Just What "Halloween" was Missing: Disco

I feel obliged to not rate a film too low if disco music is a prominent feature of it, especially when said groovy tunes seem incongruent to the rest of the schlock on screen. Such is the case with "Prom Night," a slasher flick conspicuously in imitation of "Halloween" (1978), which also starred Jamie Lee Curtis, a police manhunt and a masked madman cutting up sexually-promiscuous teenagers. This one also has an "I Know What You Did Last Summer" sort of vibe to the plot--and that was a book, apparently, before it was a movie, so don't get any ideas about "Prom Night" having originality--but that's not important. Although the filmmakers entirely blunder the reflexive voyeurism that was central to the success of "Halloween," they, at least, understood that they needed a good soundtrack to match the pastiche. Counterintuitive to creating tension for a horror film, however, they chose disco.

The base appeal of the horror genre is in the physical reactions it induces in the audience. The jump scare and how when successful it startles the viewer, for instance. "Prom Night" creates a physical reaction, too, but it's of a toe-tapping and body-swaying variety in rhythm to Paul Zaza and Carl Zittrer's score. It's fitting, I suppose, too, that as the film overall rips off "Halloween," the production was sued for its copying popular tracks that the budget couldn't afford to license. Oh well, at least, Curtis is a surprisingly good dancer, and we even get to see her cutting it up on the dance floor with an awkward Leslie Nielsen, playing her father in one of his last straight roles.