Movies
Beyond Mary Lou: Exploring the ‘Prom Night’ Quadrilogy
It’s Back to School time, so it’s high time to reflect on an institution that I’ve possibly spent more time with than my actual high school: Hamilton High, the center of the Prom Night quadrilogy. Prom Night, which lasted from 1980 through 1992, is a bit of a C-tier slasher franchise. It’s certainly not robust at the level of your Friday the 13ths or Nightmare on Elm Streets. And it doesn’t quite fit in with the B-tier franchises (so called because they swooped in slightly before or after the slasher golden era, not because of their quality) like Candyman, Final Destination, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, considering the fact that many mainstream viewers probably don’t know Prom Night had a sequel in the first place.
Prom Night: An Often Overlooked Franchise
For those in the know (which I’m assuming is you, considering you clicked on a link to a site called Horror Press), the first two Prom Night films are the ones that you’ve probably seen or at least heard discussed the most. This makes sense, as the Canadian franchise abhors continuity and is loosely connected at best (despite the recurring presence of Hamilton High, actor Brock Simpson, and the iconic line “ It’s not who you come with, it’s who takes you home”), which wouldn’t necessarily spark obsessive fandom. However, each of the Prom Night movies has a special spark that makes them worth watching in one way or another, and I’d like to take a moment to dig into the meat of what makes this bizarre, misbegotten franchise truly special beyond its current reputation.
(For the record, this article will not cover the 2008 remake Prom Night, because it’s an in-name-only remake and my mother always taught me that if I don’t have anything nice to say about something, I shouldn’t include it in my slasher retrospective.)
Prom Night (1980)
The one that started it all! Prom Night remains notable in the slasher sphere for being one of the early titles to cement star Jamie Lee Curtis’ status as a scream queen after her auspicious debut in 1978’s Halloween. Following a masked killer stalking students six years after a prank gone wrong resulted in the death of a child, Prom Night also features one of Leslie Nielsen’s final dramatic performances before Airplane! provided him with the career pivot of a lifetime.
Prom Night is a pretty rote early slasher, for the most part. However, that’s of historical interest considering how early in the game it distills most of the most long-running tropes of the genre. On top of that, it’s got some indelible moments that spice it up. This includes the notorious extended sequence of Jamie Lee disco dancing her heart out, on which mileage may vary. But I love it, especially thanks to composer Paul Zaza’s zippy original song “Prom Night.” It’s a real curio of the culture of the late 1970s, which maybe isn’t what it intended to be but is still a fun thing anyway. Prom Night also boasts a killer chase sequence and a severed head rolling onto a catwalk in the middle of prom (though sadly the gore quotient of the rest of the film is not quite up to snuff).
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)
Because of Prom Night’s lackluster reception, it makes sense that not only did it take more than half a decade to receive a sequel, but said sequel ignores basically everything about it except for the aforementioned connections that link every movie in this franchise. However, the gulf between films also feels huger as a result of one of the biggest slasher releases of the decade: 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. After the explosive release of that instant classic, the slasher genre made a Black Friday-esque rush on supernatural plots, grabbing every last amulet, spell, and demonic entity it could get its hands on, and the Prom Night franchise was no exception. Adding a healthy dose of Carrie into the Elm Street mix, Hello Mary Lou follows the titular Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) after she is killed at prom in the 1950s and returns 30 years later to possess and murder various teens as part of her wicked revenge against her killers.
Prom Night II goes full-on rubber reality, presenting some of the most dazzlingly inventive supernatural horror sequences this side of Springwood, Ohio, including a disgusting living rocking horse and a chalkboard that turns into a pool of water with chalk letters floating around on it. With its deep psychosexual bent, full-tilt embrace of 1980s aesthetics, and effortless watchability, this entry is the undeniable high point of the franchise.
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990)
Prom Night III does feature the return of Mary Lou (now played by Courtney Taylor, newly obsessed with a hunky boy, and willing to murder anyone who gets in his way), but it is something of a comedown if you’re a passionate fan of Prom Night II. However, the recent death of the slasher (1989 is pretty clearly the death knell of the genre’s post-Elm Street silver age before Scream kicked off its Renaissance in 1996) wasn’t enough to prevent this title from adding at least a little bit of spice to the mix.
You see, the turn that Prom Night III took was a sharp swerve onto Goof Boulevard. This film basically plants Mary Lou into a live-action Looney Tunes short, pushing away from rubber reality and toward full-on surrealism, complete with people on the other end of a phone line sounding like helium-addicted squirrels. Also, this entry is where the Canadian franchise really leans into pretending to be set in America (as if naming the high school after Alexander Hamilton wasn’t enough), so the camp quotient is upped by the flotilla of American flags that are shoved haphazardly into what feels like every frame. While the kills aren’t quite on the level of the previous outings, they’re still delightfully wacky and presented more creatively than the average direct-to-video slasher.
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992)
Prom Night IV is probably the hardest to defend of the bunch, but hell, I’m gonna do it anyway. It’s even more unrelated to the ongoing franchise than the previous outings, as it follows a group of teens who are having an anti-prom party at an isolated mountain cabin where they are stalked by a murderous stigmata-bearing priest. It’s by far the most rote slasher of the bunch, even compared to Prom Night, so perhaps its biggest strength is that it is somehow an early 1990s slasher that doesn’t make you want to gouge your own eyes out with an ice cream scoop. Also, I’m sorry to say it, but you really can’t go wrong with a killer priest wielding a super-sharp crucifix.
This is definitely the one where you have to put your “bad-good” goggles on in order to properly appreciate stuff like the killer coming out of a 33-year coma looking like he hasn’t aged a day, or the shriekingly bad decisions made by the final girl at every turn. But there’s plenty of joy to be mined here still, including a meta joke that references Jamie Lee Curtis, pre-empting the meta-horror boom that would come several years later thanks to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Scream.
Prom Night, Everything is Alright
So yes, it may be the case that pretty much every one of the Prom Night movies should be taken with a grain of salt. But for a haphazard four-film franchise to have such a deep bench of offbeat and interesting titles is no small feat. This Back to School season, you can still go ahead and embrace your high school/college horror by binging Scream or Elm Street movies, sure. But why not also throw in a Prom Night or two? Or four?
I’ve spent years honing my craft making strange, retro-inspired horror films on a budget — films driven by style but rooted in emotion. Love, grief, heartbreak, longing — all filtered through darkness. I’ve always been drawn to horror because, like many people, I found healing there. In stories where fear becomes confrontation, where pain can finally take shape.
How Joshua Tree Inspired In the Valley
During COVID, my partner and I bought land in Joshua Tree and built an off-grid glampsite. It became an oasis away from the city — a place defined by silence, stars, old VHS tapes, and isolation that initially felt restorative. At night, we’d drift between local dive bars, searching for connection in the middle of nowhere.
One spot we frequented was Out There Bar — a strange desert refuge with drag nights, disco, and often only a handful of people scattered inside. Most nights felt harmless, almost dreamlike. But every so often, something shifted in me. A wall would suddenly go up — an instinctive voice whispering: Be careful. Don’t let anyone know you’re queer. The feeling was immediate and overwhelming. A defense mechanism I thought I had long outgrown. One of the largest military bases in the country sat only a few miles away, and soldiers would often cycle through the bar. Some encounters were warm, others less so, but there was always an underlying sensation I couldn’t shake — that isolating feeling of being watched too closely.
What unsettled me most was the contradiction. I had been openly queer since I was seventeen. Proudly. Yet suddenly, in the place I considered my sanctuary, old survival instincts came rushing back. Joshua Tree is romanticized as liberating and expansive — a place people go to find themselves. And yet, underneath that openness, I found myself shrinking again. That feeling became the seed of In the Valley.
The stars are why you go to the desert. No matter how many vintage motels or pools people chase, the conversation always circles back to the sky. The desert remains one of the few places where light pollution disappears, and the stars reveal themselves fully. But I became fascinated by another feeling entirely: the sensation that something might be watching back. As the desert became my second home and that defensive wall kept resurfacing, I started interrogating the feeling more deeply. Why was I suddenly so concerned with safety? What exactly was I afraid of?
Queer Fear and Survival in Isolated Spaces
The answer was complicated because I hadn’t experienced overt homophobia in any defining way before. Sure, there had been passing slurs shouted from cars or strangers trying to provoke something ugly, but those moments felt easy to dismiss. What unsettled me more was the quieter feeling underneath it all — inherited vigilance. My partner is non-binary, and their safety often occupies my mind more than my own. Even in harmless moments, I found myself scanning rooms, reading body language, calculating exits. It wasn’t irrational. It was conditioning — a survival instinct sharpened over generations of queer people learning when to stay visible and when to disappear.
Building Horror From Internalized Fear
That was the horror I wanted to explore.
Not simply homophobia itself, but the psychological architecture it leaves behind. The way fear embeds itself into the body long after you convince yourself you’re safe. Eventually, I realized I had to confront it. I had to give it a face.
In the Valley is a descent — a body-switch film wrapped in alien imagery and retro western horror aesthetics. The film begins with Josh entering a queer speakeasy hidden in the middle of the desert. The room immediately studies him. Josh carries himself with hesitation, almost like someone entering a gay bar for the first time and trying desperately not to appear uncomfortable.
Romance, Desire, and Alien Horror
After several strange encounters with the bar’s enigmatic owner, Dahlia, the atmosphere shifts when Richard enters the room. Their connection is immediate, communicated through something as simple as a smile. Quiet conversation turns into flirtation, flirtation into dancing, and suddenly the film reveals itself as a romance. Richard takes Josh home after Josh admits he can barely remember where he lives — an important detail. Josh exists untethered, emotionally disoriented, searching for grounding in another person. Outside, the two lie beneath impossibly purple desert skies, staring upward as the stars loom over them.
For a moment, the desert becomes sacred. Then the film turns.
After the two move inside together, storm clouds begin swallowing the sky while purple lightning fractures across the landscape. The storm doesn’t interrupt their intimacy — it amplifies it. Desire and danger begin occupying the same emotional space. I wanted the sequence to feel like the best night of your life teetering on the edge of violence. With every flash of lightning, horrific images invade Josh’s psyche: a man bound to a barbed wire fence, an ominous cowboy gripping a bat, fragments of brutality interrupting intimacy like inherited nightmares.
By the climax of the sequence, the lovers are no longer alone. Their bed now sits exposed beneath the storm as two towering extraterrestrial beings silently observe them above. Because for me, the horror was never simply the aliens. It was the feeling of being watched while trying to love someone openly. At the final moan, Josh awakens alone — naked and abandoned beneath the brightness of the desert morning. Richard is gone.
The Desert, Memory, and Queer Trauma
Searching desperately for help, Josh instead discovers something impossible: a single black orchid growing from the dry sand. The flower mirrors the tattoo seen earlier on Richard’s arm. In panic, Josh rips the flower from the earth. Inside, a violent purple light pulses outward. Fractured memories stab through him in flashes: the dancing, the bedroom, the storm, the extraterrestrial figures looming above them. Then the desert itself revolts, erupting into blood and consuming him completely before releasing him back into the endless landscape.
By nightfall, dehydrated and unraveling, Josh discovers a lone fire burning beside an unfinished barbed wire fence. A baseball bat rests in the flames. Torn clothing hangs from the wire. Nearby, he finds a mound of disturbed earth crowned with a cowboy hat. Beneath the hat sits another black orchid.
Uncovering the Film’s Central Mystery
This time, when Josh removes it, there are no violent visions. Only silence. He begins digging. Slowly, a grave reveals itself. Inside lies a body reduced almost entirely to bone and weathered skin. Then Josh realizes who he’s looking at. Richard. Not recently dead — but buried there for years.
The Horror of “Bury Your Gays”
Josh stumbles backward in horror only to suddenly find himself seated beside Richard once more at the barbed wire fence, the same way they sat together in the bar earlier that night. Only now the atmosphere has changed completely. Romance has curdled into mourning. Richard speaks like a ghost struggling to remember his own humanity. He tells Josh the story of a man who only wanted love — and another man too terrified to survive what that love awakened inside him — and suddenly everything clicks into place.
The uneasy looks from the bar patrons were never truly about Josh. They were about what he represented: a repetition. An echo. The cowboy was never a monster in the traditional sense.
He was fear weaponized.
A closeted man who carried his self-hatred into the desert and attempted to bury it there alongside the person who exposed it. A literal manifestation of the old horror trope: “bury your gays.” Richard tells Josh it’s time to leave. The grave suddenly splits open into a violent purple void as storm clouds consume the desert once more. Before falling in, Josh looks back one final time. The extraterrestrial beings stand silently above the true history of the murder unfolding beneath them: Richard bound to the barbed wire fence while the cowboy approaches slowly with the bat in hand. Josh is no longer witnessing metaphor. He is witnessing buried history itself.
How In the Valley Reclaims Queer Horror Tropes
Josh crawls out of the grave and back into the present day. Disoriented and exhausted, he stumbles toward the bar from the beginning of the film — only now it has changed. Modern cars sit outside. The once-forgotten dive has been transformed into a stylish Airbnb. Inside, a man frantically calls the police, searching for his missing partner.
Then Josh collapses through the doorway. His own partner rushes toward him, holding him tightly in relief. And in that final moment, music begins playing softly in the background.
The spirits of Richard and the Cowboy appear together one last time, replaying their dance across the room. But now the cowboy is no longer monstrous — just young, frightened, human. Josh watches as they move together exactly as he and Richard once did. Finally, everything aligns.
The Hidden Meaning Behind In the Valley
Josh was chosen to relive this forgotten history — not simply to witness violence, but to understand survival. To recognize the privilege and responsibility of existing openly in spaces where others once had to hide. The desert did not just hold trauma. It held memories. In The Valley is intentionally layered. Viewers may miss the clues on a first watch: the body switch, the orchid tattoo, the realization that the sex scene is not simply passion but “gay panic” refracted through alien abduction imagery. The storm itself becomes psychological — terror building inside someone unable to reconcile desire with shame.
Why Horror Is the Perfect Language for Queer Stories
I never wanted to make a “clear” queer film because my experience as a queer person has never felt clear or linear. Fear rarely announces itself directly. Trauma lingers, mutates, hides in the body, resurfaces unexpectedly. Horror became the only language that felt honest enough to express it. The core of In the Valley is about the collision between passion and fear. A film wrapped in neon skies, extraterrestrials, and retro horror, but underneath, grappling with violence, shame, inherited trauma, and survival. Even the barbed wire fence carries historical weight. It directly references a young queer man whose death mirrored the imagery in the film. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I encourage you to research the history of violence against queer people, particularly in isolated spaces where secrecy and fear have too often turned deadly.
When Art and Reality Collide
Since the film’s release, it has played festivals around the world and received recognition I’m incredibly grateful for. But life has a strange way of collapsing the distance between art and reality. In February of this year, I was physically attacked for being queer for the first time in my life. The assault left me with a severe concussion and heavy bruising, and I’m still processing what it changed inside me.
The Real-World Importance of Queer Horror
More than anything, it forced me to confront a difficult realization:
The fear that inspired this film was never imaginary. It was always real.
Which is precisely why we have to keep protecting one another. Keep creating spaces for queer people to exist openly. Keep telling stories that confront what others would rather bury. And keep making horror films that remind us we survived.
Yes, Paul W. S Anderson’s film Event Horizon is far from perfect. In fact, it is very deeply flawed, especially because of its semi-lost, boundary-pushing torture scenes, dated character motifs, and a sense of humor that, tonally, does not feel a thousand percent well-balanced with the existential, hopeless tone. That being said, many of the negative reactions do not account for the pure nightmare fuel of this film at its core. Event Horizon might not be the greatest sci-fi horror film of all time (though I would personally say otherwise), but there is more than enough of a case for it being the most frightening.
The Hellish Premise That Makes Event Horizon So Terrifying
The film itself follows a group of scientists in the distant future looking for a lost ship – the “Event Horizon”. The ship, which was revolutionary in its ability to literally fold space time, poke a hole through it, and go through, went missing years ago, and had only just been discovered. As the crew boards the abandoned ship, the film plays out like a combination of cosmic terror, a haunted house/gothic aesthetic, and hopeless dread, as they discover the ship may have passed through Hell itself.
The Chaos Realm and the Fear of a Fate Worse Than Death
Probably the scariest existential concept introduced in Event Horizon is the concept of a fate worse than death. In addition to the haunted house horrors of visualized grief and deadly kills, the film vies for a more Hellraiser approach of inflicting brutal, unflinching nightmare fuel on its characters and audience. I am of course referring to the chaos realm, and how it completely derails any expectations of what the movie might have been.
So let’s say you go to a movie theater to see Event Horizon in the 1990s. It’s labeled as sci-fi horror. With Alien 4 scheduled to come out in a few months, and films such as The Arrival, 12 Monkeys, and other grunge science fiction outings filling the decades, one could assume the movie would be an alien, time travel, or other high sci-fi concept film. Soon, it shows itself as a haunted house story in space. Then, with one more twist, it becomes half Lovecraftian cosmic terror of the unknown, and half otherworldly torture. The ship passes through a Hellish torture realm; anyone who sees it becomes corrupted, and they might even participate in the infamous “blood orgy” scene. Seeing is not just believing-it is possession and corruption. This is Hellraiser in space.
Cosmic Horror and Lovecraftian Terror in Space
The concept of the chaos realm, as a demonic version of the zone from Annihilation, is partially scary because of the movie’s pacing, and how it takes a while to set up this twist of a concept. It is a festering, evil place we are dealing with. Even inanimate objects such as the ship itself, can become sentient demons in their own right. The movie, intelligently so, also does not overexplain this place. It is not quite Hell itself, but rather, a place of pure evil caught in between time and space, that people may have interpreted as Hell.
Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir Is an Underrated Horror Villain
Throughout the film, Sam Neill’s character, Dr. William Weir, makes a horrific transformation. Revealed to be the designer of the Event Horizon, visions of his dead wife led him to reach this chaos realm himself. On the Event Horizon, which had become a demon, William becomes a corrupted servant of the Hellish servants on the other side.
A potential factor in the lack of awareness of Event Horizon is that it came out in the 90s, not the 80s. If this film had premiered about ten years earlier, it almost definitely would have held Sam Neill’s character on the same pedestal as Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. However, in the late 90s, there was such a fatigue over slashers and high-concept antagonists that his character didn’t receive the cult status he should have.
Seriously…the bloody, scraped-in satanic symbols into the body? The blood-drenched skin? The cold, unloving attitude? He gives Pinhead a run for his money, and is a whole lot more sadistic than him. All the elements are there for an iconic horror villain, making his way into Funko Pop figures and T-shirts. However, he is not held on that pedestal as he should be. Maybe if there were a couple more sequels with him doing wacky kills and making puns? Sign me up for Event Horizon: The Dream Master.
The Gothic Design of the Event Horizon Ship
In addition to Sam Neill’s character, the ship itself should be as iconic as the Overlook Hotel or Amity Island. It is not a regular science-fiction designed thing, but rather more akin to a gothic Church. It gives the impression that it was destined for evil from its conception, and no one would have any control over where it went. Truly chilling-huge props (pun not intended) to production designer Joseph Bennett.
Why Event Horizon Is a Sci-Fi Horror Masterpiece
Event Horizon is a masterwork of terror. Yes, it’s cheesy at times with dated effects, and yes, some of its corny jokes feel out of place when the rest of the movie is painstakingly serious, but at its core are some truly terrifying concepts.
Ending on a final factoid, the movie was famously cut down from its original length. Some of the cut scenes from the horrific torture sequences, which were shot on film, were actually found years later in a Transylvanian salt mine of all places. Imagine being the poor sucker who uncovers practically done torture scenes in a mine. Hopefully, one day we might have a Director’s cut that would somehow be even scarier. But for now, Event Horizon as is, could take the cake as the most frightening sci-fi-horror film of the 1990s.
