Punxsutawney Kill
Happy DeatH Day I Let’s do the time loop agaaaaaaiiin! (And agaaaaiin…)
This year’s big Halloween horror, Happy Death Day, sees sorority girl Tree (Jessica Rothe) butchered on her birthday, only to relive the same 24 hours over and over until she’s solved her own murder. Ever since the trailer dropped, there’s only been one reaction – it’s Groundhog Day, but scary.
So, does director/co-writer Christopher Landon (Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse) get déjà vu? “I’ve seen the reaction and that is the truth! This is very much our horror homage to Groundhog Day. There’s a scene in the movie where we directly reference it.”
Ever since Tom Cruise lived and died repeatedly in Edge Of Tomorrow, it was inevitable that the slasher movie would be fed into a time loop. The challenge, Landon notes, is “the risk of running into monotony. It’s the repetition that can kill you – pun intended!”
To keep things fresh, Landon returned to Hollywood’s hottest horror studio – and his old Paranormal Activity colleagues – Blumhouse. “Jason Blum read the script and called me right away and said, ‘We’re making this,
it’s done,’ Landon reveals. We literally went straight into production.”
The director is full of praise for how “Blumhouse really allow a filmmaker to make the movie that they want to make. They trust the filmmakers that they hire. That’s the ‘secret sauce’ they have – trust.”
The recipe isn’t so hush-hush any more. Blumhouse’s commitment to smart, original scares has already paid off in 2017 with Get Out, and
Split in 2016. But Happy Death
Day has another secret weapon – Rothe, last seen as one of Emma Stone’s flatmates in La La Land.
“Jessica is in every scene of the movie and she’s wearing a lot of emotional hats. She has to be smart and clever, terrified and vulnerable and funny. She’s a really fearless actor and I have no doubt in my mind she’s going to be a movie star,” gushes Landon.
Beyond fellow time-loopers Cruise and Bill Murray, a key influence on Rothe’s performance is fellow birthday girl Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. “The tone of the movie is Wes Craven meets John Hughes,” explains Landon. “To meld those sensibilities and put them into one film is really exciting and fun for me.
With its masked killer, comparisons to Scream are also unavoidable, especially as Landon admits “the guy who created the Scream mask also helped create our mask”. The creepy/ funny ‘Babyface’ – actually the mascot for (fictional) Bayfield University – looks set to become a new horror icon.
“I kept coming back to this idea of a big baby,” says Landon. “It felt unique and fun and would grab people right away. The first time I got the mask I put it on and snuck into our line producer’s office. He turned around and screamed and I was like, ‘OK, this works!’” Be ready to cry like a baby,
again and again, this Halloween.
ETA | 20 OcTObEr / HAppy DEATH DAy OpEns THis AuTumn.