This article is part of ScreenRant‘s Exclusive 2025 Summer Movie Preview. Keep an eye out for the full feature next week!
A new image offers a closer look at Fear Street: Prom Queen. The 2025 horror movie is the fourth installment in Netflix’s Fear Street franchise, which is adapted from the R.L. Stine young adult series of the same name. The upcoming Fear Street: Prom Queen is set in the unlucky town of Shadyside in 1988. In the movie, which stars India Fowler, Ella Rubin, Suzanna Son, Ariana Greenblatt, David Iacono, Fina Strazza, Chris Klein, Lili Taylor, and Katherine Waterston, a killer begins to stalk the local high school’s prom queen candidates one by one.
ScreenRant can now share a first-look image from Fear Street: Prom Queen ahead of its Netflix debut on May 23. The image shows a trio of students looking concerned at prom. While they do not look entirely panicked, indicating that this scene may take place before they learn that there is a new killer terrorizing Shadyside, their tense conversation may be the result of them being worried about a missing friend, whose body will presumably be discovered at some point in the near future. Check out the full-size image below:
What This Means For Fear Street: Prom Queen
The Movie Explores A New Era Of Shadyside
As emphasized by the fashions seen in this first-look image from Prom Queen, the franchise will bring the Fear Street timeline to the 1980s for the first time. The original trilogy, which debuted one after another over the course of three weeks in July 2021, all took place during different times but skipped over the 1980s entirely. While the era was bookended by Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978, Part Three: 1666 explored the origins of Shadyside rather than filling in the gap between the two decades.
All three installments in the 2021 trilogy were directed and co-written by Leigh Janiak.
However, Prom Queen‘s evocation of the 1980s goes much further than the year in which it is set. This image also calls to mind the color scheme and overall design of the prom in the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis horror movie Prom Night, which eventually spawned a five-film franchise. By evoking the very 1980s slasher franchise, it separates itself from Fear Street‘s previous slasher pastiche, 1978, which was set at a summer camp and took on more of the tropes of the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises.
Our Take On The New Fear Street: Prom Queen Image
The Franchise Is Staying Consistent In One Way
Fear Street: Prom Queen comes four years after the previous installments and does not feature the same cast or the same eras, so it will likely feel very different from the intensely interlinked movies that came before. However, this first-look image proves that it still has the mission statement of the franchise at heart. By focusing on a core group of teenagers in peril, the movie will most likely be able to evoke the tone of both the movie trilogy and the original books and thus still feel of a piece with the universe as a whole.