Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)

The fourth Fear Street installment arrives with a 1988 setting, a prom, and a masked assailant working through the queen candidates by axe, cleaver, and kitchen knife. It is adapted loosely from an R. L. Stine novel published in 1992, which means the source material predates the current century's moral apparatus by a comfortable margin. We came prepared to take notes on messaging. The notes are mostly a body count, and the bodies are arranged with a certain old-fashioned efficiency.

What registers is modest. The ensemble is a mixed group of teenagers, though this is simply how teenagers are cast now, an ambient fact of the payroll instead of a proclamation. Girls compete for a crown, girls are butchered in classrooms and changing rooms, and one girl survives long enough to bludgeon a matriarch with a trophy while blood pools into the Witch's Mark. A female final girl has been slasher furniture since 1978. The film's engagement with its own gender politics extends no further than a dance-off in the gymnasium, and it treats that as spectacle, not argument.

The absences are total. Race never surfaces as a subject. Money never surfaces as a subject, despite a town with a poor reputation and a vice principal determined to reinvent it. There is no climate anxiety, no class warfare, no body image discourse, no neurodivergent arc, no historical reframing, and no sermonizing of any kind. Critics complained that the film lacked the thematic ambition of its predecessors, which is the nearest thing to praise on offer. An empty slasher, at least, leaves no residue.