While Prom Night’s ending might be predictable, the slasher remake still tells viewers a lot about the state of the horror subgenre back in the mid-‘00s. 1980’s original Prom Night was released at the height of the post-Halloween slasher boom and even starred the iconic scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. As such, it comes as no surprise that 2008’s remake Prom Night arrived amidst a spate of slasher remakes as filmmakers in the mid-‘00s scrambled to reboot, reinvent, and rewrite the many classic horror movies of the early ‘80s. Prom Night arrived after 2006’s Black Christmas and before 2008’s Sorority Row.
However, while the original Prom Night was not Prom Night (2008) receiving brutal reviews upon release. The 2008 Prom Night's slasher story is disarmingly simple compared to others in the genre. High school teacher Richard Fenton, played by Johnathon Schaech, develops an obsession with Donna, played by Brittany Snow, which quickly turns deadly.
Richard Fenton Is The Killer In Prom Night 2008
As far as slasher movies go, Prom Night 2008 is shockingly straightforward. Fenton was introduced as the killer in the opening scene and there were no red herrings throughout the rest of Prom Night 2008. Where the Scream movies hint that any character could be the killer to keep the audience guessing, Prom Night 2008 immediately established that Donna’s obsessive teacher was the killer and stuck with this. When Fenton killed the two police officers who were guarding Donna’s house, he snuck in and killed her boyfriend as she slept. In Prom Night 2008’s ending, Donna fought Fenton in her closet until Detective Winn killed him.
In keeping with Prom Night 2008’s simple storytelling ethos, the movie replicated a lot of Halloween’s final act but dropped the movie’s famous final scare. In Halloween, the Final Girl emerged from the closet and her older protector shot the villain, but the slasher’s body then mysteriously disappeared. In Prom Night 2008’s ending, Donna fought Fenton in the closet, Finn shot Fenton when the pair emerged, and then the film ended. Nothing was left ambiguous and there was no lingering sense of unease. Perhaps the reason that the sequel Prom Night 2 never happened is that the movie didn't leave any room for speculation.
Who Richard Fenton Kills In Prom Night 2008
In Prom Night 2008’s opening flashback, which took place three years before the rest of the remake, Donna’s brother and father were killed by Fenton. During prom night itself, Donna’s friends Claire, Michael, and Lisa were all murdered by the slasher. Fenton’s victims also include a fellow asylum inmate, Simms, Howard, an unnamed victim whose identity he stole, and one of the hotel’s housekeepers. Later on, when he escaped the prom unscathed, Fenton found Donna at her aunt’s house where he dispatched two cops guarding the house, Donna’s boyfriend Bobby, and Detective Winn’s partner Detective Nash. This brought his total kill count to 13.
Why Did No One Recognize Donna’s Attacker Before Prom Night’s Ending?
Unlike most slasher villains other than Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Richard Fenton did not wear a mask in Prom Night 2008. This seemed like a major mistake on his part since the character was wanted for murder. However, since he escaped from an asylum, viewers can reasonably presume that Fenton wasn’t thinking clearly during Prom Night 2008. Instead, Fenton’s disguise involved shaving his beard and wearing a hotel uniform. This worked pretty well, although Lisa did feel like she knew Fenton from somewhere. When she eventually ed he was the crazed teacher that stalked Donna, he slit her throat before she could warn Donna.
Why Did Detective Winn Kill Richard Fenton In Prom Night’s Ending?
In practical , Detective Winn killed Fenton in Prom Night 2008’s ending because Fenton was trying to kidnap and kill Donna. However, Winn also had another motive. Winn had already caught Fenton three years earlier after the first massacre and wanted to stop him for good. Winn was frustrated that Fenton was found not guilty by reason of insanity since the detective felt that the slasher could have been stopped if he was imprisoned instead. It is unclear why Winn thought that Fenton would be able to escape an asylum but not a prison, or why he thought that the obviously unhinged Fenton was secretly sane.
Did Prom Night’s Remake Change The Original Story?
The original 1980 Prom Night is nothing like Prom Night 2008. The earlier slasher is a tale of revenge wherein the killer is kept a mystery until the finale. The lead characters of Prom Night 1980 covered up a murder while they were children and their buried guilt came back to haunt them years later when an unknown assailant picked them off one by one. Prom Night 1980 explored the group’s guilt and the way they tried to rationalize their crime over the years, while Prom Night 2008 was a much simpler story of a killer returning to torment his most recent victim.
What The Ending of Prom Night Really Means
Prom Night 2008’s ending offers an interesting indication of where the slasher subgenre was heading in the mid-‘00s. The ‘80s were filled with slasher movies like the original Prom Night, wherein fundamentally flawed characters were forced to face the sins of their past when a forgotten figure began to wreak violent revenge on them. Similarly, the ‘90s meta-slasher boom revived this trope. in the movies of the Scream franchise, the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, and the Urban Legend series, everyone was a suspect. The teens themselves were flawed enough to earn suspicion and their character flaws meant that any of them could turn out to be a killer.
Prom Night 2008 dispenses with this moral complexity altogether, as did a string of slasher remakes from this era. Like 2006’s When A Stranger Calls, Prom Night 2008 has a perfect heroine who never errs throughout its story. The killer in Prom Night 2008, like the villains of Black Christmas 2006, has always been a monstrous murderer and has no meaningful link to their victims. Thus, the slasher’s moral world is flattened in Prom Night 2008 and its contemporaries, with any inconvenient questions of guilt and social responsibility falling by the wayside. In Prom Night, the bad guy is just bad and the heroes are just good.
