Review: Prom Night (2008)

Prom Night (US-2008; dir. Nelson McCormick)

Reviewed by Robert Hood

This modern slasher-horror film opens with a deceptively clever scene that mingles “teenage” protagonist Donna’s memories of the murder of her parents with her fears regarding the killer. Now, three years later, on the eve of her end-of-school prom night, Donna is once again having nightmares about the psychotic ex-teacher with a murderous obsession for her. Inevitably, of course, despite re-assurances to the contrary, the killer escapes from prison and comes for Donna as the coming-of-age ritual begins…

I find the whole prom night schtick, at least as depicted in American movies, far more bizarre than most of what happens in your average fantasy film, dark or otherwise. I’m sure many Americans find it equally as strange. Basically it appears to involve rich kids being celebrity bitches or assholes [aka arseholes] and strutting about in $2000 gear while agonising over their about-to-be truncated future, investigating the meaning of skin disorders or having sex. Still, it’s at base an end-of-childhood fantasy and this new remake of the 1980s slasher film Prom Night starts off treating it as such. This approach is fine if we must have another film about 20-something actors and actresses pretending to be teenagers, because the film also starts off with a couple of decent scenes that suggest that it might have A Theme (to do with maturation, loss and coping with fear-induced anxiety) – and the two aspects have the potential to complement each other. After all, the writers even include the double-edged, prom-night slasher statement: “You’ll remember this night for the rest of your life!” Alas, however, the film only starts with these things. Somehow the vaguely intelligent thematic stuff gets forgotten, or at least muddled, along the way.

Frankly it’s easier to talk about the less-than-admirable things this remake doesn’t do than it is to talk about the admirable things it does do. The original Prom Night was among the first crop of teen psycho-slasher films that sprouted from the dung heap of clichés created by Carpenter’s effective Halloween and fertilised by Sean Cunningham’s much-more-schlocky and objectionable Friday the 13th: holiday/significant social event setting, masked psycho, guilty past, female nudity (and at least a strong emphasis on sex in general), superficial “cannon-fodder” characters, blood and gore, and obnoxious parental/authority figures. Prom Night (1980) wasn’t a great film, but it did have Jamie Lee Curtis in it and lots of disco music. Is that a good thing? Probably.

And it was rated R.

Well, this remake only has a few things in common with the first: the title and setting, teenagers-on-the-verge-of-adulthood, and a killer. Motivation and actual events are all reasonably different. So that is good. It also manages to create some teenagers-on-the-verge-of-adulthood who aren’t annoying and who seem fairly believable as young people (within the confines of the Prom Night fantasy). That’s good, too, as I am sick and tired of the stupid teenagers that Hollywood imagines real teenagers want to watch get killed in horror films. Sure, some of the clichéd characters are present (though thankfully not the Nerd or the Evil Guardian/Parent/Teacher) but their presence is remarkably subdued.

Also absent is an exploitative emphasis that offers up misogynistic attitudes toward non-central females, rampant gore and vast quantities of blood. This may or may not be good depending on your point-of-view. At first I thought it was rather refreshing. It gave the film a pseudo-realism that augured well for it actually meaning something. It seemed thoughtful. Unfortunately, though the filmmakers left a lot of the stereotypical characters and approaches out, they forgot to replace them with anything. The nasty and completely bent sexual mortality that underlies ‘80s slasher flicks was at least an attitude. I couldn’t for the life of me detect anything attitudinal in this film except a desire to ensure that it isn’t offensive and that the production values are solid. It does achieve both these aims. The film is professionally made and totally inoffensive. Moreover, it’s rated PG-13 (M in Australia).

Another thing Prom Night (2008) leaves out is the horror. This isn’t a horror film. Make no mistake about that. Any randomly chosen episode of CSI (and certainly of such intensely dark crime shows as Wire in the Blood) is more like a product of the horror genre than this version of Prom Night. It’s a crime thriller, that’s all. It contains some suspense and the protagonist is afraid some of the time, but little of that could be taken as “horror”. There’s no sign of the sort of gothic darkness, or underlining questioning of mortality, or philosophical and existential paranoia, or social subversion that horror needs. Many of the classic “slasher” films that are considered part of the horror genre lack these things, too, but their exaggerated approach to gore – and the almost supernatural “presence” of their killers – pushes them over the borders of crime into the dark realms of naturalistic horror. This wouldn’t be a problem for Prom Night except for the fact that it lacks mystery, police procedural detailing, complex character interaction, or (non-predictable) suspense – the things that make crime stories work. It almost touches on a sort of psychic awareness in the heroine, but this aspect doesn’t get developed and is quickly dismissed, so it doesn’t offer any real supernatural possibilities to add a horror edge to proceedings.

What the film lacks most is epitomised in the ending. I don’t want to give anything important away (even though the identity of the killer is never the issue, as we are kept aware of him and his doings right from the start), but I will say a bit about the climax in general terms. The end is almost anticlimactic, having no active emotional resonance. Given the theme of “coming to terms with your fear”, the end should have involved Donna (the “victim”) in somehow taking charge of her fate, even if marginally. Instead she is passive (apart from a defensive kick or two), and never pro-active. Unlike the classic heroine in the ‘80s slasher films, she doesn’t play a role in turning the tables on the killer. There is a definite feeling that the resolution of the plot just happens, by luck, almost randomly.

Now, I didn’t expect Donna to become a “female vigilante” type – that would have been totally clichéd and, given the non-exploitative approach of the film, inappropriately unrealistic. But the writers needed to be cleverer about the way they resolved things. It’s pretty bad storytelling practice to have a protagonist who doesn’t actually do any protaging. Donna, in fact, doesn’t even know that the killer is around until about ten minutes from the end. We are aware of him, as are the killer’s victims, but she only learns about the killer’s escape from prison and his current location when the shit finally hits the fan. This, and her essential passivity, means that she can’t learn anything, or even work toward resolving anything. Nothing ties together – not in terms of plot nor theme -- and, for me at least, anything the film had going for it falls in a heap. If “story” refers to a series of events and “plot” refers to a series of interconnected and contingent events, then what Prom Night offers is a lot of story and little plot.

So in the end, despite a good performance from Brittany Snow as the tormented Donna (previously bitchy Amber Von Tussle from the Hairspray remake), an OK, if slightly flat, turn from Johnathon Schaech as the psycho, and a competent if distant and rather utilitarian job from Idris Elba as the sympathetic cop, Prom Night comes over as uninvolving and emotionally weak. Despite its high production values, it goes nowhere much.

In his overview of the psycho-slasher genre in Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Movie from 1968, Kim Newman writes: ‘… by the time competent pictures like The Scaremaker (1982), The Initiation (1984), Appointment With Fear (1985) and Sorority House Massacre (1986) came along the whole genre was so predictable, boring and irritating that these well-made, well-acted, decently-characterised films seemed overwhelmingly pointless.” This particular competent if narratively flawed latter-day addition to the genre doesn’t do anything to change that evaluation.

Let’s hope director McCormick can do better with the totally unnecessary remake he’s working on now – The Stepfather.