Is Netflix’s ‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ Connected To The Original Trilogy?
If you didn’t know that there was a new entry into the Fear Street canon, you’re not alone.
I myself loved the original 2021 Fear Street trilogy and didn’t even realize there would be a fourth movie of the series until a month before it was released. But now that Fear Street: Prom Queen has finally debuted on Netflix, you may be wondering how it connects with the original trilogy and the R. L. Stine book series upon which the movies are based. Here’s the tea!
***some spoilers ahead***
It references Fear Street Part Two: 1978
Fear Street: Prom Queen takes place in 1988, six years before the events of Fear Street Part One: 1994. While the events of that movie are yet to happen, the characters of Prom Queen do allude to the horrific murders depicted in Fear Street Part Two: 1978. Christine/Ziggy, the sole survivor of that movie’s Camp Nightwing Massacre, does not appear, but two police officers allude to the Massacre and suggest that the events of Prom Queen are even worse.
The Curse of Shadyside is alive and well
The characters of Prom Queen are very much aware of the Shadyside Curse, a plague of murder and mayhem that has haunted the town of Shadyside for centuries. However, the good people of Shadyside haven’t yet discovered that the Curse was created by the Goode family and Satan, and not by the “witch” Sarah Fier. For this reason, Fier’s name is scrawled across a bathroom wall shown early in the movie. Additionally, several early flashbacks reference Shadyside’s most notorious possessed murderers, including the masked and deformed Billy Barker, who mutilated his brothers as they slept.
That said, the movie’s strongest reference to the Curse is revealed during a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mid-credits sequence. As Nancy Falconer (Katherine Waterston) bleeds out on the floor, her blood forms the shape of the Devil’s Mark, a symbol historically used by the Goode family to appease Satan. The Goodes never show up in Prom Queen, but perhaps Nancy Falconer was secretly one of them.
There’s a killer callback
Fear Street fans will never forget the bread slicer scene in 1994. It’s even obliquely referenced in Prom Queen when a certain character suffers a run-in with a paper cutter. (Side-note: This has apparently already been done in horror … Several times!)
Meanwhile, the killer(s) of Prom Queen also love wielding axes, just like the killers in the other Fear Street movies. While no one explicitly takes an axe in the head like other Fear Street victims, Melissa (Ella Rubin) does unfortunately come face-to-face with a meat cleaver — in similar fashion.
Ultimately, Prom Queen exists independently from Fear Street lore
Despite these aforementioned Fear Street connections, Prom Queen takes place mostly outside the established universe of the original trilogy. The events of the movie are never mentioned in 1994, meaning they were never meant to be canon. On top of that, no significant characters from the original trilogy appear in Prom Queen, and Nancy Falconer’s connection to them is tenuous at best. Prom Queen isn’t even very connected to the R. L. Stine novel The Prom Queen, considering that the novel’s characters’ names have been changed from page to screen. One might be generous and claim that this all granted the Prom Queen creators more creative freedom, but Prom Queen is not a great movie (32% on Rotten Tomatoes). The creators did little with said freedom.
More tellingly, the director Matt Palmer has given an interview to The Direct in which he attempted to explain why he created Prom Queen as a standalone film. His explanation is mostly incomprehensible:
“The thing with the original films is that they have this lore, and they did it amazingly well. But it kind of, it was all tied, apart from one question, the kind of, who’s got the book question, very much tied up and completed in those first three movies. So it kind of felt like if we lean too hard into that, people would kind of know the answers already, because the answers are all in those three movies, apart from [your] kind of loose ends. And I’m sure people will pick up those loose ends and run with them, but then we’ve left those for the filmmakers.”
Literally what?
More likely, Palmer and his co-writer Donald McLeary wanted to capitalize on the Fear Street brand and thus attached it to their otherwise by-the-numbers slasher movie when pitching it to Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix knew that fans of the original movie trilogy would flock to any Fear Street property and thus greenlit Prom Queen without subjecting it to quality control.
But hey, that’s just this humble writer’s opinion!
