The Brady Bunch's Eve Plumb Nearly Starred In This Cult Slasher Movie From 1980

After the massive box office success of 1978's "Halloween," profit-hungry studios and producers were keen to capitalize on the newfound demand for slashers. The formula seemed simple enough: create a killer who's holding a grudge, or an obsession of some sort, and set them loose on a bunch of unsuspecting kids. As a result, in 1980, these exploitative, copycat movies began hitting theaters at a ferocious rate, including, and perhaps most notably, former children's movie director Sean S. Cunningham's "Friday the 13th" (much to the chagrin of critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert).

As writers and directors scrambled to establish memorable killers around whom they could build out franchises, one actor achieved stardom by willingly playing the victim. You'd think Jamie Lee Curtis — who, as the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, was showbiz royalty — would've been eager to take on serious roles after playing the final girl and Michael Myer's sister (?) Laurie Strode in "Halloween." Nope! She turned around and made three more horror films in 1980 ("The Fog," "Prom Night," and "Terror Train"), two of which were slasher flicks. Then, the following year, she starred in two more slashers ("Halloween II" and the superb "Roadgames") before finally making a comedy in 1983 ("Trading Places").

Though Curtis has said she "never calculated doing horror films," according to "Prom Night" director Paul Lynch and producer Peter Simpson, she actively sought out the role of final girl Kim Hammond. In doing so, she elbowed out Eve Plumb, aka. Jan Brady from "The Brady Bunch," who'd interviewed for the part and was favored by both Lynch and Simpson. And even though Simpson felt Curtis was wrong for the role, he couldn't turn down the star of "Halloween."

In a 2004 interview with The Terror Trap, Peter Simpson revealed that he and Paul Lynch interviewed, but did not screen test, Eve Plumb for the role of Kim. "We were looking for the ultimate virgin [...] the ultimate victim," Simpson explained. Then, Jamie Lee Curtis expressed interest and knocked everyone's socks off. "Jamie Lee comes into the office and puts her feet on your desk," as Simpson put it.

"She sells herself," Lynch recalled in "The Horrors of Hamilton High: The Making of 'Prom Night.'" "She's read the script [...] she sells herself. And she sold herself to Peter. After that, [Plumb] was gone."

For Curtis, chasing available work was important because, after getting fired from the television series "Operation Petticoat," she knew how fickle the industry could be. As she once told ET:

"[B]eing young and an actress and female, you don't have that luxury of being able to pick the sort of rainbow of roles. [...] and be able to be completely diverse and show every angle and every color that you have. You take the jobs that come along and are lucky that you get them."

Upon learning she'd been passed over, one can imagine Plumb exclaiming, "Jamie, Jamie, Jamie!!!" That said, "Prom Night" probably wouldn't have launched her movie career. The film was only a modest financial success that got viciously negative reviews. (Roger Ebert called it "execrable.") Meanwhile, Plumb continued to work fairly steadily on television (appearing in many "The Brady Bunch" reunions and spin-offs) and did make an impression in theaters by appearing in films like Keenan Ivory Wayans' "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," Gregg Araki's "Nowhere," and Jeremy Saulnier's "Blue Ruin." This "Prom Night" was best left unattended.