I recently saw the movie Fear Street Prom Queen, and this is my review of it. I write movie reviews largely as reminders to myself that I've seen a movie, so there's no serious critique happening here, and this post does contain spoilers for both Fear Street Prom Queen and the lore of Fear Street in general.
Cutting to the chase: Fear Street Prom Queen is a pretty good slasher movie. There's a fun twist at the end that makes the movie especially unique, and I'd happily watch it again.
Lori Granger is a high school girl who's been an outcast her entire childhood. To buck this trend, she decides to put her name in for Prom Queen. The award of Prom Queen is done by student vote during the high school prom, and aside from Lori and a drug dealer, the contestants are all popular girls.
One by one, each contestant is murdered by a masked killer. The killer hides the bodies, so the murders aren't readily apparent. The first to go is the drug dealer, but people assume she's just hanging out with her much older boyfriend. The other girls only start getting murdered once prom has started, and the event is surprisingly unrestricted, so the girls could be literally anywhere. I didn't attend my high school prom, but the events I was made to attend were always strictly managed and chaperoned. You couldn't come and go as you pleased. Fear Street Prom Queen takes place in 1988, so maybe some rules were less strict then, but it nevertheless felt a little unrealistic.
Anyway, it's a movie about a slasher killing high school beauty queens, and the story plays out in some unexpected ways. It doesn't really fall into any of the obvious tropes, and even the girls you think deserve to be killed are often sympathetic one way or another. It's not a parody of slasher movies, and actually feels like a evolution of them.
The movie isn't as gory as I'd expected or hoped, and sometimes it felt like it was a slasher film for people who weren't fans of slasher films. That's not a bad niche, to be fair, and I enjoyed the film despite wishing it had gone a little harder on the "requirements" of the genre.
I won't spoil the final plot twist of the movie, but the identity of the killer is satisfying, and ultimately unexpected.
I'm not quite sure what the movie has to do with Fear Street. Maybe I'm taking the lore of Fear Street too literally, but to me the "identity" of Fear Street (I haven't read the books, so I'm only basing my understanding on the movies) is Sarah Fier. Sarah Fier and the legend surrounding her don't play in to this movie at all, unless I missed something, so as far as I can tell this is just a slasher movie set in Shadyside. Could have been anywhere. This feels like a Friday the 13th movie without even a mention of Jason or Crystal Lake. At the very least, the masked killer could have been dressed as a witch, or one of the previous possessed killers, just as a nod to the setting.
Despite there being no obvious connection, I enjoyed Fear Street Prom Queen actually more than I enjoyed the other Fear Street movies. Its simple premise and quirky ending made for a satisfying, if lightweight, slasher flick. I'd watch it again.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash