5 Ghastly Prom Horror Movies Ranked
Proms From Hell
The prom continues to be a popular setting for horror, such as in the upcoming Netflix film Fear Street: Prom Queen. Many horror films use prom as the motivation, or climactic setting, for a series of gory murders.
Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) is inevitably the first movie that comes up whenever prom horror movies are discussed. I’m a fan of the film – in fact I ranked it at the top of my list of Stephen King adaptions. That said, there are many other prom horror flicks out there, so I’m excluding Carrie from this list.
Here are five prom night horror movies ranked. Let’s take a look at ’em!
5. Prom Ride (2015)
A bunch of rowdy promgoers are dressed up and ready to party. They pack into a fancy limo and off they go. Halfway through the trip, somebody kills their driver and hijacks the limousine. The masked psycho uses the limo’s security cameras and speaker system to spy on and communicate with the group.
He reveals the teens’ embarrassing secrets, kills some of them, and forces the survivors to perform a series of perverted and kinky acts.
With a plot like this, Prom Ride should be creepy and disturbing. It isn’t. This movie is an amateurish mess. The characters are extremely generic. There’s no protagonist, just a series of bland victims.
The acting is at the caliber of a high school play. The first half of the movie tries to be a light horror comedy, then it abruptly switches to being sick and twisted. Tonal shifts like this rarely work.
The most annoying thing about this movie is that it is constantly switching between found footage and conventional camera work. No logic is applied here. The switching seems arbitrary, and it’s distracting, not to mention annoying.
Prom Ride is the worst prom horror movie I’ve ever seen. Considering how bad some of the other movies on this list are, that’s quite the feat.
4. Detention (2011)
Riley (Shanley Caswell), a teen hipster vegan outsider chick, is put in detention on prom night with a bunch of other misfits. There’s a serial killer on the loose, and the principal is pretty sure one of them is the culprit. Better to place the suspected killer(s) in detention rather than, I dunno, call the police, right?
The kids hatch a crazy escape plot involving time travel and Freaky Friday-style body swapping. Riley teams up with her love interest Clapton (played by a pre-Hunger Games Josh Hutcherson) to take down the killer.
Detention wants to be both a quirky coming of age comedy like Juno (and countless other early 2000s movies) and a hip self referential slasher like Scream. Unfortunately, it fails on both accounts due to an utterly witless script.
This movie features a constant volley of jokes. Most of them make no sense, and none are funny. The script is like a basketball player who attempts hundreds of shots and somehow airballs every single one of them.
I felt bad for the actors. They’re constantly forced to say cringey, nonsensical lines. This movie’s idea of dialogue is to string a bunch of random words and pop culture references together and hope that viewers will miraculously believe that the characters are hip and smart.
Detention is slightly better than Prom Ride because it has a protagonist and a storyline. Yes, that’s how low the bar is.
Prom Night (1980)
Thanks to JLC’s presence, Prom Night is easily the most well known movie in this list. Is it good? Nope, but it’s practically a masterpiece compared to the movies we’ve looked at so far.
A group of children accidentally kill their friend while playing in an abandoned building. The girl’s death is ruled an accident. Years later, the guilt ridden group, now teens, are preparing for their senior prom.
But someone knows their secret. The mysterious maniac is determined to take revenge by killing them one by one. Everything comes to a head (literally) on a gruesome and deadly prom night.
This movie lacks the tight direction and suspense of Curtis’s first foray into horror, the original Halloween. But if you’re really desperate to see a young JLC in a prom night horror movie, here’s your chance.
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 (1987)
Prom Night was a commercial (if not critical) success, making a sequel inevitable. With JLC having moved on to mainstream films, a new approach was needed. The result is a film that’s far more entertaining than the original.
In the 1950s, free spirited and sexually ravenous Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is crowned queen at her senior prom. Her joy turns to ashes after a cruel prank goes wrong, burning her to death in front of everyone at the school gym.
Thirty years later, Maloney returns as a ghost to take revenge and torment a new generation of teens preparing for their prom. She possesses a young woman and uses her body to kill.
This movie is a hilarious ’80s cheese fest filled with bizarre, surreal moments (like a rocking horse that comes to life and attacks someone). Don’t expect a continuation of the original’s storyline. None of the characters from the original Prom Night appear here and, honestly, good riddance.
Mary Lou returned again in the amusing but forgettable Prom Night III: The Last Kiss. There was one last sequel, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil, which made the series-killing mistake of replacing Mary Lou with an evil priest. The original was remade as Prom Night (2008).
Tragedy Girls (2017)
Finally, a prom horror movie I can wholeheartedly recommend (although lovers of ’80s low budget horror should absolutely check out Prom Night 2). McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) and Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) are beautiful and popular high school students who run a true crime blog. There’s just one problem: they’re in dire need of fresh material.
What are two high school psychopaths to do? Take matters into their own hands, of course! If they can’t find any lurid murders to blog about, they’ll create their own!
Tragedy Girls gets strong performances by the two leads. Shipp and Hildebrand are perfectly cast. The girls are believably sweet and manipulative, while also effective as coldblooded villains. The movie features Jack Quaid, in one of his earliest horror roles, as a dimwit who is obsessed with Sadie.
Sadie and McKayla’s rampage climaxes at the prom in a brutal gut punch of an ending. The people who made Prom Ride should take note – *this* is how you make a disturbing prom night horror movie. Even Carrie White didn’t create as much prom carnage as this duo.
Why Are Proms A Popular Horror Setting?
Proms are a rite of passage for many young people. They’re supposed to be memorable and fun. Of course, prom can go wrong in countless ways. In real life, the dangers are usually stuff like getting turned down by a preferred date or seeing one’s hopes of being elected prom queen/king dashed.
Prom horror movies, of course, takes anxieties around prom to a more extreme level. Like birthdays and graduations, they are a seminal event that’s ripe for horror to subvert.
