What We Can Learn From The ‘Prom Night’ Famous Chase Scene
We can thank Stranger Things for the renewed interest in slasher films. After all, Stranger Things might be a genre hybrid, though aside from a brief Halloween II homage in the third season, it’s decidedly not a slasher series. The show is set in the 1980s, however, and if there’s one consistent horror variable from the decade, it’s the stalk-and-kill slasher.
For almost a decade, we’ve had low-budget pantomimes and big-budget remakes of the best slashers the era had to offer. The latest, Fear Street: Prom Queen, might be topping the Netflix charts, but it should also be the final knife in the corpse of 1980s slasher riffs until we figure out what the hell is going on. Paul Lynch already made that movie in 1980 (Prom Night), and before we keep churning out more slasher redux, we should take a look back and remember what makes a slasher a slasher.
There are two variables of interest here. Carol Clover already did a pretty thorough breakdown of the subgenre’s emergent themes and ideologies, though here, I’m focused less on the why of it all, more on the what. Namely, the filmmaking techniques that imbue a slasher with that inimitable, “Yeah, this is a slasher” quality. Think that innate feeling in something like Ruggero Deodato’s Body Count, and why a movie so cheap and tawdry is ultimately better than the glossy, high-profile Fear Street: Prom Queen.
We’re going to talk about tactility and geography.
While all of Lynch’s Prom Night would make a worthy study—and Fear Street culls pretty liberally, what with its severed heads and dance-offs—the focus here is more narrowly on Wendy’s (Eddie Benton) now-famous, eight-minute chase scene. For that prolonged beat, Lynch demonstrates the kind of filmmaking prowess most, if not all, attempts at revisiting the decade inexplicably miss. The set-up is classic, and also recreated in Matt Palmer’s Prom Queen. Wendy is redoing her makeup when the lights go out, someone growls in the dark, and a killer emerges from the shadows, axe in hand.
Lynch’s blocking is fantastic, keeping Wendy in frame with enough proximal emptiness to draw out the tension as long as possible. The killer could be just outside, or maybe hiding in one of the stalls, and the physicality of the setting is defined enough to render every option a possibility. Conversely, at no point in Prom Queen did I know where anyone was in proximity to anyone else. Melissa’s (Ella Rubin) Fear Street: Prom Queen death is the most Wendy-coded. Beyond not getting a chase scene, the killer reveal introduces an entirely new section of the bathroom (locker room?) not seen before. There’s no duck-and-dodge thrill when the space is nebulously defined.
Tactility is key, too. In Prom Night, when the axe swings down and is subsequently lodged in the bathroom counter, there’s weight. A physical sensation, augmented by sound design, that an axe has been swung. As a slasher, the deaths in Prom Night barely register among the canon, though they at least feel grounded enough to hurt. Fear Street: Prom Queen not only incredulously leans into CG blood, but simultaneously fails to imbue its axes, knives, or paper cutters with any weight or tactility. Real they may be, the ancillary audiovisual design renders them weightless, weapons in theory only. When a hand is severed, the audience should feel it. Prom Queen plops where Prom Night makes a bang.
Wendy narrowly dodges the axe in the bathroom, fleeing into the hallway in a desperate attempt to escape. Lynch’s proximal awareness elevates the chase, rendering it noteworthy for more than just its length. It’s always clear to the audience where Wendy is, and by extension, where her killer is. Fear Street: Prom Queen has a dozen interchangeable school hallways, and I’d wager not a single audience member once knew where anyone was supposed to be at any given time. A much revisited basement setting blips around the Prom Queen schoolgrounds, tethered to convenience, not reality. And, no, slasher films don’t need reality, but a slasher’s tension needs grounding and space, something Prom Night has in spades.
Prom Night was filmed on location, after all, and Lynch has a great deal of fun tracking Wendy as she dips in and out of classrooms, the masked killer close behind. Prom Queen’s filming location is unknown, but every room in the school feels disconnected from the others. When a handless victim humorously tries to open a classroom door, it’s unclear where he’d been emerging from on the other side. A studio backlot, most likely.
And maybe it seems nitpicky, but those small details really make or break a slasher film’s immersion. Paul Lynch, on a meager budget, orchestrated one of the greatest chase scenes the subgenre has ever seen. Watch the clip in its entirety below. Lynch isn’t doing anything profound, and he’s not remaking the rules. He’s simply perfecting them, prioritizing the tangible sound of heels in an empty hallway, of how one classroom connects and feeds into another.
In those eight minutes, it’s all too easy to see where the current crop of slashers fail to embody the true, guerrilla spirit of the originals. They’re weightless, gesturing toward needle drops and frothy costumes to impart the idea of the decade without any of the merit. Sure, part of it is me acting like an old man, yelling at slasher clouds. But it’s just as much an appreciation for creatives like Lynch, a former Penthouse filmmaker whose body of work is likely unknown to the public at large.
Yet, despite being a small fish in a gargantuan filmmaking pond, there was artistry and care in his work, even in the one about a killer at a high school prom. Slasher movies, at their core, are art, and they’re among the most important developments in horror history. With tactility and geography, they endure. The kills, the chase scenes, the duck-and-hides. Prom Night is a good movie with a great chase. Fear Street: Prom Queen wants to win the crown, but it’s a far cry from what makes royalty, well… royalty.
Fear Street: Prom Queen is now streaming on Netflix. You can catch Prom Night now streaming free on Tubi.
Categorized:Editorials
