Netflix’s Fear Street movies filled a big hole in the streamer’s offerings. Stranger Things is a nostalgic, horror-tinged book adaptation series, and the Fear Street saga did the same thing for movies. The first three movies based on R.L. Stine’s books were released only a week apart back in 2021, but since then, the franchise has lain dormant.
Finally, Fear Street is back from the grave with a new installment that makes one huge swing but plays everything else disappointingly safe, down to the smallest detail.
Set in the ‘80s, Fear Street: Prom Queen follows Lori Granger (India Fowler), a well-meaning outcast who spends her days in high school staging gruesome pranks with her best friend Megan (Suzanna Son) to distract from the looks she gets due to the murder accusations surrounding her mother. Despite the fact that her father’s unfortunate demise happened on prom night, Lori is dead-set on winning her own contest, even as the other candidates start disappearing left and right.
The film claims to be an adaptation of R.L. Stine’s book The Prom Queen, but the similarities are few and far between — not even the character names or the bad guy reveal are the same, so they are basically just both slashers set on prom night.
While the first act shows the days leading up to prom and the murder of the only other dark-horse candidate, bad girl Christy (Ariana Greenblatt), the majority of the runtime is spent on the actual prom night, meaning much of the action runs in almost real time.
This makes the actual murders more fun because they are happening in quick succession; in fact, nobody notices anyone missing until well into the spree. Unfortunately, that’s the least surprising part of the movie. All the murders go exactly how you imagine, and the ultimate culprit is so obvious, I never considered them because it would be the most uncreative option.
Going into the prom, Christy is the only non-popular girl eligible for prom queen, as shown in the scene where everyone else comes on stage in American flag-printed swimsuits, in a scene that was far more like the physical fitness number in a beauty pageant than a prom night.
Which brings me to one of my biggest issues with the movie: the styling. While the extras and side characters are given big hair, poofy sleeves, and dowdy dresses, the main cast all look like they walked straight out of an ‘80s-themed episode of Euphoria. Tiffany, the queen bee, wears a blue dress with a Basque waist — a trend all over TikTok, but not in your parents’ prom pics.
While the real-time gimmick makes it worth watching, it seems like Fear Street: Prom Queen wants to be a high school movie first and a slasher movie second — there’s Mean Girls-esque humor, swoony romance, and even a danceoff. It may not be a groundbreaking work of horror, but it certainly breathes new life into the Fear Street franchise. Hopefully, it won’t take four years to make the next one.
