Happy Death Day released in 2017 from Blumhouse Productions, and reinvigorated not only the slasher genre, but showed just how broad a genre horror can be by existing in so many different sub-genres, all at once.
When Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up on her birthday, she quickly discovers that she’s living a very macabre time loop when a killer in a baby mask - her University’s mascot - keeps tracking her down and killing her over and over again. At first, Tree is determined to try to stop her death from happening, but after a while, she becomes fixated on unmasking the killer instead, as she seems doomed to repeat the day until she can solve her own murder. It’s very much like Halloween meets Groundhog Day, and doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly scary based on the concept alone to more diehard fans, but director Christopher Landon managed to capitalize on many familiar and beloved slasher tropes while working with Scott Lobdell’s incredible script.
Scott Lobdell, who got his start writing for Marvel comics, had a clear hand in allowing Happy Death Day to traverse genre so skillfully, as this is something that often happens with comic properties. Even in 2020, there are major Marvel franchises, such as X-Men, getting ready to crossover directly into horror with The New Mutants, and the concept of dark superheroes and anti-heroes has been explored many times before. So, for them, it’s nothing new - yet, for horror, it was groundbreaking.
How Happy Death Day Crosses Into So Many Different Genres
Happy Death Day traverses several sub-genres all at once: it’s distinctly horror through its slasher vibes and manages some tight scares in spite of its PG-13 rating. Beyond that, it’s comedy, with Tree’s dark sarcasm that is a true testament to her tenacity. However, Lobdell considers the film to be just as much horror as it is science fiction, which became even more apparent in its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U. In a 2019 interview, Lobdell said, “… I think the audience is always ready for a change”. Beyond that, Lobdell spoke about how change and rebranding can be good, explaining how networks like HBO have taken huge risks with their content that paid off significantly. In a way, Happy Death Day managed that for Blumhouse; it took a micro budget of only $4.8 million and turned it into $125.5 million worldwide.
Landon and Lobdell, by investing in their incredible final girl who is very much a champion for a new generation of horror fans, took a beloved type of horror, shook off the stale excess and combined it in ways that they likely had been told they couldn’t. However, horror has a reputation for blending in such a way that it proves it can belong anywhere. Ridley Scott combined classic science fiction elements with pure, undiluted horror with Alien in 1979; it is now revered as one of the most iconic horror films of all time, and it’s a crossover movie. Regarding the sequel, Landon spoke with Collider about his thoughts that the film’s science fiction elements really changed its trajectory. Said Landon, “Once the idea of Sissy, the device, once I kind of arrived at that, that’s when I really felt like I had gas in the tank because I knew that I could play with sort of this notion of inter-dimensional time jumping”.
While the sequel was criticized for gearing too far away from its horror base at times, the fact that horror continues to be smart, forward-thinking, and unafraid to take risks and blend genres means that there will always be new, interesting content moving forward. While Happy Death Day doesn’t seem like it will continue into a third movie, the first two broke the mold and turned Blumhouse into a major contender within the genre film space, proving that budget - and genre - mean little when it comes to entertaining horror fans.
Next: Happy Death Day’s Sci-Fi Twist Hurts The Slasher Sequel
