Prom Night: JS Cordone [Screenwriter]

Prom Night, a duly dated slasher classic from 1980 and featuring teen dream scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, is being... hold onto your boogie shoes... remade.

That's right, folks: gone is the dangling disco ball, the poodle perms, Leslie Nielsen, and the plot for bloody revenge.

The reimagining, directed by Prison Break vet Nelson McCormack, and starring Brittany Snow as the cute blonde high schooler whose teacher (Johnathon Schaech) is obsessed with her, is a Prom Night in name only.

Read on, and find out why from the screenwriter, JS Cardone.

Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com: This version of Prom Night seems more topical than the first one, which was just a slasher flick.

JS Cordone: Yeah, you know, the old one was great for its time it sort of played off the whole mentality of the Halloween series when they were making all those. The studio really wanted it updated and so did I. They wanted something that was updated definitely and something that had a bit more adult twist to it while keeping as close to the original concepts of the film. I think, you know, yeah, the headlines just jumped out at us.

Q: Is that to say we're not going to see a killer in a mask?

JS Cordone: You're not going to see a killer in a mask, no.

Q: I heard, in spite of the movies you've done in the past and such, and you're not actually a fan of horror…

JS Cordone: I don't really consider myself one, you know. It's funny because of the years I've done horror films. Certainly The Forsaken and the slayer the stuff I did with Charlie Band in those years but I don't really consider myself… Even as a writer, even in The Covenants especially the original script of The Covenant, it was much more of a thriller. Like I said, I really don't consider the slasher film. We were trying to go back to those thrillers that were youth-oriented, more character driven like those in the 70s. I'm not comparing this picture to them, but I'm using it for an example like the original When A Stranger Calls or Klute. That's what we're trying to do because killings and stuff are… we have much more to tell. Which you are talking about the teacher concept [who] just becomes obsessed with this young woman to the point that he snaps, we wanted that particular aspect of the antagonist to be much more human than most pictures of the 80s in that genre and John Carpenter.

Q: I know Steve Susco was involved at one point, so did you do a complete rewrite when you came on board?

JS Cordone: Yeah, I think of it as two scripts actually previously done. For whatever reason, and I'm not really… I have been in this business a long time, at 23 scripts made into films, I certainly know the process. To be perfectly honest, I've never read the scripts so I have no idea where they were going and I purposely did not want to. I do know, I think that I've been told, that the approach those approaches both of whom were more along the lines of the original this one certainly is not to accept the fact that it takes place.

Q: So what's the connection to Jonathon that brought him onto this picture?

JS Cordone: I push, push, pushed. There are a lot of people that don't feel that, you know… I've known Johnathon sine The Doom Generation, a movie that he did with Greg Araki and I have always been a big fan of his. And mainly because we became friends, and I could see it, as a male, that he has that incredibly gorgeous veneer. But there is an evil Johnathon. I first used it in a film I did with him called The Forsaken.

We ran into trouble with Columbine happening, and we had to really cut back on that film. He understands my material, and he has a truly dark edge. But he's a very underrated actor and I sincerely think that this will bring him to the attention. This is the fourth film I've done with them.

Q: So, is the character likable at first?

JS Cordone: Yeah it is. Yeah, I went absolutely on the basis of… I can say this coming from an older man you know there is a fascination that men have with women when they are making that bridge between the innocence of being very young and into being a woman. A great piece of material that was written on that was of course Lolita, but to watch the protagonists and you watch them go through and you watch a man of that age do for this woman, for this young woman. So that was really a template fashioned for this character -that is, the obsession this incredible desire to get this middle-aged man to be part of this woman's coming-of-age which is really the whole metaphor of Prom Night. The whole prom was really designed as simply a backdrop for the series of killings.

This one, and I don't want to make a film pretentious, but this one I entered into it with the idea that the Prom Night became more of a metaphor for a coming-of-age obsession. Even if you look at the character, I don't know if you've read the script, or not, but if you look at the characters, the younger characters you know, that desires to be something of a prom queen… whatever that might be, their own natural elements that flows through when they make that transition. For me Jonathon really fit the bill because he has that incredible veneer like I said, that seems so innocent and alluring and desirable. We also use the Bundy concept a little bit, and all of you are much too young to remember that, but here was a guy who was just incredibly endearing. It was, to me, that whole fascination that you see he's the kind of guy that I've would want my daughter to go out with. Well, that's Johnathon.

Q: Do we get to see anything endearing about his character in the set-up?

JS Cordone: No. No, because it is called Prom Night. And it basically takes place on one night. We have done it with nuanced changes of dialogue and you see a certain scene, and we've also talked about it at length. In the early stages we see some things. We dropped in a moment that…

Johnathon is also very good at this… sadly I had to take it out. I remember a scene in The Forsaken I had to take out at the very end, because it transitioned into a legality aspect, but there was a pen… he plays a vampire in that, a vampire and he's challenged at the end by young woman, and he says 'there was a time I was a man'. And it was such a beautiful moment and he did so well because that's him remembering back to when he was Jonathon and I think, in answer to your question, ultimately you know, we don't have a lot of time…

Q: Coming into a genre that has been criticized and analyzed and worked over, how difficult is it to write scenes of suspense within a film like yours, especially after you have the original Prom Night to be held up to as a standard?

JS Cordone: It's very difficult to hold… The genre is becoming very difficult enough, because what has become popular now is torture movies at the present time, and you know, they're starting to fade now as the studios get back lash from them. And of course for every Hostel you have, for every Saw, you have you have 10 to 15 knock offs now that are not going to see the light of day because they're just not as original, or the time has passed for that kind of film. Writing suspense for this, writing suspense for any of these, is very difficult. We've done… I can't say we've nailed it either but hopefully Nelson can pull off this kind of [thing] in those moments and whatever he needs to do is called Prom Night, and we know we had a killer and he's gone and he's going to have, you know, there's going to be slaughter and it really comes up to nowadays more than anything. I mean, Hitchcock really achieved that and got into it, and we've tried to put that into as much of it as we possibly can. It's up to Nelson, now. He's the one that makes us look good.

Q: Did you mean to say that you're not doing a slasher movie? Did you accept the Prom Night name is going to draw in the slasher crowd, and how do you think that they will react to that?

JS Cordone: The core… I don't think they have seen this film unless their aficionados like you guys are, at the same… The Stepfather, the core audience knows the title, but they don't know that it's based on a true story. I don't know how that will actually play out. The first film works within its context but it was kind of a truncated story and we tried to go in a totally different direction with that. They had two converging storylines. One was the prom where Jamie Lee Curtis was not the most beautiful girl at the prom the most popular, and whatever, and then you have the killer. Our movie, as we came at it, was from the standpoint of having a dual storyline converging because that always really works well. But ours was the murders and then the police investigation which slasher films have not used in the past that's the reason I feel that we are kind of going in more of a Klute kind of approach. Again, I'm not comparing, because Klute was a brilliant film.

Q: Did you come here just to talk with press, or are you on the set all the time?

JS Cordone: I'm not on the set. I live in a ranch in Arizona so I'm there most of the time, but I'm here right now because I am an executive producer in this picture. It's in the early stages, so if there's anything that really needs to be changed, and the fact that we're just finishing up the developmental stuff, we're rolling around on the floor with the executives. Names that have come out are kind of interesting names. I don't know.

You know, in this day and age you have to have a name value the thing, I've felt. In The Stepfather, it was a fact was that Terry O'Quinn was not a name, but he did an awesome job. If you know that John Wilson story… he was a guy that basically waiting for his kids to come home from school, and shot to death one by one and lined them up because of this one it was really creepy. He was a monster.

Q: You said this wasn't like a normal slasher film, is he killing these just because they're in the way or…?

JS Cordone: Yes. That was the key that we wanted. This was not in the original one, it was revenge, and we didn't want to go that route. We wanted to go for psychological, basically. Absolutely. He just wants success in getting to her and it's by circumstance. He really wanted this right from the beginning. It's one of the reasons that I finally took the project on, was because it was more Hitchcock in that aspect. Someone just was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He doesn't really kill in anger, if you watch it. It's quick and its violent, but he doesn't really kill with anger because there's no reason to. He's just eliminating an obstacle.

Q: Did you know going in that it was going to be a PG-13 film?

JS Cordone: Yes. Oh, yeah. I know the studios are obsessed with this. It is disturbing to find out that the R is coming back, and all the kids under 15 sneak into them anyway. I went in and I had a mandate to do it as a PG-13. We are shooting some harder material, obviously, for DVD. They specifically want this because they are targeting a specific audience. We have found out that there are two basic audiences to horror: one is basically a cynical jaded psychotic audience who loves Hostel, and then there is a female audience that was never there before. But they discovered during When A Stranger Calls, or before that with Nicole Kidman's The Others, and then The Grudge, a really strong female horror audience that was never there before.

But what they want, God love them, which all females do, is something intelligent as opposed to just something blindly archaic and violent. That is where we kind of took our cues for this particular picture. I'm not saying that this is only a chick flick because it's not, but there is a great female audience and you have to give them something like The Grudge did, like The Others. You have to give them some depth and texture, too.

Q: I'm sure that's part of the thing that teenager and their prom dresses…

JS Cordone: You mean with somebody my age, as old as I am, [can I write] that?

Q: A guy.

JS Cordone: I went to prom. I was not in a gown. You know, it's an interesting question because I think that if you're a writer you write to… come from some sort of background. If you're not observant then you should not be a writer at all. I was at prom and it might have been a thousand years ago, but in essence it's no different, youth is youth. We have different access to information, and have different hair but we all have the same… The youth today has the exact same desires and wants and needs that we did back in prehistoric times.

Q: Like The Slayer? I love the pitchfork.

JS Cordone: You know it's funny Roger Corman once told me it was the best death scene ever put on film. I don't think I would go that far, Roger is a was either drinking or… It was a great thing, but you know, Robert Burns did that. I said I would like to do a scene in which a woman gets a pitchfork to the back but I'm shooting from the front. It comes up through the front and I don't want to do a cover up… and by the way that was my wife, Carol…. I said, can it can be done? He goes yeah, you could really kill her. I said well how could we actually really do this? And so we played around with it for a long period of time and then finally we both came to the realization that the camera sees myopically.

So if you shoot almost dead-on the depth of perception...  what Carol was really wearing in that it's an apparatus that comes this far out from the chest, and they made a false because sadly to say, it was a very gratuitous scene to because she was in the rain and she just had a blouse on and we wanted the picture you can see the breasts and nipples which made it even harder but he built that whole thing. When we saw it on film, we just died. We were in heaven because no one had ever done that and no one's ever done that since that since.

We did toy around with it but they really wanted to keep this very, very simple and because it is PG-13. We want to keep the killings very simple because of the fact, as I just mentioned a moment ago, because he's not driven by a vendetta or whatever, he's not really premeditating these murders or anything like that. And we certainly didn't want to go into the direction that… and it was great the first time, but we didn't want to go into the set piece killing, or how do we outdo ourselves. We just really wanted to keep this relatively simple and drive it on the old… shouldn't use the word old… a great sort of narrative that really could be from the 70s when you go back to what it really looks like.

I do think as smart as you get with a thriller, the times I've talked to the director with this, with Nelson, you know, he's a really good sense of the thrill aspect of this picture as opposed to just… I was really fascinated with that from the very beginning because Nelson knew where I was going with this. And he understood that this picture is… it makes it and breaks itself on the suspense as opposed to the outcome, and I do I think the thriller is definitely on its way back from, you know, how many times can you torture a woman? And I'm not putting those films down, but at some point in time it becomes redundant. I've always just be a big fan of the thriller, the horror thriller, it is really a mainstay. [I'm a fan] of the original Psycho. That is a horror thriller, and it delivers on every level that a horror film should.

[End]