On May 23rd a new Fear Street movie premiered on Netflix: Prom Queen (2025), adapted from R.L. Stine’s 1992 Fear Street book The Prom Queen. It’s been four years since the initial Netflix trilogy of films directed by Leigh Janiack, with Prom Queen offering a long-awaited opportunity to return to this universe of nostalgia and horror. The 2021 Netflix trilogy took a far-reaching approach, highlighting three pivotal moments in the history of Shadyside—1666, 1978, and 1994—to explore the identity and mythos of this place, its generational terrors, and the deep divides that have separated people throughout the years, including race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and power, adding depth and resonance to the established Fear Street narrative pattern. Matt Palmer’s Prom Queen takes a significantly more focused approach, adapting a single Stine novel rather than contending with the expansive Fear Street legacy.
The basic premise of Stine’s book and Palmer’s film are the same: there are several girls in contention to be Shadyside High’s prom queen, and someone starts murdering the contestants one by one. The snarky competitiveness and mean girl bullying are central to the conflict in both the book and the film, and keep characters guessing about who’s behind the murders, even as they find themselves drawn together by their sense of collective fear and danger. The candidates in Stine’s The Prom Queen are Elizabeth (Lizzy) McVay, an Everygirl type and the book’s first-person narrator; dramatic, stylish Simone Perry; popular rich girl Elena Potter; standout athlete and perennial winner Dawn Rodgers; and quiet Rachel West. Lizzy, Dawn, and Rachel are good friends, and while Simone and Elena are in different social circles, there’s no pre-established or deep-seated animosity between them. As they have pizza together to celebrate their candidacy, however, the girls think it would be a laugh to pretend to be one another and “do each other’s speeches” (21), and their underlying biases and prejudices about one another come immediately to the surface: that Simone is self-centered, Elena is spoiled, Dawn is arrogant, and Rachel doesn’t belong in the prom queen running because of her family’s poverty. These tensions distance the girls from one another, even driving a wedge between friends, like when Dawn forcibly takes the prom dress that Lizzy has fallen in love with, telling her “Lizzy, don’t be stupid … It would look so much better on me, and you know it. You’re not tall enough for a dress like this” (62, emphasis original). Lizzy can’t even trust her closest friends, with the prom queen competition seeming to reveal underlying resentments and tensions, rather than eliciting new ones, though these emerging conflicts give the competitors plenty to contend with, even before people start getting murdered.
The competition and stratification of the prom queen competition is more starkly divided in Palmer’s film: the four front-runners for prom queen are head mean girl Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza) and her three friends, who call themselves “the Wolf Pack”: Melissa (Ella Rubin), Linda (Ilan O’Driscoll), and Debbie (Rebecca Ablack). The group of competitors is rounded out by black sheep and “bad girl” Christy Renault (Arianna Greenblatt) and protagonist Lori Granger (India Fowler), whose family is infamous in Shadyside because of rumors that her mother killed her father, a dark legacy that has cast a long shadow over Lori’s life. While Tiffany and her Wolf Pack put up a united front, their cruelty toward one another lies just beneath the surface, with Tiffany especially happy to sacrifice anything—and anyone—in order to win prom queen. Lori is an outsider, something Tiffany and her friends never let Lori forget, and Christy is killed too early in the film for there to be any chance of substantive character development, limited almost exclusively to a scene in which she sells drugs to some guys from Sunnyvale who treat her like trash and refuse to give her a ride back to town. While the animosity between Wolf Pack members is often hidden beneath a veneer of performative niceness, the lines between who belongs and who doesn’t are much more starkly (and unapologetically) drawn in Palmer’s film than in Stine’s book.
The murders themselves play out very differently between book and movie: in Stine’s The Prom Queen, the candidates are picked off one by one over the course of several weeks, intended not just to fatally eliminate the competition, but to terrify those who remain. This suspense is further complicated by the fact that there’s also a serial killer at work in the Shadyside area—in the opening chapter, he has just murdered a girl on Fear Street and left her body in the Fear Street woods—which keeps the police (and others) guessing about whether the murders of the prom queens are the work of this same killer or a separate case, which slows them down when it comes to ascertaining motive and apprehending the killer. Simone goes missing, Dawn is attacked in the local movie theatre (though she survives), Rachel is stabbed to death in her house on Fear Street, and Elena’s mangled body is found on the stage of the school auditorium. While the horror drags out over weeks in Stine’s book, in Netflix’s Prom Queen, almost all of the violence is confined to prom night itself, and with the exception of Christy, the slasher stalks their prey and kills their victims within the halls of Shadyside High School. Instead of everywhere and anywhere being a source of danger, the violence plays out in classrooms, the high school basement, the girls’ locker room, and the gymnasium where the prom is being held, confined within this familiar space that has turned deadly and terrifying (or perhaps just more terrifying, since day-to-day high school life isn’t all that easy for Lori, Christy, and other students on the fringes or beyond the margins of popularity). Rather than calculation and mystery, there is a sense of mayhem as the teens try to make it through prom night, with very few of them succeeding. While the murders in Stine’s book are relatively understated, with the bodies discovered after the fact or heard about rather than seen, the murders in the Netflix film are violent, gory, and often over the top, channeling some of the aesthetics of the ‘90s teen horror film trend (though the film itself is set in 1988). Lori Granger is crowned prom queen before everything spins out of control, which ends up being fortuitous because a tiara turns out to be an effective makeshift weapon (who knew?), but in Stine’s book, the remaining candidates call the whole thing off, and prom goes forward without a queen.
Another distinctive difference between the book and movie versions of Prom Queen is the role of these girls’ parents. As in most of Stine’s books, the parents in The Prom Queen are pretty ineffectual: Simone’s parents are distraught by their daughter’s disappearance, waiting for a ransom call that never comes, but the rest of the parents largely leave their daughters to their own devices. Lizzy’s dad is safety-minded and has a security system, while Rachel’s dad tries (unsuccessfully) to convince her to go out with the family for ice cream on the night she gets murdered, but they aren’t key figures and don’t seem to have much influence on their children’s lives and choices. In contrast, parents play a central role in the Netflix movie, highlighting the significance and impact of past suffering and prejudices that get passed down from one generation to the next. Prom Queen continues the Shadyside/Sunnyvale divide that was central to the initial Netflix trilogy—part of what makes Lori’s mom’s alleged transgression so gossip-worthy is that she’s a Shadyside girl who fell in love with a Sunnyvale boy. It’s almost as if this “star-crossed love” is more scandalous than the murder of which she is accused, because as far as Sunnyvalers are concerned, there’s nothing all that shocking about a Shadysider being a murderer. Lori’s whole life, peoples’ perceptions of her, and all of her relationships are framed within what people think her mom may have done. Part of Lori’s motivation in running for prom queen is to win for both herself and her mom, who was a prom queen candidate herself before everything went wrong. But it’s Tiffany’s parents, Nancy (Katherine Waterston) and Dan (Chris Klein) Falconer who have the greatest influence, both in the pressure they put on their daughter to win at any cost and in their violence, with Tiffany’s father acting as one of the Shadyside High slashers and her mother confessing that she’s the one who killed Lori’s father, after he dumped her to be with Lori’s mom when she got pregnant.
While the prom queen candidates in both versions are frequently depicted as victims, just hoping to survive the big night, it turns out that they are also capable of violence and deception, willing to kill to win the crown. In Stine’s book, Simone faked her own kidnapping so that she could work behind the scenes, without anyone suspecting her. As she tells Lizzy, “I staged my own disappearance … I knew my parents wouldn’t care if I disappeared. And you want to know why? Because nobody cares about me. Nobody!” (157). While there is clear evidence to contradict this, including her parents’ desperation to have her found safe and returned to them, Simone is right in her doubts about her boyfriend Justin, who has been going out with lots of girls behind her back. So after Simone “disappeared,” she set her sights on killing all of the girls who had snuck around with Justin, which included Elena, Rachel, and Dawn; there are plenty of others, including Vanessa Hartley and Suki Thomas, but the other prom queen candidates are at the top of Simone’s list. In Palmer’s Prom Queen, Tiffany’s dad murdered some of the candidates to clear the way for her victory, telling Tiffany and her mother that he did it “because I knew how much you wanted it … Both of you.” But there were two slashers in the school, with Tiffany apparently doing some of the killing herself: when Tiffany has Lori cornered after the prom night festivities have wrapped up and the police are processing the scene and thinking it’s all over, she reflects on the euphoria of these murders, wistfully recalling “the stunned look in their eyes … the blood … It was beautiful.” With Nancy’s murder of Lori’s father added to the mix, the entire Falconer family are killers without any sense of hesitation or remorse.
All in all, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same: these girls’ worth is socially measured by their popularity and appearance, and they can’t trust one another (not even their closest friends). Winning is all that matters and it’s worth killing for, though the stakes are different for the various competitors, ranging from confirmed dominance to redemption. Palmer’s Prom Queen evokes some of the tone and terror of Stine’s book, but falls short of the worldbuilding and the dissection of the Shadyside mythos that was so central to the 2021 trio of films. There are some details and isolated moments that connect Prom Queen to the larger series, including Nancy Falconer’s blood forming the Witch’s Mark in the movie’s final scene, but these moments are fleeting and undeveloped. As isolated as these connections may be, they will hopefully provide a link to more films in the series. Prom Queen may have fallen short of the bar set by the first three films, but there are dozens more Fear Street stories to tell—I would personally love to see the Cheerleaders series or the Silent Night trilogy serve as inspiration for another film—and as Janiak’s trilogy has already established, plenty of opportunities to tell new stories within this established world.
