While vegetating in my basement after work (not as creepy as that might sound), I stumbled across a trailer for the upcoming film Happy Death Day. I saw the poster in my local theater, but I had nothing to go on outside of that, plus I was more excited by the Kingman: The Golden Circle poster next to it. After seeing the first full trailer, I can say I am genuinely intrigued.
I imagine the pitch for the film was: “It’ll be like Groundhog’s Day, but for murder!” I love the concept and the movie actually seems to give us a mystery element to go along with the slasher horror. With a mystery element in the Groundhog’s Day template, we will see plenty of fun trial and error by our lead that could lead to some interesting scenarios as the day starts over. Something small I noticed about the trailer was that the jump scares don’t seem to have a cacophony of horrific sounds in the background, so maybe the jump scares won’t be as bad as they are in other horror films.
I’m really hopeful that this could be a sleeper horror hit. It’s got a great concept and even seems like it’ll have some fun with it as alluded to by the guy helping our lead saying that she basically has unlimited lives. This means we can see a lot of death, but also get clues to piece together the case every time she’s killed.
Happy Death Day joins another interesting non-franchise horror movie, American Satan, as a Friday, October 13th release.
Hold Your Applause 