Prom Night [Paul Lynch, 1980]:
The last vestiges of the 1970s are all over this, with the constant soundtrack of disco floor fillers and phantasmagoria of star lights and saturated color seen during the titular prom. It's an aesthetic that shows an obvious debt of influence to Brian De Palma's earlier, hugely successful Stephen King adaptation, Carrie (1976). Like Carrie, there's also a tracking shot through a girls’ locker room here, but it's more chaste and less shocking in this context than the markedly more sensationalist take by De Palma. The thrum of the soundtrack and cross-cutting between dance and terror might also make this as much a precursor to Lucio Fulci's similarly disco themed slasher Murder Rock (1984) as it is to the more analogous likes of My Bloody Valentine (1981), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) or Terror Train (1980).
Slow and for a large part bloodless, many see this as bottom of the barrel stuff compared to Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but I had a lot of fun with it. The third act especially is masterfully directed. A reminder that before the blockbuster boom of ‘80s slasher cinema (which focused more on elaborate deaths and gratuitous violence), many early slasher films were more concerned with themes of suppressed trauma and moral retribution. This is one of the saddest films of the sub-genre, haunted from the earliest scenes by the death of a child, and brought full circle with the eventual reveal of the killer's painful motives.
