Fear Street: Prom Queen Director Sees Franchise as the Next Halloween
Exclusive: Fear Street: Prom Queen director Matt Palmer talks classic horror influences, his approach to making a good kill scene, and his ideas for the future of the franchise.
The latest entry in the movie adaptations of author R.L. Stine‘s teen novels, Prom Queen follows teen Lori Granger (India Fowler), who becomes an unlikely prom queen favorite when a masked killer starts offing the competition. In addition to young stars such as Fowler, Suzanna Son, and Ariana Greenblatt, Prom Queen also features an impressive adult cast, which includes Lili Taylor, Katherine Waterston, and 2000s mainstay Chris Klein.
But the most surprising name in the credits is Palmer’s, and not just because he takes the place of Leigh Janiak, who directed the first three films. Palmer’s debut Calibre focused on two Scottish young adults whose friendship is tested when a hunting trip goes horribly wrong. It’s rural and thoughtful, and a million miles from the 1980s American setting of Prom Queen. But to Palmer, the two films both feel complementary.
“I guess there’s two of me,” he says, thoughtfully. “There’s one side of me that’s into heavier movies and quite intense thrillers in the Deliverance mold. But horror was my first love in terms of genre. I do a festival at an all-night horror event in the UK once a year. We show five horror movies from the ’70s and ’80s, all the way through the night.”
That experience makes Prom Queen “a dream project” for Palmer, “making a movie that could potentially fit in with the ’80s movies I show at my event.”
While there’s plenty of ’80s influence in Prom Queen, Palmer also adds elements of giallo, the lurid Italian murder mysteries that were precursors to the American slashers, especially with the look of the central masked killer.
“I really liked the black leather raincoat and the black gloves in gialli, so I started from that,” says Palmer of his process of designing the killer. “Then our concept artist said the killer can’t be all black because they’ll get lost in the dark. So we started looking at a yellow coat but that felt a bit too much like Alice Sweet Alice—which was a visual influence on the movie. We looked at blue and then the concept artist announced red on red, and we were like ‘boom! Yeah!'”