Fear Street: Prom Queen Wears a Flimsy, Plastic Crown

The thing that made Netflix’s 2021 trilogy of Fear Street meta-slasher films unique–beyond the fact that they were all written and directed by Leigh Janiak, only her second (huge) project after the vastly underseen and underappreciated 2014 horror film Honeymoon–was the fact that they were unusually ambitious, both in a narrative and content-warning sense. The sprawling, interconnected trilogy served as a mythos-laden exploration of the dark heart and historical sins of the R.L. Stine town of Shadyside, reaching across three different time periods while simultaneously delivering some genuinely gnarly slasher violence when the story called for it: One kill in particular involving a bread slicer immediately entered classic slasher death canon. The widespread positive acclaim for those Fear Street films will no doubt serve to buoy viewer interest for the streamer’s new follow-up Fear Street: Prom Queen, but the sad news to convey for genre geeks is that this is a far lesser sequel, one where the ambition of Janiak’s films has been replaced by solid but largely blasé competency. More or less no attempt is even made to connect Prom Queen in any substantive way to the previous trilogy; it’s pretty much Fear Street in name only, a film that would have been better served without any franchise tie-in.

In fact, the only direct allusions to Janiak’s films come in Fear Street: Prom Queen’s opening voiceover, which shares a couple quick flashes of footage from those movies, while describing Shadyside and its high school as “where it all went down,” a “town where the future crawls to die,” simultaneously disinterested in actually giving any examples of the supposed social or economic inequality between the town and its prosperous neighbor Sunnyvale. Beyond a few throwaway lines of dialogue from bystanders and minor characters, saying things like “This is worse than ‘78,” this story functions entirely independently of the complex web of black magic, witchcraft and family bloodlines that Janiak established.

For that reason, it’s a pretty odd choice to set Prom Queen in 1988, smack dab in the middle of the time period covered by Janiak’s trilogy, which has entire entries in 1978 and 1994. The characters from Janiak’s films would literally be running around, living their lives in the town during this exact same time frame; nor is there any chance to play up the mystery of Shadyside’s history of mass killings for viewers who already know the exact, supernatural reasons for why they’ve happened if they watched the trilogy. Director Matt Palmer almost has no choice but to ignore all of the low-hanging fruit and opportunities for narrative crossovers, fully committing himself to a self-contained, extremely conventional slasher story. Why choose 1988? I can only assume that beyond a wish to vaguely evoke 1980’s Prom Night and its axe-wielding killer, the year was mostly selected because it has more recognizable licensed music to constantly deploy. Fear Street: Prom Night immediately sets about abusing that privilege, with so many short snippets of recognizable songs that it evokes nothing so much as another recent Netflix misfire, The Electric State.

This time around, our protagonist is the poorly defined Lori Granger (India Fowler), a girl who reads as either “nerdy” or “unpopular” without actually seeming to be either of those things. We don’t know, because Prom Queen doesn’t really afford her a ton of characterization–we just understand that she’s a less fortunate soul, her reputation (and that of her family) tainted by the childhood death of her father in suspicious, violent circumstances, when suspicion fell against her police officer mother. Mom is an even more underwritten character, vanishing from the screenplay entirely after a few early scenes, despite an obvious, fitting way she could have been worked into the conclusion. Lori sees the chance to win prom queen as a symbolic rebirth for her family name, an achievement that will prove she can throw off the Shadyside curse. She’s also keen on prying away her enemy’s boyfriend Tyler (David Iacono), despite the fact that her best friend Megan (Suzanna Son) seems romantically infatuated with her–a potential same-sex romance between friends that the film hints at while simultaneously seeming oblivious to it.

It’s actually the antagonistic Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), meanwhile, who we understand better. She’s your classic high school alpha bitch and prom queen in waiting, made just slightly sympathetic by the obvious burden of expectation placed on her by an overbearing mother and father, but rest assured that Strazza’s gleefully cruel performance gives back any of that sympathy almost immediately. Strazza is ultimately the highlight of the whole film, rubbing her privilege and domineering control of her boyfriend and friend circle into the collective faces of the school with a hilariously haughty and imperialistic sense of entitlement.