History, Horror Movies, and Literary Critique

Michael B. Jordan (center) and ensemble prepare to face the monsters, in Sinners

In late spring 2025, two movies dropped close enough together to be essentially simultaneous, and therefore comparable. Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), hit cinemas on April 18^th and became an immediate success. The fourth Fear Street movie, Prom Queen, shipped on Netflix on May 23^rd, and landed with a thud. These movies share significant overlap, so why did one succeed, and the other splat?

Both movies are historical reconstructions. Sinners recreates a pre-Hays Code gangster film, but with a primarily Black cast, adding the burdens of Jim Crow onto Prohibition-era themes. Around the halfway mark, it shifts from a musical gangster drama into a horror film, painted in shades of Quentin Tarantino. But throughout, it retains its core of Black Americans struggling to assert their identity in an era of overt, legalized bigotry.

Prom Queen, set in 1988, attempts to capture the experience of a 1980s “dead teenager” slasher flick. That’s all it does. Unlike Sinners, which unpacks multiple layers of Black experience and the economic dislocation of the post-WWI world, Prom Queen tries to return viewers to the era when audiences got giddy, giggly, and possibly horny while watching masked evildoers hack their way through hordes of pretty, sexually precocious youth.

Both movies are freestanding. Though Prom Queen joins an existing franchise, viewers needn’t watch prior Fear Street movies to understand most of this one. I had definite quibbles with the original trilogy, but overall liked it. But without the connection to the existing movies, this one feels adrift. The original trilogy existed in conversation with prior generations of horror film canon; without that, this one appears merely lurid.

Sinners shows two Black men who share one goal: to build a distinctly Black space in segregated Mississippi. Their Club Juke aspirations, where Black musicians sing Black songs to Black audiences, bespeak a desire to simply exist, without the need to propitiate White gatekeepers. But a trio of local Whites demands entry anyway. Yes, the trio are supernatural monsters, but that’s ancillary. At root, Whiteness defines them, and their demands.

White Americans have a history of expecting admittance to Black spaces: blues clubs, Juneteenth parades, the entire disco subculture. But when White people arrive, they begin making exorbitant demands, expecting the existing Black infrastructure to assuage their White fears. I say this as a White man who frequently attends Black church; I know Whiteness makes aggressive, high-handed demands on Black identity. We eventually drive Black people from their own spaces.

Set aside everything else that happens in Sinners. Pause the time-shifting griot magic on the dance floor, the Smokestack Twins’ need for cash in a cash-strapped community, or the bloodthirsty monsters that eventually besiege the club. Those are trappings, but the movie is really about Black people building Black spaces, and White people demanding admittance. Viewers needn’t ruminate upon these themes, but these themes drive the movie.

The killer prepares to dispatch another interchangeable teenager in Fear Street: Prom Queen

Similarly, the original Fear Street trilogy uses the trappings of past cinema: 1990s horror comedies, 1970s slasher flicks, and 2010s psychological horrors. But again, these are set dressing. The movies are about inherited guilt and the degrees to which the living bear responsibility for their ancestors’ sins. The movies don’t foreground those themes or demand answers from the audience, but they exist behind the garish surfaces.

The best horror narratives have a definable spine that says something about us, the audience. The Call of Cthulhu asks what might happen if God were ultimately hostile to human needs. Cujo depicts a mother reduced to helplessness and the inability to keep her children safe. Night of the Living Dead, made during the Cold War, asks what happens when buried secrets rise up and demand admission.

Again, audiences don’t need to spend time mulling over these themes. But we also need them there, to give their narratives meaning. Jason Voorhiees and Fredde Kruger say something about class divisions and suburban anomie, and when studios remove these themes from sequels to focus on gross-outs and bloodbaths, the resulting movies just don’t work. Horror succeeds or fails based on what it says, or doesn’t say, about us.

By contrast, Prom Queen uses the original trilogy’s trappings, but forgets the driving themes. Like countless Freddy sequels, it dresses up pretty, and spills copious blood, but it doesn’t feel larger than that. Some themes exist, but only laterally, and without connection to the original trilogy’s message. Like too many sequels, it’s all style, no substance. But without substance, it’s easy to forget, and audiences probably will.