Review: Fear Street: Prom Queen
Netflix returned to Shadyside this past weekend for Fear Street: Prom Queen, a solid and fun slasher movie that nails the formula but doesn’t do anything to shake it up.
India Fowler stars as Lori Granger, who is running for Shadyside High’s prom queen in 1988. She’s up against “The Wolf Pack,” led by alpha mean girl Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza) and her friends Melissa (Ella Rubin), Debbie (Rebecca Ablack), and Linda (Ilan O’Driscoll). Bad girl Christy Renault (Ariana Greenblatt) is also in the running. As prom commences, a mysterious killer in a red raincoat and creepy mask starts picking off the prom queen candidates in brutal fashion. The movie nails the vibe of an 80s slasher, with several licensed needle drops and tracks from Powerglove, and giallo films clearly inspire the killer’s look. There’s a great setup of several suspects who could be the killer, and part of the fun is trying to figure out who it might be and getting the big reveal at the end. While it nails the structure and tone of a classic slasher, it also doesn’t do anything to change it up or innovate, as it hits all the beats you’d expect, when you expect them to hit. It’s a bit of a regression from the Fear Street trilogy that dropped in 2021, which offered a much more ambitious, time-hopping horror epic. It may be because Prom Queen is based on a particular R.L. Stine book, while the trilogy was all original, set in the world of Shadyside. Prom Queen is still a lot of fun, but don’t go in looking for a game-changing take on the slasher genre.
Of the cast, India Fowler is a fantastic lead heroine who is easy to root for, especially when the other prom queen candidates are deliciously over-the-top evil, especially Fina Strazza. Strazza seems to be reveling in getting to be as sadistic and mean as possible, not just to Lori but all of her supposed “friends,” and she’s a great, hateable antagonist. Katherine Waterson matches that energy as Tiffany’s overbearing mother, Nancy, who was robbed of the chance to be prom queen when she was in high school due to a murder involving Lori’s parents. Chris Klein is also fun as Tiffany’s father, and Lili Taylor is also great as the school’s extremely religious and conservative vice principal. There’s also Suzanna Son as Lori’s best friend Megan, a pot-smoking horror nerd who may be using her love of horror to help her best friend win prom queen in the most extreme way possible? The rest of the cast is fine, but they are mostly just there to be cannon fodder for the killer.
Prom Queen offers up some excellent, gory kills for horror fans, as the killer uses a wide range of tools and implements to dismember and disembowel their victims. There’s a particularly gruesome kill involving a handheld circular saw and another involving multiple uses of a paper cutter. The Fear Street trilogy also embraced the R rating with gruesome and fun kills, and Prom Queen definitely lives up to that part of the franchise.
While Prom Queen may not reinvent the slasher wheel, it delivers enough blood-soaked thrills, dark humor, and ’80s flair to make it a worthy – if familiar – return trip to Shadyside. All of the Fear Street movies Netflix has made have been extremely fun, and I’m definitely up for more trips to Shadyside in the future.
