This low-budget, tongue-in-cheek horror film of the slasher genre -- which had recently been popularized by Halloween (1978) -- stars that film's lead, Jamie Lee Curtis, as Kim Hammond, a prom queen who becomes a scream queen. Six years ago, a little girl was taunted by four classmates and fell to her death from an abandoned schoolhouse. The quartet of kids promised to keep their complicity in the accident a secret. Now it's their prom night and they've got the jitters because they have recently been receiving phone calls and notes from an ominous, unknown individual claiming to have witnessed the girl's death and vowing revenge. At the prom, the four become fatal victims one by one of a mysterious, axe-wielding, masked, and hooded stalker. The many possibilities of the murderer's identity include Kim, who is the little dead girl's sister, her school-principal father (Leslie Nielsen), or her disc-jockey brother, Alex (Michael Tough).