RL Stine's series of 'Fear Street' young adult novels served as a gateway for a lot of young readers to discover the horror genre in the '90s. In 2021 Netflix released a trilogy of movies based on Stine's books, with instalments set in 1994, 1978 and 1666 that heavily drew on Scream, Friday the 13th and the folk-horror sub-genre respectively. Long envious of MCU fans who get to enjoy three or more interconnecting movies from their favourite cinematic universe every year, I was excited for a horror equivalent. Sadly the Fear Street trilogy was a mess that suffered heavily from getting itself bogged down in clunky universe building rather than telling three engaging horror stories. It may have taken the form of three movies but 2021's Fear Street was really just a TV show in disguise.
We now get a fourth movie in Fear Street: Prom Queen, which continues the pattern of setting its story in a specific year, in this case 1988. Thankfully, this one works as a standalone entry, so you don't need to suffer through the previous three movies to make sense of its narrative. The only real connection with its predecessors is its shared setting of Shadyside, a cursed small town with a murder rate to rival Murder She Wrote's Cabot Cove.
It's here that we find the local high school preparing for its prom, that ghastly tradition that prepares American teenagers for a life of rejection and disappointment. Our final girl is the unsubtly named Lori (India Fowler), who wants to become prom queen in the hopes it might finally cast off the cloud she's been living under as the daughter of a woman believed to have killed her husband while pregnant with Lori. But to take the tiara she'll have to compete with Shadyside High's "Wolf Pack," a clique of mean girls headed by the monstrous Tiffany (Fina Strazza), who makes Regina George seem benevolent by comparison, and her band of perm-haired sycophants. On prom night Lori's odds of being crowned are significantly increased when the candidates are killed off one by one, often along with their meathead boyfriends.
The 1994 and 1978 instalments of the series only superficially resembled horror movies of those eras, more concerned with needle drops and costuming than in replicating the atmosphere of '70s and '90s horror. Prom Queen is determined to make sure you know it's set in 1988 with half the budget seemingly spent on music licensing, but it also captures the mood of late '80s slasher movies, which were significantly more knockabout in their tone than those of the slasher golden age of the early '80s. Prom Queen has more in common with David A. Prior than John Carpenter. It skews more towards the cartoonish hijinks of 1987's Prom Night II than the more sombre and scuzzy tone of 1980's Prom Night. The Shadyside setting allows it to shake off any real world shackles from the off, which means it gets to embrace its ridiculousness, something director Matt Palmer and co-writer Donald McLeary take full advantage of. The kills here are designed to make you laugh rather than scream, but they're silly and outlandish enough to achieve that goal. Early on Prom Queen establishes its m.o. by aping the school massacre prank from 1987's Summer School, letting us know that none of this should be taken seriously.
Despite its rollicking tone, Prom Queen does a surprisingly good job of keeping us guessing as to the identity of the killer, whose red raincoat and ghastly mask simultaneously references both Don't Look Now and Alice Sweet Alice. There are several red herrings in place with a credible line-up of potential suspects, and it executes this element far more convincingly than the recent Scream sequels. It even crosses our mind that Lori may not be the innocent final girl archetype we assume, thanks to a subtly ambiguous turn from Fowler.
The standout performance here comes from Red Rocket's Suzanna Son as Lori's queer-coded Fangoria-reading best friend Megan. Unlike the previous Fear Street instalments, which unconvincingly added 2020s social progressivism to their less enlightened settings, everyone in Prom Queen behaves like its 1988 rather than 2025. This makes Megan something of a tragic figure who could turn out to be the film's heroine or villain, but we'd root for her either way. Katherine Waterston, an actress who always seem utterly miserable on screen, is refreshingly having a blast here as Tiffany's mother, but Lili Taylor is wasted as Shadyside High's bible-bashing vice-principal.
Hardened horror fans may well scoff at Prom Queen's Nickelodeon-with-decapitations aesthetic, but this is a movie designed to appeal to teenage girls huddled around a laptop on a sleepover. It's the horror movie equivalent of a pink suitcase record player. It may not boast the best quality, but it could be a great entry point for burgeoning young horror fans to discover this evergreen and unstoppable genre.
Fear Street: Prom Queen is on Netflix
Directed by: Matt Palmer
Starring: India Fowler, Suzanna Son, Fina Strazza, David Iacono, Ella Rubin, Chris Klein, Ariana Greenblatt, Lily Taylor, Katherine Waterston
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