This ‘Prom Night’ Star Co-Wrote The Original ‘Twister’
I love Paul Lynch’s Prom Night. Like a lot of 90s babies, I watched it for the first time because of Scream. I’d known Jamie Lee Curtis from Halloween and, curiously, A Fish Called Wanda (kids hyper-fixate on weird movies!), but I’d seen little of her other horror work. When Randy Meeks notes how the Woodsboro police would better understand the Ghostface killings if they’d simply watch Prom Night, well, I didn’t understand. So I watched it. And I loved it. It’s goofy, totally 80s, and features one of my favorite all-time slasher chase scenes with Anne-Marie Martin’s (credited as Eddie Benton) Wendy. What you might not know is that Martin, during her marriage to seminal genre writer Michael Crichton, co-wrote the 1996 blockbuster Twister.
Hot take, or maybe not, but Wendy isn’t the villain of Prom Night—Curtis’ Kim is. Yes, Wendy is a bully, but she’s clearly struggling, and Kim takes inordinate glee in sticking it to Wendy time and time again. Miserable at the titular prom, Wendy absconds to the bathroom to touch up her makeup (and recover from witnessing an incredulously extended choreographed dance sequence, probably). As she’s finishing, the killer appears, brandishing an axe. He chases her around the school for nearly eight minutes before her death. It’s a classic slasher chase.
Check it out below:
It wasn’t until my recent rewatch of Twister in anticipation for Twisters that I caught Martins’ writing credit. As someone who has endured an F5 tornado before—though it’s just come to my attention it was downgraded to an F4—Twister is basically a horror movie. It’s a ton of fun, the pinnacle of effects-driven 1990s blockbusters, but that opening scene especially strikes terror into my heart like few others. If you’ve heard an earnest tornado siren before, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
The extent of Martins’ input on the screenplay remains unknown, but I have little doubt some of its best elements—namely Helen Hunt’s Jo Harding—were distinctly hers. While the script underwent several rewrites after its sale, it’s still a fun bit of horror history. Wendy from Prom Night helped write Twister. I mean, how cool is that?
What do you think? Did you already know that? Do you think Twister is a horror movie? Sound off on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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