Film review: Fear Street - Prom Queen (2025)

Back in 2021, Netflix released a trilogy of films based on RL Stine's Fear Street books. As someone already reading Stephen King and Clive Barker when Stine’s books were initially popular, the Fear Street (and the Goosebumps) books were fairly unknown to me, so I went in with no real expectations. And I was pleasantly surprised by what director Leigh Janiak had conjured - three interconnected slasher films that told one big story featuring gnarly kills (important for a slasher film) while giving us characters to care about.

Four years later, Fear Street is back on Netflix, sans Janiak and sans everything that made the first film so enjoyable. The story, such as it is, is set in the less salubrious town of Shadyside in 1988 (slotting it between the 1978 & 1994 entries) in the lead-up to the high school prom and the various characters vying to be the titular prom queen.

Our lead is Lori Granger (India Fowler), a social outcast with a tragic backstory who goes up against the bitchy Wolfpack, a group of girls who torment her daily with nasty digs about her dead dad. We get the bare minimum of character development before a masked killer starts offing the prospective Prom Queens and their partners in extremely predictable fashion.

Two days after watching it, I find myself actively angry with this film, which rarely happens anymore. Even disappointing films can be shrugged off in the search for something better. But for some reason, this really got my hackles up. After watching it, I felt bored and disappointed at a missed opportunity, giving it 2 stars on Letterboxd. But then the spectre of the previous trilogy kept creeping back into my mind, films that, while not without their flaws, were superior in every single aspect, so I was forced (by myself) to drop it down to one star on Letterboxd.

If I was to be charitable for a minute, I would single out the performances of Chris Klein (a generally average actor who somehow works here) and Katherine Waterston as the caricatured parents of queen bitch of the Wolfpack, Tiffany Falconer. Klein is also a teacher at the high school, prone to confiscating spiked drinks from his students to guzzle for himself. They both seem to be in a different, campier film than everyone else, which points to another major problem of the film - tone. Director (and co-writer) Matt Palmer is unable to juggle the tonal elements, so instead of a fun, campy time, it feels both flat and messy.

The usually reliable Lili Taylor is given the role of the highly conservative Vice Principal, who is really running the school, but the script is unable to mine any humour from this potential, giving Taylor little to grab on to.

Lori's tragic backstory is repeated ad infinitum when the film could have just opened with it, saving us from the dull exposition dump.

For a movie where the cast is getting picked off one by one, there are zero stakes or tension. Teens just arbitrarily wander away from the prom to go to the bathroom or make out, which is when they get offed, making for one of the lamest killer modus operandi's in a long time. The killer just waits for one of the prospective prom queens to leave the prom before they can take them out! A flawed (and boring) plan, to say the least.

Another important area (for a slasher) where this film fails is the kills. The very first murder has a drug-dealing teen wandering through a wide-open car park while the killer just walks up behind her and hacks her with an axe - again, zero stakes or tension. There is a rather gnarly guillotine kill in a classroom, which is probably the highlight of the film, but for most of the kills, the director has opted to slather unnecessary CGI blood over the top of perfectly good practical FX.

It really feels like Netflix were hoping the Fear Street name would guarantee a good turnout from viewers on the ‘opening weekend’ without spending the time or money to develop a worthwhile script. Ultimately, it's some more low-calorie retro ‘80s fetishism (that really didn’t need to be set then other than hey - Stranger Things vibes) slop, fed to the masses in order to satisfy some algorithmic demand by the corporate overlords. In other words, Fear Street Prom Queen is a huge disappointment compared to the original trilogy.

1 guillotined hand out of 5.