Fear Street: Prom Queen

Netflix’s time-hopping horror franchise, based on an improbably large number of YA novels by RL Stine that should keep them going until streaming services get replaced by telepathy or something, lands bang in the middle of the slasher heyday of the 1980s. It also bucks the trend of these period pieces replicating only the music and fashions of the era, and leaving out the gratuitously mean-spirited violence.

The whole premise of a killer stalking the variegated nubile candidates hoping to be elected to the coveted title, while familiar from a million similar movies and predictable in many of its story beats, is an amusingly literal expression of the idea that the most popular kids in high school tend to peak early in life.

The film’s retro stylings are straight out of the manual: elaborately ironed hair and stonewashed jeans sported by precocious schoolgirls posing to a synth-layered, Doppler-shifting darkwave soundtrack, albeit studded with some choice hits of the time to beef up the prom disco scenes. Wallowing even deeper in the nostalgia swamp, there are also a couple of hints of the era’s own Reaganite fixation on the 1950s; the music and costume departments have clearly done their jobs a little too well.

On the other hand, the actual 1980s are now so far back in time that most of the actors still young enough to play the authority figures without bursting their colostomy bags (Chris Klein, Lili Taylor, Katherine Waterston) had flourishing careers about a decade later. There’s a delightful hint of self-aware irony in some of their performances, while their younger counterparts show a refreshing candour about the Heathers-style bitchiness of their characters, rather than wasting too much of our time on the emotional problems that might get them off the moral butcher’s hook. After all, that would get in the way of our twisted joy in their inevitable demise.

By contrast, the appeal of the heroine Lori (India Fowler) is rooted in a dodgy past for which she bears no responsibility and in her general outsider status, wherefrom she can gather our sympathies like she’s picking flowers from a garden, moments before it gets sprayed with arterial blood. Her equally outcast best friend Megan (Suzanna Son), a stoner with a Tom Savini talent for make-up effects and an Annie Lennox tendency to cross-dressing, pulls triple duty as confidante, misdirection device and sly commentary on how little things have changed for sexual minorities.

These days, the lurid primary colours of the traditional slasher flick have had a lot of the grime washed out of them, and the sound design is digital perfection. But the film does a decent job of making up for these sops to modern technical expectations with some truly brutal post-Terrifier kills and a spiteful dash of attitude.

Fear Street: Prom Queen splits the difference between its twin target audiences of ageing VHS-weaned gorehounds and their phone-thumbing teenage descendants with a big axe and a mordant smirk on its face. Its thrills are cheap, and it panders to your basest requirements; but then the exact same thing could be said about a Netflix subscription.

-Stew Mott-