When I wrote about Prom Night at Final Girl way back in November 2005, I was lukewarm on it at best, wondering why I’d seen it so many times and if I even liked it. My feelings about it have definitely risen since then, but I understand my yesteryear views. It’s a very stereotypical slasher in terms of tropes and archetypes—it follows in the footsteps of John Carpenter’s Halloween very, very closely, right down to the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as the movie’s Final Girl. But while they share an actress and a young adulthood upended by murder and tragedy, Kim Hammond is actually a far cry from Laurie Strode. Rather than shying away from boys to bury herself in books and babysitting duties, Kim is a gregarious, popular prom queen chased after by a few men…none of them masked.

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate all the things Prom Night does differently in spite of its adherence to the slasher formula, not the least of which is the dark emotional heart beating at the center of the thing. No, these are not richly-drawn characters. But they do have lives and stories, and one can only imagine the kinds of trauma those will entail after the film’s credits roll. It’s a silly slasher that takes place over the course of one day and night, but its implications reach far into the past and farther into the future. In 2005 I was disappointed by the slower pace, the dull kills, the lack of action (outside, of course, of the incredible disco dance sequence)…nowadays, those “disappointments” don’t detract from everything I get out of it. Weird!