India Fowler as Lori Granger in Fear Street: Prom Queen | Photo Credit: Alan Markfield/Netflix © 2025.
For any high schooler, prom night has the potential to be the best night of your life or an absolute nightmare. For most, it’s probably the latter—especially if you’re a candidate for prom queen and a masked killer starts picking off your competition one by one. Welcome to Netflix’s latest installment in the Fear Street series, Fear Street: Prom Queen. Written by Matt Palmer and Donald McLeary (based on the original R.L. Stine novel) and directed by Matt Palmer, Fear Street: Prom Queen offers up a collection of generic slasher tropes and poorly written teen soap opera plotlines that have been thrown into a blender and turned into a ninety-minute movie. It’s not quite so bad that it’s good; instead languishing somewhere in that middle ground of mildly entertaining and eye-rollingly mediocre. There’s some fun to be had here, but only in the smallest of doses.
A Prom Night Turned Deadly
It’s Shadyside High School’s 1988 prom night, and all the usual suspects have put themselves forward as prom queen candidates—including the school’s resident mean girl, Tiffany (Fina Strazza). But when Lori (India Fowler), an outcast with a dark past, enters the competition, things take a turn for the deadly as one prom queen after another starts disappearing. Can Lori and her best friend, Megan (Suzanna Son), survive Shadyside High’s prom night? Or is yet another tragedy about to befall this seemingly cursed town? Fear Street: Prom Queen combines every possible teen slasher cliche into an underwhelming smorgasbord of a film. From minute one, it’s exactly as predictable as you expect, packed with the most thinly painted stock characters possible.
At times, it’s hard to tell whether Fear Street: Prom Queen intends for you to take it seriously. It occasionally comes close to a sort of Scream-style tongue-in-cheek approach to its material, as though it’s inviting the audience to knowingly smirk at its cliches. But as the movie progresses, it quickly becomes clear that Palmer and McLear’s script is perfectly content to traffic exclusively within those tropes, with nothing to say about their inclusion and no new take on the teen slasher genre at all. It’s an exercise in nostalgia, except without any of the elements that made ’80s slashers particularly enjoyable. No believable relationships, no emotional hook to hold your attention. It’s just a hollow, heartless, paint-by-the-numbers script that somehow makes its meager ninety-minute runtime feel a lot longer than it actually is.
Photo Credit: Alan Markfield/Netflix © 2025.
Gruesome Kills and Solid Performances Can’t Quite Save the Day
That being said, it’s not all bad news for Fear Street: Prom Queen. Like any good horror film, Prom Queen is buoyed by some inventive and pretty gruesome kills. There’s a whole lot of delightfully gross gore effects on display—so much that it honestly proves slightly shocking at times, giving the film an injection of excitement. The kills take a while to begin, and they don’t always come as frequently as you might hope, given how exciting the movie gets when a kill’s about to happen, but what’s here is enough to give the film a much-needed shot of adrenaline. But really, Fear Street: Prom Queen‘s cast is its highlight. Everyone here’s giving their absolute best—even if that best results in a campy, over-the-top performance like Katharine Waterston’s as Tiffany’s equally mean girl-esque mother.
Fowler and Son both give relatively restrained performances as Lori and Megan, respectively. Fowler’s more grounded performance helps give the film some kind of emotional center, even if the script doesn’t give her much to work with, while Son’s adds some much-needed brevity. But it’s performances like Strazza’s that give the film its spark. She takes her generic mean girl character and just plays it with such glee that it’s genuinely fun to watch her chew the scenery. The same is true for the rest of the cast, particularly Lili Taylor as the very Puritan vice principal, Chris Klein as Tiffany’s equally over-the-top father, and Darrin Baker as the school’s bumbling principal. The cast is clearly having such a fun time that it’s easy to just kind of go along with them and enjoy the ride as much as possible.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, Fear Street: Prom Queen is a bit of a rough watch. Though you can tell the cast, crew, and designers poured a lot of love into the film, Prom Queen‘s script just really lets it down. It’s crammed full of one cliche after another; a generic slasher movie trapped inside the cheesiest of teenage soap operas. It’s predictable, droll, and devoid of any real emotional draw; a paint-by-the-numbers slasher in search of a heart. Still, it’s a fun enough watch if you can look past all of that. But fans of the previous three Fear Street films will struggle to find much to enjoy in Prom Queen. It’s not quite so bad that it’s good, but it’s not good enough to be fully enjoyable as the cult classic it clearly wants to be. Instead, it languishes somewhere in that middle ground, destined to fade into obscurity.
Fear Street: Prom Night premieres May 23rd exclusively on Netflix.
Plagued by an underwritten script littered with one cliche after another, "Fear Street: Prom Queen" is about as messy as one of its killer's victims. Though there's fun to be had in the over-the-top camp that permeates the mercifully brisk runtime, the script's just so messy that it's hard to get invested in what's going on. It's not quite so-bad-it's-good, but it's not good enough to be fully enjoyable in its own right. Instead, it languishes somewhere in that middle ground, destined to pale in comparison to the previous Fear Street installments.
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Part-time writer, part-time theatre nerd, full-time dork.
