Review - Fear Street: Prom Queen
Maybe it's time to stop being nostalgic for the Eighties?

I grew up a huge fan of R.L. Stine’s work — I can still remember buying The Babysitter at Crown Books while my mom was grocery shopping nearby (one of my favorite pastimes from my childhood) and feeling like my world was forever changed after I read it. In fact, I had already been reading Stephen King pretty regularly (I was constantly borrowing my mom’s books), but Stine’s first Babysitter book absolutely opened the door for me to discover more authors like him, including Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan. Eventually, I would go on to become obsessed with the other books in that series as well as the Fear Street books.
With all that being said, I was stoked as all hell when the Fear Street trilogy came along in 2021 and every installment in that series delivered in ways I was not expecting (I rewatch them every year and am still sad that they never received any sort of home media release — thanks, Netflix). Every film worked so perfectly, both as a stand-alone effort and as one-third of this overarching story, and Leigh Janiak just killed it so completely with all three of those movies.
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So, when it was announced that we were going to be getting another Fear Street movie, I was pretty excited, especially since I remember how much I loved Stine’s The Prom Queen book back in the day so I thought it would translate well to a movie adaptation. And the thing, I still believe that but honestly, this new Fear Street: Prom Queen just totally misses the mark in so many ways. The characters are forgettable, the kills are lacking, there’s no tension, and the nostalgia in this feels like it was put through ChatGPT or something because it lacks any kind of authenticity.
Basically, it was just a huge bummer from start to finish. Yikes on bikes.

The thing about The Prom Queen book is that Stine does a great job of fleshing out what are usually very typical female characters in horror stories during the 1980s in ways that feel genuine and interesting; here, we get those same “stock” characters, but they are lacking in any sort of real development so when bad things start to happen, it’s like “Okay, so what?” It made it hard to care about anything going on here, and the fact that the co-writers Donald McLeary and Matt Palmer (who also directed) didn’t even use any of the characters’ names from the book or follow most of the plot of that story (it’s so perfectly ridiculous) just left me cold.
Also, what makes The Prom Queen such a great story is that Stine does an excellent job of infusing his story with this sense of mystery that ramps up with every twist and turn, and this film has none of that whatsoever. The killer is such an afterthought here — the look isn’t even close to being iconic, and their presentation is haphazard at best — and that is such a major misstep when you’re making a slasher movie. There are plenty of bad slasher movies out there, but if the killer leaves an impression or stands out in some way, a lot can and will be forgiven by horror fans. Prom Queen’s killer gives us nothing to work with. Like, at all. Not even the “twist” that happens during the last 10 minutes was enough to get me to care about what was happening.
Also, not that it’s something you HAVE to do, but to not even include an opening kill or some kind of inciting incident at the start of your slasher movie just feels like a major horror faux pas, and Prom Queen waits nearly 20 minutes until the killer claims their first victim.

Beyond that, there is just such a lack of authenticity to Fear Street: Prom Queen that I felt so disconnected from every aspect of the movie as the story unfolded. Nothing feels real: the characters, the costuming, the dialogue, the aesthetics, and the music all land with a hollow thud (the soundtrack feels like someone pulled a random ‘80s playlist off of Spotify and thought “Good enough!”). We’ve seen so many “throwback” movies and television series set in the 1980s at this point that I just wish we could find new decades to be nostalgic for, because Prom Queen demonstrates that we really need to move on from the Eighties. It’s done. It’s tired. It’s well-traversed territory at this point.
Let’s have some fun in some other decades because I think we’ve done all we can do with this decade (I mean, the early aughts would probably be fun, and I’m always game for going back to the ‘70s or ‘90s because we don’t do that nearly enough these days).
To be honest, I’m a pretty forgiving horror fan in general (I have a Howling II poster hanging on my wall for chrissakes), but there was just something about Fear Street: Prom Queen that got under my skin, and not in a good way. If someone told me A.I. made this movie, I would absolutely believe it because that’s how disingenuous everything about this adaptation feels. I know I sound dramatic here but I was so pissed afterward that I immediately began rewatching the Fear Street trilogy at 1:45 AM (as I’m writing this review) because I could not end my Friday night on this mess of a movie. I deserve better, and fans of the Fear Street books deserve a better adaptation than Prom Queen, too.

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