Review: Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)

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Fear Street: Prom Queen is proof that nostalgia alone can make something watchable, but it cannot make something good. Unlike Leigh Janiak’s 2021 Fear Street trilogy, which is pretty good as far as genre entertainment for teens is concerned, Matt Palmer’s Prom Queen is truly empty calories. It’s a film with indistinct characters and generic thrills that gestures at 1980s slasher films without having their pulpy fun or inventive style. It seems that in the four years since the Fear Street trilogy premiered, even nostalgic streaming entertainment has experienced substantial “enshittification.” Even in cinema, things can always get worse.

In Prom Queen, we follow the senior class of Shadyside High School in 1988 as they prepare for their prom. Although the characters exist in the same cursed town as the other films and there are even a few references and flashbacks to Fear Street Part Two: 1978, the film is not interested in lore the way Janiak’s films are, or in expanding the storyworld of those films. For instance, there’s no dense supernatural mythology to work through, nor are there complex rules for the characters (and the viewer) to uncover as they try to solve the mystery. Rather, it’s a straightforward slasher film about a masked killer offing the candidates for prom queen one-by-one.

Six girls are running for prom queen at Shadyside High. Lori Granger (India Fowler) is our protagonist, a working class girl and social outcast with a desire to make her mom proud. Christy Renault (Ariana Greenblatt) is the class badgirl, with a dope dealing boyfriend and a leather wardrobe. The other four girls are the “Wolfpack,” run by the school’s queen bee, Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), and her sycophantic friends Melissa Mckendrick (Ella Rubin), Debbie Winters (Rebecca Ablack), and Linda Harper (Ilan O’Driscoll).

Through an early voiceover from Lori, we learn about the girls as we see snapshots of the school year, as if we’re getting a yearbook brought to life. It’s a stylish little sequence that sets up the characters and their conflicts and promises some fun to come. Sadly, it’s the last bit of genuine style in the entire film. Soon enough, the voiceover and innovative editing disappears and the film simply runs its programmatic slasher function. The film’s drama hinges on the contentious relationship between Lori and Tiffany, but because the film spends no time other than this montage setting up the relationship, there’s little tension or payoff to it. The drama is limp, even if the young actors acquit themselves fairly well in the unoriginal narrative beats. We’re left with the horror as the film’s raison d’etre then, but even that proves insubstantial.

Like the previous Fear Street films, Prom Queen is not shy about gore. Characters have their faces eviscerated with table saws and limbs hacked off with those table-top paper cutters that seemed like such a risk to have in elementary schools. It’s modestly entertaining to watch these kills, but none of them are tense or surprising. The film can’t even manage any good references. There are gestures towards Prom Night and Halloween, but nothing like you get in 1994, such as the opening sequence that is straight out of Scream. The horror teeters on the edge between perfunctory and satire, since it’s too indistinct to truly engage us, while it never teeters over into metatextual commentary either. These lacklustre moments made me appreciate the cynical comedy of, for example, a film like The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), which is willing to get truly silly with the outlandish slasher kills.

Fear Street: Prom Queen has the hallmarks of a 1980s nostalgia piece: the garish makeup and costumes, the soundtrack of 80s hits (including an inexplicable Rick Astley needle drop), the tried-and-true high school cliches. But it’s nothing more than nostalgia bait as neither its drama nor its horror rises above rote. For all the shortcomings of the overly-nostalgic approach of the Fear Street trilogy (and its antecedents such as Stranger Things), those works understood the importance of character in making people invested. Prom Queen understands little beyond the affectations of a time and place and the broad strokes of a horror subgenre that it struggles to emulate.

4 out of 10

Fear Street: Prom Queen (USA)

Directed by Matt Palmer; written by Matt Palmer and Donald McLeary based on The Prom Queen by R. L. Stine; starring India Fowler, Suzanna Son, Fina Strazza, Chris Klein, David Iacono, Ella Rubin, Ariana Greenblatt, Lili Taylor, Katherine Waterstone.

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