'Prom Night' Forever: The Death and Life of the Slasher Cycle

Separated by seven years, 'Prom Night' and 'Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II' reveal how horror trends mutate but never really die.

Jamie Lee Curtis, undisputed scream queen.

“See you later, alligator.” — Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Four kids accidentally kill someone. Rather than come clean about what happened, they enter into a pact never to speak of the incident again, though two of the four feel pressured into it. Some time later, they receive notice that somebody may have witnessed what they did. And that somebody appears hellbent on revenge. 

That’s the premise of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the 1997 neo-slasher I wrote about last month. It’s also the premise of Prom Night, the 1980 slasher I’m writing about today. Horror films are often talked about in terms of trends or cycles—slashers and neo-slashers, J-horror and Americanized J-horror, haunted house movies, found footage, “torture porn,” etc.—but rarely does history repeat quite so neatly. The screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream before moving on to IKWYDLS the following year, is a prodigious enough student of the genre (or rip-off artist, if you prefer) that perhaps he deliberately engineered a new slasher cycle out of dead parts, like Dr. Frankenstein with a laptop. Scream was his Halloween, IKWYDLS his Prom Night. He would make further contributions with 1998’s The Faculty and 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which he also directed, but the neo-slashers would stab themselves out without him. 

But while the two IKWYDLS movies illustrate how quickly a cycle can exhaust itself, Prom Night and its nominal 1987 sequel, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, play more like a game of telephone, where the initial statement is so mangled up by multiple iterations that, at the other end, it’s barely recognizable. In the seven-year stretch between the two films, the Halloween series had sputtered out after 1982’s bizarre (if fascinating and lovable) Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Friday the 13th was five sequels deep, and 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street had become the franchise du jour, giving slashers a darkly comic, hallucinatory twist. The genre itself had played its own game of telephone, evolving so far past the sources of Black Christmas and the original Halloween to become unrecognizable. 

---

The Reveal is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to bringing you great essays, reviews and conversation about movies (and a little TV). While both free and paid subscriptions are available, please consider a paid subscription to support our long-term sustainability.

---

I started watching Prom Night and Prom Night II with the hypothesis in mind that the time between the two movies could roughly etch a tombstone: “R.I.P. The Slasher Craze, 1980-1987: Dead For Now But Not For Long.” But that doesn’t really hold water, because slasher films didn’t die so much as mutate into different forms, changing like a chameleon to take on whatever qualities it took to survive. The Prom Night films have their specific merits, but they’re not the sort of innovative benchmarks that can steer horror in another direction. Instead, they’re a soft clay shaped by more significant films.

But being so impressionable can lead to a remarkably strange amalgam of influences. The incredible disco dance sequence that breaks out in the middle of a gory mayhem in Prom Night doesn’t happen without 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, even though it was late to the party, arriving one year after the Disco Demolition Night riot at Comiskey Park and the same year as the Airplane! parody. No matter. Film composer Paul Zaza, who’d worked on Black Christmas, was asked to write some original disco songs on the fly, and while “Tonight is Prom Night” isn’t exactly The Bee Gees at the height of their powers, the sequence showcased the truth that Jamie Lee Curtis could be as electric as John Travolta. Even in a murky, cheap-o Canadian horror film, a star can still shine: 

Prom Night’s unsettling opening sequence follows four 11-year-olds playing a game of hide-and-seek in an abandoned convent, where the seeker pretends to be a murderer, chanting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” When a fifth child named Robin Hammond tries to join them, the other four taunt her straight out of a second-story window, where she plummets to her death. Six years later, Hammond’s father, played by a ridiculous (but not yet intentionally so) Leslie Nielsen is the principal at Hamilton High School and his two surviving children, Kim (Curtis) and Alex (Michael Tough), are getting ready for prom, where Kim is to be crowned queen. (The voting process is more contentious in Prom Night II.) But in the lead-up, the four now-grown kids responsible for Robin’s death each get a breathy, taunting phone call, which they all weirdly dismiss as a prank. Either Black Christmas doesn’t exist in this cinematic universe or they were too young to see it. 

Before the slasher starts slashing, Prom Night functions surprisingly well as a high school drama, full of teenagers fretting over a rite-of-passage evening that they anticipate with, varyingly, excitement, dread or jealous derangement. Though Kim still mourns her lost sister, she’s ready for a coronation in the arms of the prom king, whose ex-girlfriend is dating a chain-smoking brute for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on him. Another girl ponders whether or not to let her boyfriend take her virginity—“It’s like getting a shot,” a friend counsels—and her refusal (and subsequent gruesome death) defies the conventional wisdom that slasher killers are attracted to the promiscuous like moths to flame. Though Prom Night is setting this table only to break all the dishes, the characterization’s not as perfunctory as others in the genre. These are horny teens with dimension. 

Which isn’t to say that Prom Night’s not perfunctory. It introduces one red herring in Mr. Sykes (Robert A. Silverman), the obviously-not-guilty creepy janitor who skulks around campus, and another in an asylum escapee who the authorities fear is coming back to town—a Halloween plot that never comes to fruition. The whodunit aspect of the film doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out, but it’s striking that the kills are mostly messy crimes of passion rather than the coldly efficient work of monsters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. The killer gets whipped around in a van, chases one victim through seemingly every unoccupied hallway and classroom in the school, and gets into fights where he doesn’t have the upper hand. He’s as vulnerable as his targets, not the sort of immortal monster who lives to see a sequel. 

And lo, he does not. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II not only doesn’t bring the killer back, it doesn’t bring much of Prom Night back, either. The film wasn’t created as a sequel, despite an original title (The Haunting of Hamilton High) that nods to the school in the first one. It was only late in the process that producers rebranded it Prom Night II, an odd decision made odder by the fact that the audience for a Prom Night sequel, if one even existed, would have aged out of over the seven year gap. The only connective tissue here is Hamilton High, prom night as a concept, and a surfeit of Canadian-on-Canadian violence. 

Wendy Lyon as Vicki in ‘Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II’

Though an absolute shambles of a production, pieced together through extensive reshoots and spit-and-bubblegum story edits, Prom Night II is horror-geek ambrosia, a bizarre mishmash of ideas cribbed with a knowing wink from Carrie, The Exorcist, The Shining, Back to the Future, Blue Velvet, and A Nightmare of Elm Street. To torture the telephone analogy a bit more, it is the “purple monkey dishwasher” at the end of the slasher boom, a nonsensical creation that nevertheless honors the films that made it possible. There’s an animating intelligence behind the camera that’s regrettably not accompanied by a mastery of craft, but squint hard and Prom Night II could have been Scream before Scream, a summing-up of where the horror genre was at the time and where it might be going. 

The Hamilton High connection to the original seems even thinner when you consider that the film is composed entirely of self-aware hat tips to the past, with characters named after John Carpenter, John Waters, Dan O’Bannon, Ed Wood, and Tod Browning, just to name a few. The terrific opening sequence introduces Mary Lou Maloney, a 17-year-old wild thing in 1957 who saunters into a Catholic Church and offers this confession to the priest: “I’ve disobeyed my parents many times. I’ve taken the Lord’s name in vain many times. I’ve had sinful relationships—boys at my school, many boys—many times. And there’s one more thing: I’ve loved every minute of it.” In the slasher world, she’s asking for it, and she gets it on prom night, when her boyfriend Billy, furious over catching her with another guy, tries to embarrass her the moment she’s crowned queen. He tosses a stink bomb on stage from the rafter but accidentally lights her dress on fire. 

In the present-day, Billy (an overqualified Michael Ironside) is principal at the same school, and his son Craig (Justin Louis) is dating Vicki (Wendy Lyon), the odds-on favorite to win prom queen herself. Vicki is basically Carrie White by another name, the daughter of a religious zealot who’s trying to wriggle out of her influence and into a prom dress that doesn’t resemble an old green sack. When she pokes around the school prop room in search of something to wear, Vicki inadvertently unleashes Mary Lou’s malevolent spirit, which wreaks havoc around the school before possessing Vicki’s body. Mary Lou wants revenge on Billy most of all, but she’s not above the mischief-making of her fully human 1957 self, who longs to be the school bad girl once again. 

The new Mary Lou gets another chance to visit the confessional, where she informs the sputtering priest that there’s no God or heaven after you die. (“And you know what pissed me off the most? No fucking wings!”) But the funniest scenes show a fully possessed Vicky, in ruby-red lipstick and throwback clothes, strolling confidently through the school as if 30 years hadn’t passed at all. “Everything’s swell,” she says, when her best friend wonders what’s wrong. “Scram” gets a workout, as do antiquated phrases like “See you later, alligator” and “Pull it together, bonehead.” She’d be charmingly retro if she wasn’t a supernatural demon hellbent on revenge. 

The not-insignificant problem with Hello Mary Lou is that it literally doesn’t know what it is, which is what allowed it to be a Prom Night sequel in the first place. And perhaps that’s where subgenres like the slasher film truly end: When beginnings as purposeful and inspired as Black Christmas and Halloween reach the inevitably muddled third act, when all its ideas have been played out. At least Prom Night II attempts to make something out of its irrelevance by mixing and matching the horror trends of the day with past favorites, then adding the requisite T&A and gore. If it was the end of the slasher cycle, then it gives the genre a more dignified death than many of the promiscuous teens who died to keep it going. 

Both Prom Night and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II are currently streaming on Shudder.

Pre-order here or at the bookstore of your choice