Prom Night (2008)

This version stars Brittany Snow, who had three major roles in three successful films – The Pacifier, John Tucker Must Die, and Hairspray – as Donna Keppel.

While Prom Night (1980) started like several slashers of the 80s, which revolved around a group of people committing some prank that accidentally turned fatal, Prom Night (2008) went the route of the traditional slasher akin to Halloween or Friday the 13^th and Scream. The characters did nothing wrong and absolutely did not deserve to be hunted down and murdered. Yes, even Crissy (the one character you might have been rooting to die who didn’t). Slasher films are often notorious for introducing many characters that audiences don’t care about. Thus, they will be waiting to see how they’re dispatched. In this vein, Prom Night can be compared to Scream. The characters are merely caught up in a horrible situation where every action or defense they take leads them to their doom through no fault of their own. But just because I like the film doesn’t mean it is without flaws.

As Donna goes through her house that night, she doesn’t realize something is off immediately, though it’s clear that something has happened. By the end of the night, her mother, father, and younger brother have all been brutally murdered by her teacher, Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech), who is unhealthily obsessed with Donna. We soon realize that this is Donna’s recounting of the event with her therapist, Dr. Elisha Crowe (in a surprise appearance by Ming-Na Wen). As expected, this event has haunted and traumatized Donna ever since. This sets the stage for Donna to finally break out of her shell, which she retreated into the past few years, and enjoy moving on with her life and putting her horrifying past behind her. If only life could be that fair.

Donna is at the center of a tight-knit group of friends on the verge of going their separate ways. For the past four years, they have dated and broken up, loved, laughed, and lived amongst themselves, and now the reality of adulthood is dawning on them. These are not the deep-seated thematic elements you usually expect from a slasher film. This is also why I place Prom Night up with Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer – the former deals with how society reacts to horrific events, dramatizing them for gossip’s sake, and the latter truly deals with the loss of innocence after a horrific mistake fractures the future of four youths. By the time the credits roll for Prom Night, her friends are utterly decimated, and all the problems and dreams they had planned on dealing with are over. For most of them, with immense finality.

Donna’s best friends are Lisa Hines (Dana Davis) and Claire Davis (Jessica Stroup). The three of them are presented as fun, easygoing, popular girls, with Lisa being one of the final contenders for prom queen. They each have their relationship woes, such as what they can or should expect from their respective boyfriends for prom night. Their boyfriends are Bobby Jones (Scott Porter), Ronnie Heflin (Collins Pennie), and Michael Allen (Kelly Blatz), and they run the gamut as characters. While Bobby is supportive and compassionate towards Donna, trying to help ease her into the night, Ronnie is more interested in what will happen later that night in the suite. Michael, by contrast, is having the most challenging time, as his relationship with Claire is collapsing in front of his eyes, and he is incapable of getting out of his own way to repair the damage.

Between the six of them, it’s clear that they are close friends, but that doesn’t mean that their relationships are without flaws. They are teenagers, so they aren’t making decisions based on logic. At the same time, absolutely no one realizes they are in danger. For that reason, Michael isn’t above getting drunk after he and Claire get into a fight, and Claire has no reason to be afraid to head up to the room to work things out by herself. If the police had told them, they wouldn’t have split up even once that night. Hell, they probably wouldn’t have left their homes. The most tragic part is when Lisa realizes that the person she saw earlier, who gave her the creeps, is Fenton. Her immediate reaction is to rush to warn Donna about this. Still, she fails to share this information with Ronnie, leading to further tragedy.

Even so, throughout the film, we truly get to look inside the group’s dynamics, especially as they are concerned with Donna – though Michael doesn’t really get that chance. While her strongest ties are with Lisa and Bobby, she spends most of the night with Ronnie and has a heart-to-heart with Claire. This is something that many slasher films fail to create – an actual camaraderie between its central characters. We all know why: they’re here to be sliced and diced. But, if we like and care about them, their deaths hit harder.

Detective Winn (Idris Elba) was the one who arrested Fenton three years ago, and he has always considered it a mistake that he didn’t simply kill the man then and there. Then, of course, there’s the fact that Fenton was able to be sent to prison because the Jury decided he was simply insane and not capable of making sound decisions. Winn is furious when word of Fenton’s escape reaches him days later. He immediately rushes to Donna’s home, where her aunt and uncle Karen and Jack Turner (Jessalyn Gilsig and Linden Ashby) decide not to inform Donna so she can have one final night of normality. Police are stationed outside the Turners’ home and the hotel where the school’s prom is being held. As you can expect, this results in tragedy.

While the police in horror films are generally portrayed as inept at their jobs, often with fatal consequences (with the general exception of Dewey Riley), save for Detective Winn, the police do a bang-up job of screwing up every time they’re on screen. Fenton crosses their path numerous times, barely having changed his appearance and usually just wearing the most basic of disguises, yet they never recognize him. Granted, this is so that the plot can happen.

It’s heartening that her comeuppance is losing prom queen, which she argues with the faculty and police about as they desperately try to evacuate the hotel once Fenton’s presence is confirmed. We also have Jana Kramer as April, who would star in the latter half of One Tree Hill. She, alongside Taylor (Rachel Specter), is one of Crissy’s friends. Finally, James Ransone shows up as Detective Nash, who assists Detective Winn in trying to avert the tragedy that unfolds before their eyes.

Is Prom Night a great movie? That’s up to personal debate. It is not the best slasher film by any means, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad film in and of itself. It has a likable cast in a tried and true story, which lends itself to an air of familiarity. The late 2000s was filled with a glut of slasher films, some good and others bad. Films like the Friday the 13^th and Sorority Row remakes, both of which were released in 2009, were some of the last genuinely great slashers of that era. This is primarily because horror was moving away from slashers and into a new era that would birth the likes of Midsommar, The Witch, and Hereditary, which were more cerebral. But by the late 2010s, slashers were making a resurgence, with Halloween and Scream both receiving new entries to critical and financial acclaim. It’s clear that horror and the slasher subgenre are not on its way out the door. It’s simply updating itself.