Dissecting Slashers: Prom Night (1980)

There's blood on the disco dance floor.

BACKGROUND

A decade into his directing career, Paul Lynch had worked on multiple TV shows and had made a couple of feature films: the drama The Hard Part Begins, about the life of a struggling country singer, and the wrestling sports drama Blood & Guts. Now he was anxious to work on a horror movie, so he took a meeting with producer Irwin Yablans, who was having huge success with the slasher movie Halloween. Yablans was the whole reason why Halloween had happened in the first place: he wanted to make a movie about a babysitter being stalked by a killer, so he hired John Carpenter to direct it. He was originally thinking of calling the film The Babysitter Murders, then he realized that nobody else had ever made a Halloween movie, so The Babysitter Murders became Halloween. And a box office hit. With that story in mind, it’s no surprise that Yablans told Lynch he should build his horror movie around a holiday - or at least a popular special event.

Lynch had been thinking about making a movie called Don’t See the Doctor, about a killer physician. Taking Yablans’ advice, he set aside that idea and went looking for a script that he could build around a high school’s prom night. A writer he knew, Bob Guza, had a short horror story that centered on high school kids, so Lynch decided that could carry the title Prom Night and hired William Gray to flesh the idea out into a screenplay. Lynch had planned to circle back to Yablans once he had a solid foundation for Prom Night – but before he could reconnect with Yablans, he was approached by Peter Simpson of a Canadian production company called Simcom Productions and quickly secured a deal to make Prom Night with them.

Given a budget of 1.5 million Canadian, the film was shot in Toronto, Ontario over the course of 24 days – and since there weren’t much in the way of film crew members in the area at the time, aside from people who worked on commercials and TV shows, most of Lynch’s crew members ended up being recently graduated film school students. And while Simpson was very receptive to his Prom Night pitch and got the project on the fast track, it doesn’t sound like he was the most pleasant producer to work with, as he has been described as having a “hands-on and often prickly production style.” Apparently Prom Night underwent several reshoots, with Simpson taking the helm himself to get some of the new footage.

Everything turned out just fine in the long run, as Prom Night ended up becoming one of the most well-known slasher movies of the 1980s.

SETTING

Toronto, Ontario was the filming location, but the movie is actually meant to be set in small town Ohio. The opening sequence takes place in a large, abandoned brick building, built in 1913 but emptied out sometime before the film's opening scene, which is set in 1974. At one time it was a convent, now it's just an empty shell with busted windows. In real life, this building was (for a while) the Langstaff Jail Farm, where minor criminals would serve short sentences doing agricultural work. The place had been closed down for more than twenty years before the makers of Prom Night showed up and shot a very creepy, disturbing sequence there.

There are scenes that take place in quaint residential areas, small homes, and there’s even a visit to a drive-in restaurant, driving home that “nice small town” feel – but the majority of scenes take place in or around Alexander Hamilton Senior High School. These scenes were filmed at the Don Mills Collegiate Institute, which opened in the late 1950s and appears to still be a high school to this day. The place has a nice, old school vibe... and plenty of rooms and hallways for stalk and chase action to play out in.

The prom, which has a Disco Madness theme, is held in the school gymnasium.

Oddly, the school is shown to be right on the edge of a lakeside bluff, which seems like quite a safety hazard. Given the Ohio setting, this body of water is presumably supposed to be Lake Erie, although these shots were actually filmed at Toronto's Scarborough Bluffs on Lake Ontario.

KILLER

1974. At an old, abandoned building, a group of kids are playing a twisted variation on Hide & Seek and Tag called Killers, where the person who's "It" is the first Killer, and as they catch the other kids playing, those kids are tagged into becoming fellow Killers. The Killers stalk the halls shouting things like "The Killers are coming!" and "The Killer's gonna get you!" When they're down to just one non-killer, that kid is surrounded by Killers who chant "Kill! Kill! Kill!" It’s not clear how the game ends, because the one time we're shown the end of a game, it results in someone actually being killed. The Killers are a little too intense with the role, the last non-killer is a younger girl who's a bit too freaked out by her peers, and the girl accidentally backs up through a busted window, falling to her death. Not wanting to get in trouble, the four Killers swear they'll never tell anyone what happened. But someone else knows...

Six years later, those “Killers” are getting ready for their high school prom – and in the hours before the dance, they start receiving strange phones. A creepy voice saying stuff like, “Can you come out to play tonight? I’ll see you at the prom,” and, “It’s been a long time. Tonight, it’s my turn.” Asking, “Do you still like to play games?”

Then the murders begin, carried out by someone wearing all black and a ski mask. The prime suspect is the same man who took the blame for the little girl’s death in ‘74: a schizophrenic sex offender who lived near the old building. Said deviant, Leonard Merch, didn’t help his case by attempting to flee when detectives showed up at his door. The ensuing car chase ended with Merch crashing his vehicle, which burst into flames. Merch was severely burned, disfigured, and sank into catatonia. But now he’s awake. He has escaped from the state hospital in Cleveland, killing a nurse and stealing a Volkswagen. Has he come to Hamilton High to kill some more youngsters? Or is someone else under that ski mask? Someone who’s out to avenge the death of that little girl?

The identity of the killer is kept hidden until the final moments. This maniac isn't very stylish, in dress or with most of the executions, but they get the job done.

FINAL GIRL

Paul Lynch and Peter Simpson had been hoping to cast Eve Plumb of The Brady Bunch as Kim Hammond, the older sister of Robin, the little girl who died in 1974... but then, an amazing opportunity was presented to them: Jamie Lee Curtis’s manager called them up and said the Halloween star was interested in playing the lead role! Lynch was scrambling to close the deal with Curtis right away, but Simpson, who hadn’t seen Halloween, wasn’t sure about her. He made her audition and even had her show off her dance skills, since Kim is involved in a standout dance number. Of course, Curtis managed to win him over and landed the role – and she has said that this was one of the first times she actually made money from working on a movie. Halloween hadn’t paid very much.

Kim isn’t the most fascinating or memorable horror heroine, but Curtis did a fine job playing the character as a nice, normal high school girl who is doing her best to navigate her school life while also dealing with the grief she and her parents (played by Leslie Nielsen and Antoinette Bower) feel over the loss of Robin. Six years after her death, that loss still, understandably, hangs over their household like a dark cloud.

And yes, when the time comes, Curtis does demonstrate the ability to dance like a maniac to disco music.

VICTIMS

The kids who accidentally caused Robin’s death while playing their “Killer” game, then got freaked out that they would go to jail for what happened, were Wendy Richards, Nick McBride, Jude Cunningham, and Kelly Lynch. Six years later, we find that Wendy (Eddie Benton) has become a rather horrendous person; Nick (Casey Stevens) is a nice guy who dated Wendy for a while, came to his senses, and is now going to the prom with Kim; Jude (Joy Thompson) is a fun person who will be going to the prom with a guy called “Slick,” and Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens) is a meek girl who’s concerned about giving her virginity to her boyfriend Drew (Jeff Wincott).

Upset that Nick is going to the prom with Kim instead of her, Wendy decides to go with unibrowed troublemaker Lou Farmer (David Mucci), who previously tried to force himself on Kim while wearing a ski mask – which, understandably, did not go over well with Kim’s violently protective brother Alex. (Robin’s twin, played by Michael Tough.) Given their mutual distaste for the Hammond family, Wendy and Lou hook up with plans to get revenge on them at the prom.

Viewers might be surprised to find that, despite the dark secret they’re holding, most of the kids responsible for Robin’s death actually grew up to be decent, likeable people. You feel sorry for Kelly when her boyfriend rejects her for not being willing have sex yet. It’s fun to watch Jude and Slick interact with each other. Nick clearly cares about Kim and feels really bad about what happened to Robin. There’s even a moment where he tries to tell her the truth of what happened to her sister, but he can’t quite get the words out before Kim has to leave... Wendy is the exception; she’s not likeable at all, and she finds her douchey match in Lou.

Most viewers will probably get a smile from seeing the credit "Introducing Sheldon Rybowski as Slick," and what's even better than having a character called Slick is the payoff that this guy does not match the image that his nickname brings to mind. Seymour "Slick" Crane is a mop-topped, bespectacled, overweight, short guy with a customized Chevy van... But with the way things go for him, he kind of lives up to the nickname he surely gave himself.

DEATHS

The most troubling death of all happens right up front: ten-year-old Robin Hammond falls to her death from a second-story window, landing on another pane of glass on the ground below. Her death is the reason for all of the deaths that follow – starting with the corpse of a nurse that is found after Leonard Merch escapes from the state hospital in 1980.

The nurse is killed off-screen. The on-screen deaths are reserved for the people who were responsible for Robin’s death, along with a couple of bystanders along the way. At first, the killer’s preferred method of dispatching people is by introducing their throats to shards of glass – which makes sense, given that Robin fell through a busted window and landed on more glass. We get a slow-motion throat slitting that focuses on the victim’s eyes rather than the cut being made across their throat, and a shocking triple-stab to the throat that, again, doesn’t show the damage being done to the throat, but does show the bloody aftermath.

Things get more spectacular when a character makes a failed attempt to speed away from the killer and instead ends up crashing their van off that bluff at the edge of school property – a crash that, of course, causes the van to explode.

After that, the killer switches to carrying around an axe for a couple of kills, including a decapitation. Counting Robin, the off-screen nurse, and the killer, we end up with a body count of eight, which is perfectly respectable number for a slasher movie. Aside from the van explosion and the decapitation, the kills aren’t likely to knock your socks off – but, like the killer, they get the job done.

CLICHÉS

There are plenty of clichés to be found in Prom Night, some of which are legitimate parts of the story and some that were just dropped in there to subvert expectations and have viewers (and characters) turning their focus in the wrong direction. For example, the whole Leonard Merch element of the story is pure cliché: the wrongly accused man pursued by authorities, injured in a horrific accident. Years later, this disfigured, catatonic, schizophrenic character escapes from the state hospital and heads out to kill... That makes this movie sound like it will be just like any number of Halloween knock-offs, but Leonard Merch is no Michael Myers.

You have a creepy landscaper lurking around the school grounds as a red herring. The killer making unnerving phone calls. There are the typical slasher movie clichés, which are also sort of the clichés of teenage life: some drinking, some pot smoking, some premarital sex. Sex equals death, as the couple that loses their virginity to each other is killed right after, but virginity isn’t a way for someone to protect themselves, as the girl who isn’t ready to have sex yet also gets killed.

Wendy is the “queen bitch” cliché we see in a lot of movies, while Lou is the cliché bully. When these characters come together with a plot to get revenge on their enemies at prom, it feels like a replay of Carrie.

There’s a lengthy chase scene toward the end of the movie – but while these chases usually involve the heroine, Kim is too busy enjoying her prom to get mixed up in this stuff. It’s Wendy who is chased around the school in a seven minute sequence.

POSTMORTEM

Prom Night wasn’t released during the high school prom season, but it wasn’t far behind, reaching theatres on July 18, 1980 and expanding its run throughout August. Distributed by Astral Films in Canada and AVCO Embassy Pictures in the United States, it quickly became AVCO’s most financially successful release to date, breaking weekend records in several of the cities it was shown in. By the end of its theatrical run, it had pulled in just under $15 million, making it Canada's highest-earning horror film of 1980.

Television airings kept the movie alive as the ‘80s went on – and I personally remember taking in multiple TV showings of Prom Night when I was a kid. Its success also paved the way for sequels, none of which were a direct follow-up to the first movie’s story. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (another movie I caught on TV as a kid) started out as a separate, standalone film, but producer Peter Simpson decided to give it a higher profile by slapping the Prom Night title onto it when it was released in 1987. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which was a direct follow-up to Hello Mary Lou, followed in 1990, then Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil, which drifted away from the Mary Lou storyline, came along in 1992. The only thing that ties all four of the movies together is Hamilton High School. Then, since Prom Night proved to have a popularity that endured for decades, there was a reboot in 2008 – and, unfortunately, that one neglected to reference Hamilton High School.

Of course, a big reason why Prom Night is still popular and frequently viewed by genre fans is the fact that it was part of Jamie Lee Curtis’s late ‘70s / early ‘80s horror/thriller run, which consisted of Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, Road Games, and Halloween II. All of those movies still get regular viewings as fans have their own Jamie Lee Curtis classic horror marathons.

Aside from the Curtis of it all, it still gets a lot of viewings from slasher movie fans, like this one, as it still holds up as a great entry in an awesome sub-genre.