Screen to Scream: Summer of '84 and Cricket Hunters

The past year hasn’t been the best one, and there are a lot of reasons why. It’s pretty tempting then to go back to a simpler time, where life made a bit more sense. From binging the sitcoms you watched in the ‘80s or buy a few discount parachute pants, there are a lot of ways to do our own limited version of time travel. The pull of nostalgia can easily pull one down the rabbit hole of VHS tapes and slap bracelets, but we should also remember that nostalgia, quoting from Mad Men ad man Don Draper, literally means the pain from an open wound. In a nutshell, the past isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the movie Summer of ’84 and Jeremy Hepler’s coming of age book Cricket Hunters are prime examples of this.

Summer of ’84, like its TV show progenitor Stranger Things, draws a lot of inspiration when Reaganomics and horror permeated the American consciousness. The story takes place in Cape May, Oregon, an idyllic small town full of nice houses and manicured lawns. Teenager Davey Armstrong, a fan of urban legends before the Internet, suspects that his neighbor, a well-respected Police officer, is a serial killer responsible for the deaths of thirteen boys. Pulling his three friends and his crush into the investigation, they search for the necessary clues to prove the killer’s guilt to a town full of unbelieving adults. If the plot sounds like something dredged up from too many Hardy Boys books, that could have been the filmmakers’ intention, if only to later subvert them. What starts off as a Rear-Window type mystery soon becomes something much more high stakes and much more terrifying. The resolution of the film should turn that sugary hit of nostalgia viewers were expecting into something more stomach-churning.

This is a similar formula Hepler uses to great effect in his book Cricket Hunters. The story follows Celia Garcia and her friends during an eventful autumn in 1998 and 15 years later, when the kids now adults are still processing what happened to them. Not only is Celia’s grandmother, a bruja, dealing with a sister who is cursed by a rival brujah, but the kids, including Celia’s future husband Parker, must navigate a city full of danger, including a husband stalking his ex-wife, young Abby Powell’s mother, and a nephew of the brujah who cursed Celia’s great aunt. Young Abby disappeared that year and 15 years later, the adult Parker turns up missing. Celia must dig through her past if she hopes to have a future with her husband. Hepler weaves a story that moves through past and present, showing readers how that fateful autumn has affected Celia’s life today, especially as it unravels when she becomes a suspect in Parker’s disappearance. The real joy in this novel is watching Hepler set up our expectations only to gleefully knock them down. This isn’t, however, mere shock value. It merely proves, like Summer of ’84, that the past shouldn’t be looked at through rose-colored glasses lest you miss something important.