Fear Street: Prom Queen
Content Advisory: Excessive or gratuitous violence
The candidates for Prom Queen at Shadyside High School are targeted by a killer in Fear Street: Prom Queen. In 1988, Lori Granger (India Fowler) is the underdog in the competition to be the Shadyside High School Prom Queen. The heavy favourite is Queen Bee Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), the leader of the Wolfpack clique of Melissa McKendrick (Ella Rubin), Debbie Winters (Rebecca Ablack) and Linda Harper (Ilan O’Driscoll).
Lori is an outcast at the high school because of rumours that her mother brutally killed Lori’s father. As such, her only friend is fellow outcast Megan Rogers (Suzanna Son). Lori hopes that running for Prom Queen will change her reputation at the school. However, once the prom gets started, a masked killer in a red raincoat begins killing the candidates one by one.
Fear Street: Prom Queen Synopsis
Four years after the release of the Fear Street Trilogy, Matt Palmer co-writes and directs the stand-alone follow-up, Fear Street: Prom Queen, which is based on the young adult novel The Prom Queen by R.L. Stine. While the town of Shadyside has a poor reputation, the High School’s Vice Principal, Dolores Brekenridge (Lili Taylor), hopes the upcoming prom will change all that. The favourite to win Prom Queen, Tiffany Falcone, has been prepared for this moment for all her life by her mother, Nancy (Katherine Waterston), with Lori Granger and local drug dealer Christy Renault (Ariana Greenblatt) becoming the only competitors not part of Tiffany’s clique.
As the prom gets started, Lori is concerned about being overshadowed by Tiffany and her Wolfpack and being bullied about the rumours surrounding Lori’s mother. However, there soon turns out to be a greater threat, as the Prom Queen candidates sneak off for time alone with their dates, only to be brutally killed by a killer roaming the halls of the school. Lori comes to realize that becoming Prom Queen is the least of her worries.
My Thoughts on Fear Street: Prom Queen
The original 2021 trilogy of Fear Street: Part One—1994, Fear Street: Part Two—1978, and Fear Street: Part Three—1666 was positioned by Netflix as a weekly event viewing. Based on R.L. Stine’s series of young adult novels, the trilogy introduced us to the town of Shadyside and its long history of serial killers. The trilogy was successful enough for Netflix to greenlight a new standalone Fear Street film, this time a direct adaptation of one of the books in the series. However, the trilogy’s co-writer and director, Leigh Janiak, does not return for Fear Street: Prom Queen and is replaced by Matt Palmer (Calibre).
The change in filmmaker is likely part of the reason why Fear Street: Prom Queen ends up being much more of a disappointment than the trilogy. It is quite obvious that Matt Palmer is trying to replicate everything that made the previous Fear Street films so successful. This includes a playlist of songs from the period, this time it’s the 1980s, and kills that are surprisingly gory for an adaptation of a young adult series, with Fear Street being known for being harder-edged than R.L. Stine’s more well-known Goosebumps series. Sadly, Palmer is not successful in making Fear Street: Prom Queen an engaging follow-up to the trilogy.
The Fear Street Trilogy was not without its flaws, but at least it developed an engaging three-film arc that heavily delved into the mythology of Shadyside. However, in comparison, Fear Street: Prom Queen answers the question of what Mean Girls would look like as a very generic and by-the-numbers slasher film, where you don’t care for the majority of the characters. In theory, you would expect Fear Street: Prom Queen to feature allusions to 1980’s Prom Night, though I would argue that the comparisons are closer to the 2008 remake.
Most of the young cast of Fear Street: Prom Night are made up of relative newcomers, though there are some familiar faces among the cast. Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie, Borderlands) has the role in the film that is akin to Maya Hawke in Fear Street: Part One – 1994, while Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice, Alien: Covenant) is the closest the film has to a scene-stealer as Nancy Falconer. However, I thought that Lily Taylor ends up being wasted as the High School’s vice principal.
If all you want from a slasher film is gore and 1980s record drops, then Fear Street: Prom Queen has that in spades. However, the film still ends up being an incredibly lacklustre follow-up to the earlier trilogy. So much so, I don’t envision Fear Street continuing as a film franchise.
Trailer for Fear Street: Prom Queen
