I spoke with Fear Street: Prom Queen director Matt Palmer about the look of the film’s killer, which draws inspiration from Alfred Sole‘s 1976 proto-slasher Alice, Sweet Alice.
“Alice, Sweet Alice was definite influence. There’s a chase scene in that with the killer in the raincoat. And I’m big giallo fan too, so I think there was a giallo element that I always wanted from the start,” Palmer explains to Bloody Disgusting.
“We were like, ‘What color of jacket we put against the red lockers?’ We looked at yellow, but that felt a bit too on the nose, because Alice, Sweet Alice already done that. We tried blue. And then one of our concept artists came back with red on red, which we hadn’t thought of because we were looking for something that wasn’t red, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God! That looks awesome!’
“Ironically, I read that the guy who directed Alice, Sweet Alice said that he always wanted a red raincoat but couldn’t do that because it already been done in Don’t Look Now, so we ended up back where Alice, Sweet Alice wanted to be.”
Palmer continues, “The mask took a long time. There’s been so many iconic horror masks. It felt like everything had been done, and it was a bit of a panic. Then the production designer came back with that one, and it scared the shit out of all of us when we looked at it, so we were like, ‘That’s that’s the one.’
“And then the Wellington boots, which is just more practical, really, in terms of wading around in everyone’s blood.”
Stay tuned for more of my Fear Street: Prom Queen interviews, and don’t miss the movie when it slashes onto Netflix this Friday, May 23.
Prom season at Shadyside High is underway and the school’s wolfpack of It Girls is busy with its usual sweet and vicious campaigns for the crown. But when a gutsy outsider is unexpectedly nominated to the court, and the other girls start mysteriously disappearing, the class of ’88 is suddenly in for one hell of a prom night.
India Fowler, Suzanna Son (Red Rocket), Fina Strazza (“Paper Girls”), Chris Klein (American Pie), David Iacono (“Dead Boy Detectives”), Ella Rubin (Until Dawn), Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), Lili Taylor (The Conjuring), and Katherine Waterston (Alien: Covenant) star.
