‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ movie review: Netflix horror spinoff nails the 80s slasher aesthetic

High school seniors competing for the title of Prom Queen are being knocked off one-by-one by a masked killer in Fear Street: Prom Queen, now streaming on Netflix. This adaptation of R.L. Stine‘s The Prom Queen and follow-up to Leigh Janiak’s trilogy of 2021 Fear Street films set in 1666, 1978, and 1994 perfectly captures the 1980s slasher movie aesthetic of films like Prom Night. Only problem: those movies were never all that good in the first place.

Set in 1988, in-between the Friday the 13th-inspired Fear Street: 1978 and Scream-inspired Fear Street: 1994, Fear Street: Prom Queen takes place in the familiar Shadyside locale of the previous films. In the days before the senior prom, a group of in-crowd girls are competing for the titular title alongside loner Lori Granger (India Fowler), who puts herself in the race to honor mom; in backstory so heavily referenced you might think it came from the earlier movies (it doesn’t), rumors swirl about her mother allegedly murdering her father.

The odds-on favorite for Prom Queen is Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), whose parents Nancy (Katherine Waterston) and Dan (Chris Klein) spare no expense in supporting their daughter’s ambition. Tiffany leads the Wolf Pack of Prom Queen-seeking mean girls, which includes Melissa (Ella Rubin), Debbie (Rebecca Ablack), and Linda (Ilan O’Driscoll), while bad girl Christy (Ariana Greenblatt) is also in the running.

But Lori has a secret weapon in best friend Megan (Suzanna Son), who reads Fangoria and has a poster for Lucio Fulci’s Zombi on her wall, and some gory pranks in store for the cool kids. Unfortunately, a killer in a red raincoat and nondescript mask starts knocking them off before prom even starts, and Principal Wayland (Darrin Baker) and VP Brekenridge (Lili Taylor) aren’t exactly quick to respond to the carnage.

Fear Street: Prom Queen is a disarmingly conventional slasher movie compared to the earlier trilogy, which leaned heavily into supernatural horror and wove in darker, more complex themes of generational trauma and social injustice. Here, the tone is lighter, the scares more familiar, and the Scooby Doo storytelling has a playful quality that owes more to Scream than to the blood-soaked classics that defined the genre’s golden age.

Director and co-writer Matt Palmer, who previously made the taut Netflix thriller Calibre, brings a steady hand and an eye for tension to Fear Street: Prom Queen. He’s greatly aided by strong production design and misty, neon-lit cinematography by Márk Győri (Katalin Varga), which helps elevate the familiar story beats with an atmospheric visual flair. A talented cast led by Fowler’s engaging protagonist help give weight to film’s campy thrills and gory kills, which include a severed hands showstopper.

An eclectic soundtrack that includes iconic 80s hits like Roxette’s The Look, Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now, and Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams adds to the period atmosphere but distances this Fear Street entry from the era’s slasher movies, which rarely splurged for chart-topping hits. A climactic dance-off set to Laura Branigan’s Gloria is one of the Prom Queen‘s most amusing non-horror moments.

As a horror pastiche along the lines of Eli Roth‘s Thanksgiving, Fear Street: Prom Queen touches all the right bases but never goes far enough over-the-top to serve as genre meta-commentary. Instead, this straightforward 80s-style slasher is a spot-on recreation of the kind of movie that might have been plucked off the shelves in the horror section at Blockbuster—for better and worse.

Janiak’s earlier Fear Street trilogy sometimes struggled with tone—lurching between the R.L. Stine young adult source material and graphic on-screen depictions of violence—but at least those films tried to do something more ambitious than this predictable prom night massacre. While Fear Street: Prom Queen hits all the right genre beats, it never escapes the feeling of being an affectionate imitation rather than the true belle of the ball.