I put off watching Prom Night for years because it was lumped in with those misogynistic punishment Slashers. How good could it really be if the prom scene in Carrie is more famous than this entire movie dedicated to proms? I imagined Jamie Lee Curtis would lead a cast of girls getting massacred for flirting. But that’s not what happens here.
The premise is standard issue: a masked killer stalks a high
school on Prom Night. Even in 1980,
this wasn’t breaking a lot of ground. The funny thing about Slasher films is
they weren’t originally Conservative punishment fantasies. Prom Night is about a small group of friends who, when they were
very young, accidentally killed a classmate and ran to hide from the
consequences. Someone witnessed the death but never spoke about it. He’s only
returned on the eponymous night of their prom for revenge. The killer is
attempting to punish these teens for the thing they buried in their pasts.
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