Anyone who has seen the first three movies in theFear Street series knows that they’re indebted to horror of the past. Fear Street: 1994 borrowed from Scream‘s self-awareness. Fear Street: 1978 had a masked killer stalking a campground, just like Friday the 13th: Part II. The folk horror films from the 1960s and ’70s provided a model for Fear Street: 1666. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the original trilogy though by telling a standalone story. For Prom Queen writer and director Matt Palmer, that division brings to mind another horror forerunner. “I keep thinking about Halloween III: The Season of the Witch, which I quite like even though it didn’t go well with audiences in the 1980s,” Palmer tells Den of Geek. Halloween III famously ditched Michael Myers for a new story about cursed masks and Celtic witches. It was an attempt to turn the series into an anthology instead of the continuing adventures of a silent killer. “I like that idea of a Halloween franchise, a world where you could just tell vastly different stories form different subgenres. I think there’s potential for that to happen in Fear Street.” 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!'” Palmer brought a similar level of erudition to designing what many would consider the most important part of a slasher: the over the top kills. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! “One of the things I’ve noticed about modern slashers is that they sometimes don’t have wide shots in the kill scenes. I think that’s a mistake because I want the audience to understand the space where the kill is going to happen, and then you can start cutting into closer shots. Because then they can compute from that wide shot where people are. It makes the scene more frightening because you know where the dark spots are and you know how big the room is.” As academic as that approach may sound, Palmer’s careful to keep focused on the main thing, the blood and guts that audiences expect. “We shot all of the kill scenes in one day,” Plamer reveals. “Some of them have a lot of shots, so they were heavily storyboarded,” meaning that Palmer and his team made comic book style drawings of every shot in the sequence, so they could shoot them more efficiently. “There was a funny moment when we were storyboarding one of our kills and we got really excited about the lighting, because it’s somebody moving through different planes of lighting and you can see certain things. The storyboard artists and the director of photography [Márk Gyõri] started talking about this mist and the light, and it started turning into a real art film geek conversation, all about the mystery. Then the storyboard artist turns to me and asks, ‘so what happens next?'” and I said, “and then all her guts fall out.’ Lets’s not forget what kind of movie we were really making.” While that might sound like he’s committed to making a lean and mean slasher, and he did emphasize the fact that he wanted the film to come in under 90 minutes, Palmer does find surprising moments of stillness in Prom Queen. “I didn’t realize this until after Calibre, but I give scenes a bit of breathing space so you can be with the characters and go a bit deeper with them. But then in between scenes, the escalation of plot is quite steep.” He adds, “I prefer movies that are a bit more sedately paced, but sometimes I’m watching a movie from the ’80s and wondering, ‘Why are we holding here? Cut, cut, cut! I’ve got the information, so move on!’ People assimilate information faster now, so I’m trying to find that sweet spot where you can still have that breathing room to go a little bit deeper with the characters, but also be aware that people need things these days to move a bit quicker.” Palmer’s awareness of both classic horror and modern audiences make him a perfect choice for the Fear Street franchise, which has a huge audience among early teens, newcomers to the genre. “I feel like the characters should be youngsters and the focus should be on the younger characters,” Palmer explains. “I went to my first all-night horror event when I was 16. I was underage and it was the most exciting thing, and I think that’s the genesis of my process. I asked myself what kind of movie I would have wanted to see when I was 15 and tried to go back and capture a bit of that magic.” For the other big audience of Fear Street, Palmer had to go beyond himself and get some outside help. “I think there’s also a skew towards the female in Fear Street’s following, so we all wanted to have a female-led story. That was obviously a challenge for me because, you know, I’m male. Fortunately, I had really strong female producers on this to guide me if I went astray on any of the characterizations.” After seeing Prom Queen, most will agree that Palmer didn’t go astray in any regard, which raises some questions. Prom Queen may be a one-off, but does Palmer have more to say within the world of the series? “Well, I’ve had my dream project in the franchise, so I don’t want to be greedy. But If I was going to do another one, it would probably take place a couple of years later in the ’80s and be a Satanic Panic thing with ouija boards.” Palmer trails off here, not wanting to get ahead of myself. “But I’ve already had my Fear Street adventure,” he says with a smile and gesturing back to the Halloween-style anthology that he wants the franchise to become. Still, if Prom Queen hits with fans as well as the other Fear Street movies, it’s hard to imagine that we won’t Palmer making his Satanic Panic movie soon. Fear Street: Prom Queen arrives on Netflix on May 23, 2025.