Fear Street: Prom Queen director aimed to make the film feel like a lost '80s slasher classic (2025)

Fear Street: Prom Queen, the continuation of theFear Streetfilm franchise that began with the release of the trilogy ofFear Street Part One: 1994,Fear Street Part Two: 1978, andFear Street Part Three: 1666on theNetflixstreaming service back in the summer of 2021, made its way through production last year,and recently it was announced that the new film will be available to watch on Netflix as ofMay 23rd. With that date right around the corner, Collider has heard from director Matthew Palmer that he aimed to make this movie feel like a lost ’80s slasher classic!

Author R.L. Stine has written over 100 books that have been published under the variousFear Streetbanners. While the initial trilogy of films wasn’t directly based on any specificFear Streetbook, the new movie will be telling a version of the story Stine crafted for his 1992 bookThe Prom Queen. Here’s the description:A spring night… soft moonlight… five beautiful Prom Queen candidates… dancing couples at the Shadyside High prom — these should be the ingredients for romance. But stir in one brutal murder — then another, and another — and the recipe quickly turns to horror. Lizzie McVay realizes that someone is murdering the five Prom Queen candidates one by one — and that she may be next on the list! Can she stop the murderer before the dance is over — for good?The official synopsis saysFear Street: Prom Queentakes us back to the town of Shadyside, Ohio, where prom season at Shadyside High is underway and the school’s wolfpack of It Girls is busy with its usual sweet and vicious campaigns for the crown. But when a gutsy outsider is unexpectedly nominated to the court, and the other girls start mysteriously disappearing, the class of ’88 is suddenly in for one hell of a prom night.

Back in 2022, we heard that Chloe Okuno, who recently made her feature directorial debut with the thrillerWatcher, would be directing the nextFear Streetmovie, butshe left the street behind at some point in the last couple years. The film is actually being directed by Matthew Palmer, who made his feature directorial debut with the 2018 Netflix thrillerCalibre. Palmer has written the screenplay withCalibrecast member Donald McLeary.

Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, and Kori Adelson of Chernin Entertainment are producingFear Street: Prom Queen, with Yvonne Bernard, Joan Waricha, and Jane Stine serving as executive producers. Caroline Pitofsky is overseeing the production for Chernin Entertainment. The film recently secured an R rating for strong bloody violence and gore, teen drug use, language and some sexual references.

The cast ofFear Street: Prom Queenincludes Katherine Waterston (Alien: Covenant), Lili Taylor (The Conjuring), Chris Klein (American Pie), India Fowler (The Nevers),Suzanna Son(Red Rocket), Fina Strazza (Paper Girls), David Iacono (The Summer I Turned Pretty), Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), and Ella Rubin (The Idea of You).

Palmer told Collider, “Visually, we actually took a lot of inspiration from movies like River’s Edge and Blue Velvet, in terms of nailing down an authentic ’80s look and a wrong side of the tracks feeling for Shadyside. As the movie progresses, and we move into prom itself, the visual look becomes more heightened, falling more in line with the slasher classics of the ’80s, as well as the Italian giallos of the same period. Some of my favourite directors — John Carpenter, Dario Argento and David Lynch — also feel like influences on the visual look and movie as a whole. The entire movie is a love letter to 80s slasher movies, it’s really seeped into every frame of the movie. There’s a bunch of slasher movies that I’m crazy about — Happy Birthday to Me, Sleepaway Camp, and Pieces to name just a few — and the idea was to try and make a ‘lost slasher classic,’ as if the movie had been locked in a vault since 1988 and only released now.” Many of my all-time favorite movies are ’80s slashers, so that’s music to my ears.

R.L. Stine recently said there are alreadythree moreFear Streetmoviesin development at Netflix.

Are you looking forward to watchingFear Street: Prom Queenin May, and are you hoping it feels like a lost ’80s classic? Let us know by leaving a comment below.