8: Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
Following the Fear Street trilogy which I watched and discussed in the 2021 thread (1, 2, 3), another loose adaptation of a YA horror but this time not using the ‘unified theory of supernatural slashers’ that bugged me then. And riffing on prom slashers as well as general high school mean girl and pushy parent stories from fiction and reality. After half an hour of setup and a starting kill, it’s almost all set in and around the prom. Those background artists must have been dancing for days.
It pushes the protagonists to be as immediately sympathetic as possible short of making them puppies - our hero is basically Cinderella and her best friend loves horror movies - contrasted with a more unusual mix of slasher villains and regular life villains.
It plays the gore way up for laughs, see below.
(Checking back, I see that Time Cut has a 15 rating here and this has an 18. I can see that. Time Cut is so mild on gore it could probably get a 12 if they asked nicely.)
Some good laughs outside of the murders as well.
I don’t think dance offs work that way.
Also a deliberate mix of cheesy and cool 80s music, but was Never Gonna Give You Up actually a hit in the US in the 80s, or is it just here for the retro humour?
(Edit: Yes! It got to number one in March 1988. Sorry America. Thank you NoOneImportant.)
The medium: Netflix
Gameability: Competition that’s supposed to be “fun” gets crossed with some murderous antics, it could work pretty directly as a one-shot where some of the PCs stay competitive even as the bodies start piling up.
Gore spoiler:
Notably the moment where somebody tried to open a door after getting both hands cut off. I haven’t seen something like that before.
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