Prom Night (1980 film)

Prom Night is a 1980 mystery slasher film directed by Paul Lynch, written by William Gray, and starring Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film follows a group of high school seniors who are targeted at their prom by a masked killer, seeking vengeance for the accidental death of Robin Hammond, a young girl, from six years earlier. The film features supporting performances from Casey Stevens, Eddie Benton, Mary Beth Rubens, Michael Tough, Robert A. Silverman, and Antoinette Bower.

Lynch began developing Prom Night after a meeting with Irwin Yablans, producer of Halloween (1978), who suggested he make a horror film similarly centered around a holiday. Instead, Gray wrote a screenplay adapted from a revenge-themed story by Robert Guza Jr.—an acquaintance of Lynch—using a school prom as a unifying setting. A co-production between Canada and the United States, Prom Night was filmed in Toronto in late 1979.

Avco Embassy Pictures released Prom Night on July 18, 1980 in the United States, where it was a significant financial success, breaking weekend box office records in various cities and grossing over $14 million. It was concurrently distributed by Astral Films in Canda, where it was the country's highest-earning horror film that year. Critical reaction to the film was mixed, with some dismissing its depictions of violence against young women, while others alternately praised it for its more subtle onscreen violence. Prom Night received some critical accolades, garnering Genie Award nominations for editing and also for the leading performance of Curtis at the 2nd Genie Awards. An alternative cut of the film was popularly aired on American and Canadian television networks in 1981, and a soundtrack album was released in Japan the same year by RCA Records.

In the intervening years, Prom Night has accrued a substantial cult following, and has been cited by some film scholars as one of the most influential slasher films of the period. The film has had an extensive release history on home video from numerous distributors in various formats, with its first DVD edition being issued by Anchor Bay Entertainment in 1998. A remastered Blu-ray edition of the film was released by Synapse Films in 2014.