Films on September 12, 1980. By the end of its theatrical run, Prom Night grossed a total of $14.8 million at the U.S. box office. It earned an additional $6 million in rentals during its home video release. Critical response Contemporaneous Upon release in 1980, Prom Night received mostly negative reviews from critics, with frequent comparisons to Halloween (1978) and Carrie (1976). Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune referred to the film as a "watered-down cross between Carrie and Halloween", though he noted it was "not as violent as one might expect, based on those frightening ads of a masked man holding a phallic knife... You would think that Prom Night was another one of those hideous attacks-on-promiscuous-women pictures. It's not. Gender makes no difference in this routine revenge film." The film's advertising campaign was criticized by Siskel and Roger Ebert in a September 18, 1980 episode of Sneak Previews, cited among a glut of other violent slasher films released the same year that thematized "Women in Danger." Siskel and Ebert used the episode to criticize the advertising campaigns for several films, including Don't Answer the Phone, Hell Night and Prom Night: "[These] ads have been saturating television for the past two years," said Ebert, "and the summer and fall of 1980 are the worst yet." Variety noted that the film "[borrows] shamelessly from Carrie and any number of gruesome exploitationers pic [from a story by Robert Gunza (sic) Jr.] manages to score a few horrific points amid a number of sagging moments." Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave the film a middling review, writing: "Prom Night, the Canadian film that opened yesterday at the Loews State 2 and other theaters, is a comparatively genteel hybrid, part shock melodrama, like Halloween, and part mystery, though it's less a whodunit than a who's-doing-it." He also praised the film's restrained violence, writing that director Lynch "chooses to underplay the bloody spectacle. This isn't to say that there aren't some sticky moments, including one not especially convincing beheading, but that more often than not the camera cuts away, or the screen goes discreetly gray, before the audience is drenched in gore. This may or may not be the reason that the audience with which I saw the film yesterday booed at the end." Jack Mathews of the Detroit Free Press also drew comparisons to Halloween and Carrie, though deeming it "not