FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN - Mark Reviews Movies

Fear Street: Prom Queen, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2025

Co-writer/director Matt Palmer's Fear Street: Prom Queen has a tough act to follow in the form of the ambitious 2021 trilogy that kicked off what now seems to be a new series of horror movies, based on the books of R.L. Stine. This installment stands entirely on its own, apart from a couple of references to the middle chapter of those previous films, but it does little to stand apart from the more mundane elements its predecessors or any other generic slasher movie.

The gimmick of this one, as the title suggests, is that most of the slaughtering takes place on prom night. The place is once again the seemingly cursed town of Shadyside, where all sorts of ordinary murders and supernatural events have occurred in the past, and the year is 1988, which means some of these teens should at least be aware of the fact that this kind of night of terror has been done in the movie before.

After all, the local theater showing a horror movie is pretty populated, and one of the main characters is such an aficionado of the genre that pulls couple pranks involving a fake decapitated head and the hacking off of her own hand. That first one turns out to be in pretty bad taste, by the way, but by the time anyone realizes that, the carnage at the school is well under way.

Our protagonist, though, is Lori Granger (India Fowler), a notably unpopular kid at Shadyshide High who has someone ended up in the running to be elected prom queen. Much of her outsider status comes from the persistent rumor that her mother (played by Joanne Boland) murdered Lori's father. If that is the case, she got away with it pretty well, since mom is now an officer with the local police department, but such things don't stop the gossip mill from turning in a small town like this.

Lori does want to win, if only to prove that she has somehow escaped her family reputation with a good number of her classmates. Her most significant competition for the title of queen are members of a popular group of girl called "the Wolfpack," led by Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), who can make or break a student's status with the help of her cohorts. All of them, as well as small-time drug dealer Christy (Ariana Greenblatt), are up for the coveted position, to be elected near the end of prom.

The gimmick, obviously, is that the candidates for prom court are being picked off one by one, before and mostly during the festivities. The killer is someone in a red rain slicker and wearing a golden skull mask of sorts.

Does anyone need a summary of the process to this movie at this point? It's probably worth bringing up, if only to point out how much Palmer and Donald McLeary's screenplay sticks to the formula. A teen is separated from the herd. The killer stalks and hides from said intended victim for a bit, until the time is right for the masked murderer to pop into frame with violent blow—usually from an ax. Repeat until it's time for a chaotic showdown and the big reveal of the killer's identity.

It's standard stuff, made slightly more palatable by the cast, which includes a surprising collection of actors playing adult authority figures (namely Lili Taylor as the school's vice principal and Tiffany's parents being played by Katherine Waterston and Chris Klein), and Palmer's efforts to replicate the aesthetic of a slasher movie from the era (It's generally too polished to really look like one, but the movie has its film-grainy moments). The movie is violent in a way that those who haven't seen the previous entries and mainly associate Stine with kid-friendly horror tales may find surprising. Apart from a brutal and ultimately mischievous disarming using an '80s crafts classroom fixture (It really does look like some Medieval torture device), though, those scenes end up feeling more routine and less imaginative than anything we've seen in this series thus far.

The whole venture is mostly defined by missed opportunities. There was a playful self-awareness to the last entries, and this screenplay gives us a character who would, in theory, be the perfect way to raise that sense here.

She's Lori's best friend Megan (Suzanna Son), the horror fan who almost certainly knows a thing or two about what's happening and will inevitably happen as the night unfolds. She's mostly kept in the backdrop, however, perhaps because the filmmakers don't want anyone in the movie to point out how familiar all of this is. There's also the whole thing that a slasher movie usually is, after all, a bloody murder mystery, filled with likely suspects and obvious red herrings, and a character like Megan surely fits into one of those two categories.

The world established by this series, in which horrors exist across time and run the gamut of varieties, still remains a promising one. Here's hoping whatever the future has in store for it, though, isn't as by-the-numbers as Fear Street: Prom Queen.

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