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WHEN
producers Marc Forby and Neal H. Moritz set out to make
a film inspired by the 1980 thriller Prom Night, their
intent was to completely reimagine the picture for a
new, more sophisticated audience. The result is Columbia
Pictures’ reinvigorated suspenseful film Prom Night,
starring Brittany Snow.
In the
film, the night every high-school girl dreams of turns
from magic to mayhem for Donna (Snow) when Fenton, the
obsessed psychopath who killed her entire family,
escapes from prison and comes to claim her.
The
original Prom Night, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis at
the height of her “scream queen” notoriety, is one of
the classic slasher films of that era, but Forby and
Moritz envisioned a script in which the emphasis would
be on suspense, with the gore toned down significantly.
“In
the post-Saw world, we’ve gone as far as we can with
onscreen violence,” says Forby. “We went back to the
classic, old-school thriller where the scares are really
coming more out of, ‘Where is the villain right now? Is
he right there? Is he behind her?’”
“One
of the greatest things about the script,” says director
Nelson McCormick, “is the crossover of genres—it’s a cop
movie interwoven with a teen terror film. You have a
detective who’s getting a second chance to bring a
killer to justice. The killer is an obsessed man who is
driven to insanity by a student he simply must have, to
the point that he will kill anyone who stands between
him and her. And in the middle of these two men is this
young woman who’s experiencing the most magical night of
her life, the night of her prom, an event which is
synonymous with the end of youth—the death of youth,
metaphorically.”
Adding
to Prom Night’s palpable tension is the fact that while
their storylines are inextricably intertwined, those
three characters—Donna, the Detective and Fenton—don’t
come together onscreen until the final, cathartic
climax. “Our threat is a man who suffers from the same
disorder that John Hinckley Jr. had for Jodie Foster,”
McCormick explains. “It’s called ‘erotomania.’ Our
killer imagines a relationship that doesn’t exist. He
imagines that this woman is meant to be with him for the
rest of his life and he will do whatever it takes to
make that happen.
“There’s something very human about it,” says the
director. “Maybe not to that extreme, but we’ve all
wanted something badly in our lives and have been driven
to obsession over it—a job, a car, a spot on a team—so
we can relate to this guy on some small level. He’s not
just a killing machine out to rack up a body count.”
Opening soon across the Philippines, Prom Night is
distributed by Columbia Pictures, the local office of
Sony Pictures Releasing International. |
