Mary Lou: Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three months since my last confession. I’ve disobeyed my parents many times. I’ve taken the Lord’s name in vain many times. I’ve had sinful relations with boys at my school. Many boys. Many times.
Priest: My child, these are great sins. You must prepare yourself for the consequences.
Mary Lou: Father, there’s just one more thing.
Priest: What is it, my poor child?
Mary Lou: I loved every minute of it.



Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), one of the great unheralded horror sequels, is not particularly an original movie. It’s not even an actual sequel. The first Prom Night has nothing to do with this Canadian film. The “Prom Night II” moniker was slapped on by producers hoping to capitalize on the former’s box office success (it didn’t.) “This isn’t a sequel. Why do they call it a sequel? It’s not Prom Night 2; the characters are different, the stories are different,” said the film’s director. So, then, what is Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II?


If you’ve religiously watched horror films of the ‘80s and late ‘70s, you’ve basically seen Hello Mary Lou. There are homages on top of homages, so much so it verges on infringement. Remember the high school hallway scenes in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)? That’s this film stretched out to feature-length. Remember the gonzo sexuality and dreamlike-unbelievability of Carrie (1976)? Then you’ve watched a more respectable version of this. While Hello Mary Lou does indeed fit itself into the formulaic mold of the popular horror of the time, it also does something more—it embraces and defies it.


The titular villain is Mary Lou Maloney. She bursts into flames and dies in the opening after jilted boyfriend, Billy Nordham, throws a stink bomb at her just as she takes the stage as Prom Queen 1957. Flash forward to 1987 and Nordham (played by devilish ham Michael Ironside) is now the principal of the high school, and his son is going to prom with Vicki Carpenter (yes, Carpenter), who uncovers the unworn 1957 Prom Queen dress and tiara in the school basement and makes the mistake of taking it home with her. You can guess what happens next… The film similarly references The Exorcist (1973). “The body of Christ compels you,” a priest unironically yelps. This priest also used to have sex with Mary Lou Maloney.


There is surprisingly a lot of sex in Prom Night II. More precisely there is sexuality, and you see it more than fetishistic sex. Mary Lou seduces men in 1957, but in 1987, in another woman’s body and with greater freedom, her games of seduction turn to women—with the same raw fervor intact. “I have seen hardcore porn with less horniness than this movie,” said actress Charlize Theron, a noted fan.


For all of Mary Lou’s villainy, the character is framed yet as a “queer-coded sexual liberator, obsessed with camp pageantry and consequence-free lust,” as Leigh Monson puts it. “[Prom Night II] is a demonstration of how villains can be used to deliver subversive messaging to an audience willing to look outside the mainstream, and it’s a testament to how a queer feminist villain can speak to people that society deems as inherently villainous, even as the film she occupies nominally appeals to straight conservative values.”

Very recently, actually, the film has seen a moderate reappraisal. Over the past few years, popular podcasts like How Did This Get Made?, Horror Queers, You Are Good, and at least 5 others, have discussed the film, zeroing in on the queerness of Prom Night II and its penchant for horror film rule-breaking.


From the Teen Creeps retrospective: “You have this creepy male gaze, but it starts mutating. When you take that sexuality, and she starts to own that sexuality. […] Suddenly the female body isn’t this hot thing. It’s scary. She’s coming after me, and she’s not embarrassed of her body. She not only isn’t scared of it, she ravishes in it. She’s obsessed with it. And that’s weaponizing sexuality that is scary for heterosexual males.”

About as curious as Hello Mary Lou’s queerness is to me, I’m fascinated just as much with its very derivative nature. It steals so openly and frequently from the staples of the time (a more positive review nonetheless compared it to the previous year’s Blue Velvet) that it actually gains agency from this.


The boldfaced rip-off that is so much of this movie makes an outstanding case for imitations (repurposed and renewed) to be held as worthily as its originals. With its interplaying of familiar expectations and subversions, Prom Night II wouldn’t have had the same power if it didn’t plagiarize.


And they knew what they were doing: the film boasts characters named Carpenter, Craven, Browning, Hennenlotter, Waters, O’Bannon, King, and literally Eddie Wood. If the film didn’t fit itself into the mold to begin with, the film couldn’t have defied the mold in the shocking way that it did. The film wouldn’t even have had the same power if it wasn’t a cash-grabby sequel to the completely unrelated Prom Night 1...

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