Trick or Trailers: Prom Night (1980)

With Halloween inching ever closer, we're sticking with the Jamie Lee Curtis slasher theme here. Next up is 1980's Prom Night. The trailer for this is so great, let's not waste any time and just get to it:



If I could pick one early '80s slasher trailer as being the most emblematic of the sub-genre, it'd have to be Prom Night. That is the slasher genre's golden age, right there, encapsulated in all its cheesy glory. No kid who saw this trailer back in the day wasn't 100% sold.

Thanks to a speedy turnaround that gave Prom Night its TV premiere a scant seven months after playing theaters, when excitement for the movie was still fresh, underage kids like me who missed out on Prom Night on the big screen got to watch it in the comfort of home!

For anyone who wasn't there, let me tell you - it was a big deal!

I believe it's the fact that its network TV airing put it in front of so many impressionable eyes, many of them in pre-cable, pre-VCR households at the time, that gave Prom Night such a foothold in the consciousness of Gen-X horror fans. Fans of a certain age will swear to you that it's a good movie, maybe even a horror classic, but in fact it's pretty lousy.

I've got all kinds of affection for it, sure, but it's bad. And it's such a weird Jamie Lee Curtis horror film in that her character, being the beloved sister of the killer, is never actually in any jeopardy. You'd think that Curtis should have been one of the kids whose thoughtless behavior leads to Robin Hammond's death. Ideally, she should have been the "good girl" of the group who carried remorse for her actions.

She should have been the character of Kelly that Mary Beth Rubens plays but, obviously, have her not die early on but instead survive to be the Final Girl and confront the killer in the climax. But they didn't do that so Prom Night stands as the one Jamie Lee slasher film in which she's never in any real peril, making it low on actual suspense.

Then again, I kind of think Prom Night's tepidness played in its favor to a younger audience. It was just scary enough for kids to feel like they were watching a "real" contemporary horror movie like Friday the 13th but it wasn't hardcore enough to actually traumatize them.

It was like a slasher movie version of an underhand pitch. It's a softball movie that gave a lot of young kids their earliest taste of a grittier type of horror before they were ready to graduate to the next level. Although its protagonists were high schoolers, I believe that Prom Night's greatest admirers were strictly of the less jaded junior high set.

Jeopardy Free Jamie Lee

Towards the end of the new Prom Night (yes, it was lousy, by the way), lead actress Brittany Snow evades her psycho-stalker in the manner that made original Prom Night star Jamie Lee Curtis a Scream Queen during her horror heyday. But while watching the new film's endgame play out, something that I never consciously noticed about the original Prom Night finally came to my attention.

And I’m probably the last person in the world to pick up on this so forgive me if this is nothing but a “duh” moment for everyone else but as I watched Snow’s character going through the familiar motions of the Final Girl, alternately eluding and striking back at her pursuer in the kind of tense climatic face off that Jamie Lee earned her place in horror history with, I realized that Jamie Lee’s Prom Night character was never in any jeopardy in that film.

As Kim Hammond, Jamie Lee has nothing to do for the duration of Prom Night but be the best disco queen that Hamilton High has ever seen. While her classmates are being taunted, harassed, stalked, and slaughtered, Kim herself is never a potential victim (actress Anne-Marie Martin as Wendy earns the longest chase scene between herself and the killer and even though Wendy fails to survive, this sequence is the kind of lengthy pursuit that in most slasher films would've been earmarked as the heroine’s Big Moment).

It isn’t until Kim’s ax-wielding brother Alex brings his slaughtering ways onto the flashing lights of the dance floor in the last ten minutes or so of Prom Night that she’s even aware that there’s a killer on the loose. And even then, it’s her date Nick who’s in direct danger, not her.

This made me wonder for a moment why Prom Night's producers even bothered to cast Jamie Lee in the first place but I believe that with any other actress it would’ve been too apparent just how little this character had to do with the events of the film for an audience to perceive them as being the lead.

In 1980, though, Jamie Lee had the horror movie crown long before she got to the Prom. It only makes sense that after Halloween that she could literally dance her way through the role of a horror heroine.

Dancing In The Moonlight

There's a number of early '80s slasher movies that were initially trashed by both fans and critics that hold up well today as being much better films than they were originally given credit for. Films like Terror Train, Hell Night, House on Sorority Row, The Funhouse, and My Bloody Valentine may not be legitimate 'classics' outside of their sub-genre but they all have some actual merit. And for years - up until this very day, in fact - I always thought director Paul Lynch's Prom Night belonged in that company, too. But a fresh viewing instigated by the current remake has forever cured me of that delusion. As far as I'm concerned, Hamilton High's Class of 1980 has a lot to answer for.

I first saw Prom Night when it premiered on NBC a mere seven months after its theatrical release and I know that at the time I felt like a pretty privileged twelve-year-old. Watching the movie now, it's impossible to remember what it was like to view Prom Night through 1981 eyes as a contemporary thriller before the film's insta-dated fads and fashions took center stage. Apparently I've also forgotten what it was like to view the film through retarded eyes so Prom Night really looks like a completely different movie to me now.

Like many slasher films, Prom Night is a murder mystery with its masked killer's identity meant to be a whopping last-minute reveal but no one must've told screenwriters William Gray and Robert Guza, Jr. that if you're going to introduce multiple red herrings to keep the audience guessing as to who your killer is that you ought to make sure these various characters rate as believable suspects. Instead, Gray and Guza, Jr. introduce red herrings that by their screenplay's own logic can't possibly be the real killer.

For instance, we meet the new school gardener of Hamilton High (played by Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman) who's meant to be a suspicious character apparently because he has thick glasses and looks like he owns a sizable porn collection but the film immediately cuts from his introductory scene on the school grounds to the killer busy at home making taunting phone calls to his victims. So that's it for the gardener, but yet he's still shown creeping around the girl's locker rooms and showers as though he's still in the running as the man behind the mask.

Even more incompetent is a subplot involving a sex offender named Leonard Merch who has just escaped from the state hospital in which he's been institutionalized since being disfigured in a fiery car wreck six years earlier as a result of being pursued by police who had wanted to question him in regards to the death of a young girl named Robin Hammond (whose surviving brother and sister now attend Hamilton High). Police institute a manhunt to get Merch and maintain a presence at the Hamilton High prom just in case he shows.

But while it's meant to create suspense, this entire subplot is just empty wheel-spinning as we already know from the movie's opening scene that this character isn't the film's killer. From the opening, we know that four kids caused Robin's accidental plunge from the window of an abandoned convent so to try to have us care that Leonard Fucking Merch is on the loose is just ridiculous. Maybe if the opening sequence had been taken out and the film had opened in the present day with the cause of Robin's death unrevealed, then having Merch be a false lead would be useful. This actually might have made for an intriguing film - to lead the audience to believe that Robin died at the hands of a child murderer who may now be returning to the scene of the crime only to have it be revealed that Robin in fact died at the hands of a group of kids and that the killer stalking the prom is their fellow classmate, Robin's brother Alex, out to avenge her death. But unfortunately Prom Night doesn't have nearly that much sense.

And honestly, even the killer's motivation is sketchy. Sure, Alex (Michael Tough) saw his sister die at the hands of these four kids and he's looking for some payback but it's unclear why he decided that the best way to deal with this was to keep his mouth shut and wait six years to exact his revenge! The only way this plot point could've worked is if he had been stricken mute after the trauma of seeing Robin's body and was institutionalized for the intervening years. What else could've possibly stopped him from telling his story as soon as he got home? Especially when the guilty parties were all people that he saw everyday? I mean, shit, his sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) is dating one of the people who he knows killed Robin! How fucked up is that?

And on a lingering, albeit trivial sidenote: why does it look like Alex is wearing make-up when he's unmasked at the end? Seriously, is he wearing lipstick or what?

Besides the iconic presence of Jamie Lee Curtis (who actually delivers the least appealing of her horror film performances here) the only good thing about the original Prom Night is that it's notable as one of the last youth culture films to emerge before MTV's 1981 debut. A few years after Prom Night's release it would become impossible for anyone to make a movie involving teenagers (much less one that featured music so prominently) without taking their cues from MTV. That's not a bad thing necessarily but there's an undeniable nostalgic vibe to Prom Night for the fact that it was made in such blissful ignorance of the seismic change in teen (and film) culture that was looming ahead. Oh, and I seriously dig the cheesy ballad "Fade to Black" sung by Gordene Simpson that runs over the end credits. That does kicks ass.

What doesn't kick any ass is that outside of a severed head that slides onto the dance floor (which looks incredibly hokey, by the way - Tom Savini wasn't looking over his shoulder for whoever did the effects for this), there's no gore to be found in the entirety of Prom Night. An early '80s horror movie - a slasher movie, no less! - with zero splatter FX? Sorry, but that's grounds for fraud in my book. Prom Night may have the reputation of being a classic (or at least a classic of its kind) but I believe that's only because so few people have bothered to watch it recently. I know the remake is probably terrible and in light of that it's tempting to give some credit to the original but while I'll grant that the remake likely doesn't have any dialogue as awesomely goofy to offer as "For a guy so fast on the disco floor, you are the slowest!" let's just say that both of 'em suck.