Hamilton High Prom Night ’57

About Prom Night (1980)

Paul Lynch’s Prom Night (1980) starred Jamie Lee Curtis—fresh off Halloween and The Fog—as the lead in a slasher set during a high school prom where a masked killer targets four teenagers responsible for a childhood tragedy six years earlier. The film is notable for its extended disco dance sequence featuring Curtis performing elaborate choreography, a scene so committed to its musical number format that the film temporarily forgets it’s supposed to be a horror movie. Shot in Toronto for $1.5 million, the film benefited from the Canadian tax shelter system that funded many horror films of the era and earned $14.8 million at the box office. While often overshadowed by its slasher contemporaries, Prom Night’s combination of whodunit mystery structure and disco-era atmosphere has earned it a nostalgic following as a quintessential early-80s time capsule.