Freaky

Freaky is a perfectly effective horror spoof that left me thinking about why horror movies were so popular in the 80s. It’s not because people were really that into seeing teenagers getting horribly murdered, or even because there was some anti-sexual undercurrent in 80s life which meant that English-speaking societies wanted to send a message that anyone who had illicit sex would die horribly. I appreciate that if anyone was reading this, they’d be jumping up and down to point out all the semiotics studies which correlate teen slasher movies to the AIDS pandemic and various other moral panics. Yeah, sure, right. Might even be true, for semiotic values of true. It would, perhaps, have had something to do with why some people bought some tickets. But.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Movies get made and distributed for money. So if you want to understand why Hollywood does something, look at the margins. Slasher movies are just efficient.

Watching someone do a very expert parody of a slasher movie hammered the point home for me. Slasher movies are cheap to make. They have small casts, shot in easily controlled environments, doing essentially mundane things. At intervals, someone dies horribly. Which is a little expensive, but it’s usually very controllable and involves practical effects that have been around for years. There’s nothing that’s hard or expensive to do; no big crowd scenes, no car chases, no explosions. Just a small group of kids being whittled down by a looming bad guy who’s got enough of a drop on them that most of the kills don’t even require fight choreography. Film-making doesn’t get much cheaper than this. No wonder they made so many of them in the 80s. Anything else would have cost more.

Do not get me wrong. It wasn’t that Freaky bored me so much I got to thinking about other things like the economics of movie making. It was that watching its own efficiency and appreciating it for what it was got me thinking about how efficient the originals were.

Above all and anything else, Freaky is well scripted. I don’t mean that it’s got good dialogue, although it does have that going for it. I mean that the plotting is clever.

Here’s the basic plot-line; your stereotypical slasher movie goon unintentionally swaps bodies with one of his teen girl victims. That’s it. Teen girl stuck in the body of a killer goon, trying to figure out how to get her body and her life back, goon stuck in the body of a girl and trying to figure out how many people he can kill at homecoming weekend.

The cleverness in the plotting is that this is a comedy, more or less, so there has to be the prospect of a happy ending, more or less. For that to work, everything that happens has to be plausibly attributable to the goon so that if the teen ever gets her body back, she’s not going to be spending the rest of her life in jail anyway. Freaky pulls this off so well that you can see them doing it and enjoy the thought that went into it. The plot is put together just so; it’s got all the beats and fakeouts of the originals, tweaked just enough both for comedy and the sensibilities of a more critical era, but like all good homages, it also tells a satisfying story.

For any of this to work, two things have to happen. One is that you’ve got to spend enough time with the larger cast that when they start getting murdered it feels like it matters. Which is one of those places where slasher movies save money; there’s lots of stuff which just establishes character - or the lack of it - and which is really cheap to film

The other is that your two leads need to sell the body switch. I’d had my doubts about Vince Vaughan convincing me that he was a teenage girl trapped in a lumbering body, but he did better than I expected. Kathryn Newton actually does the real groundwork as Millie, because by the time the swap happens, we’ve got to know Millie and we’re primed for what Vince is going to do to try to imitate her. And Millie’s been so beaten down as herself that when she starts gooning it up the audience is pretty much rooting for her to kill some dudes in her cool red leather jacket. 

All in all, it’s a lot more fun than a movie ought to be where people get skewered, sawn in half the long way, flash-frozen, beaten to death with toilet seats and choked by having a champagne bottle hammered down their throats. Not all of them have that shit coming to them either. Some of the fun is Millie in the Butcher’s body enjoying the idea of having strength on her side for once in her life. Some of it is the Butcher in Millie’s body finding out how hard it is to murder people when you’re only five foot four and flimsy. As I say, a lot of the rest of it is watching the setups which mean that when the cops are trying to make sense of this, the Butcher will be more in the frame than Millie. The scripting and plotting are nimble enough that none of that seems forced. I always like good writing.

But the simple question about this, if you’re wondering if you’re going to like it, is this. You’ll know in the first five seconds, when a huge smash title comes up saying just “Wednesday, the 11th”. If that makes you burst out laughing, you’re going to have a great time.