Original subtitles

- This is Halloween, the night when all the creepy

things are supposed to stalk the earth.

- Halloween and horror films, to me, go hand in hand.

They are one, they are married,

they are united and that's it.

- The last thing in the world I thought I would do

is another "Halloween" movie.

- Happy Halloween, Michael.

- Every major holiday that we celebrate...

Has some sort of bloodshed underneath it.

[dramatic music]

- We love the holidays, but we dread the holidays.

- Happy Thanksgiving, Grandma.

- Holidays are exhausting.

[tense music]

- It's Christmas I hate most.

- So there's something very forbidden and cathartic

about watching everybody get chopped up.

- Merry Christmas.

- All holidays tend to feel like bull[bleep] after a while.

- Ah!

- To take it over and to completely

desecrate it with a horror movie...

- Happy Father's Day.

- ...is always kind of nice.

- Punish! - No!

[eerie music]

♪

- [screams]

- Holidays are usually the time we get

together with our families.

- Tra la la la la!

- For better...

- Bless you heart, I was afraid you weren't coming.

- Or worse.

- Grandpa is nothing but a crazy old fool.

- But even if you get along with your relatives,

holidays can be stressful.

[loud bang] - Ah!

- Passive aggressive behavior.

- Careful, kids, remember that your Aunt Sarah

likes everything to be clean and perfect and that's why

she makes so much food that you can't pronounce.

- Forced cheerfulness.

♪ Season to be jolly

- Heavy drinking.

- Where's the nog, I need to get merry.

- They're typical parts of the holiday experience.

All that tension needs to be released.

Enter the holiday horror film...

Bringing our wildest

homicidal holiday fantasies to life.

- It's juxtaposing what gives us great comfort

with something that terrorizes us.

- Ah!

It's a very simple equation...

♪ Happy birthday

- That is effectively executed in many films.

♪ To me

- Trick or treat!

- For horror fans, Halloween is the happiest

holiday of the year, but it wasn't until 1978 that

filmmakers combined its inherent spookiness

with graphic murders.

John Carpenter's "Halloween"

set the standard for slasher films.

It's been imitated many times, but rarely equaled.

"Halloween's" success kicked off a wave of the festive

fright films that continues to this day.

Of course, after "Halloween," people

started realizing that it was a pretty good

gimmick to market a horror movie around a holiday.

[eerie music]

- Like what's Valentine's Day?

Okay, let's do "My Bloody Valentine."

There's New Year's Eve, let's just do "New Year's Evil."

- Happy New Year!

- Ahhh!

- Holiday horror never went away,

but it returned to center stage with the revival

of the franchise that started it all.

"Halloween," 2018, was a massive hit that

brought Jamie Lee Curtis back to the role that

made her a star.

What was it like playing Laurie Strode 40 years later?

- Well, it was just--it honored all of it, it honored

the trauma, it honored the thing that I've always wondered about

about these movies, which is what happens to these people.

There's a lot of stuff that happens, but then what

happens to the people that survived afterwards?

- David Gordon Green's reboot made the bold choice

of ignoring all nine

"Halloween" sequels and remakes.

- What made the first film scary, and what made

Michael Myers scary, you didn't know who he was.

All you knew is he killed his sister, you don't know why.

You know, let's go back to that pure dread that came

with Halloween and let's go back

to that singular strong final girl

that took him on, and let's see what she's like 40 years

later, and she's, you know, she's--she's kinda messed up.

- From a clinical perspective, Doctor, would you say

that Laurie strode has lost her [bleep]ing marbles?

- There are many ways for tragedy

and violence to change a victim.

- She's still very deeply affected by what happened,

but she's also a survivor and she's ready for anything.

- Laurie lives in the woods, she is a sure shot,

she practices every day on these dummies, and she's

an end of days prepper, ready for Michael Myers

because she knows Michael's gonna come back.

Sometime someplace, she will be prepared.

- Girl is as hard as can be.

The trauma of what she went through,

you see it in her life down to the way she built her house.

Everything is wrapped up.

This safety and the way that she interacts with

her daughter, and her daughter's daughter.

- If the way I raised your mother means that she

hates me, but that she's prepared

for the horrors of this world, then...

I can live with that.

- We didn't see that journey fully, but we know it.

- The opening sequences

with Michael Myers in the insane asylum.

- There he is.

- Go right there with some of the most

chilling stuff in any Halloween picture ever.

- It is so beautiful, the checkerboard floor,

those other people out on the yard,

that strange man having a fit, the dog barking.

- I love the fact they brought back Nick Castle,

the original actor to play The Shape in the asylum

scenes at the start, I thought that was really great.

- He's being transferred and, of course, he commandeers

the bus through acts of incredible violence, and...

- He gets out.

- So now you've set up a woman who's been

waiting and he comes back.

[eerie music swells]

[boot thuds]

- This movie finally gave us that moment

of Michael Myers going around on Halloween,

walking around the neighborhood,

children bumping into him.

Just walking through the house.

[eerie music]

[woman gasps]

- Spectacular--it's spectacular.

- After considerable mayhem, Laurie, her daughter,

and her granddaughter have a final showdown

with the unstoppable fiend.

- Michael's here, get downstairs.

Go, baby, go!

- Michael seems certain to win, but this is a film

about a woman who turns the tables on her abuser.

[gunshot blasts]

- She successfully traps him...

[gate slams]

- And, actually, has trained her

daughter to do so as well, which I thought was really cool

because she plays the damsel in distress

to the last moment.

- I can't do it!

Gotcha.

[gunshot blasts]

[thud]

- Happy Halloween, Michael.

- Were you surprised that it resonated the way it did,

that it was such a cultural milestone?

- As we were launching the 2018 movie,

it was right in the center of the Me Too movement,

and so women taking power and speaking truth to power,

voicing their experiences as trauma victims, was echoing all

over the world when we released that movie, a movie about

a woman taking power from her trauma against her oppressor.

- Goodbye, Michael.

- So I think there was this spectacular

confluence of life and evolution of women,

and Laurie Strode coming to grips with Michael Myers.

- Today, horror and holidays go hand in hand,

but it wasn't always that way.

In 1974, one movie started it all.

- Hello?

[man screaming]

- Hello?

[man screaming]

♪

- Christmas, it's the most wonderful time of the year.

- Good morning, Merry Christmas.

[laughter]

- A time of joy, unmarred by the dark side of life.

[dramatic musical sting]

- So they say.

- People forget that Christmas used to be

a very spooky holiday, that people used to get

together and tell ghost stories on Christmas.

Only recently, over the last few decades, has it been turned

into this very glossy, shiny, family oriented event.

- So, it should not have come as a surprise when

Bob Clark Combined Christmas with graphic murders

and launched a new style of horror.

[glass shattering]

- I think Bob Clark's "Black Christmas"

is ground zero for holiday horror.

I mean, Bob Clark was a genius,

the guy created, of course, "Deathdream,"

"Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things."

He takes the POV from Mario Bava's "Bay of Blood,"

he applies the holiday to it, basically

starts a slasher film with "Black Christmas."

- On a snowy Christmas Eve, a serial killer breaks

into the attic of a sorority house.

He terrorizes the women downstairs

with disturbing phone calls.

[creepy laughter on phone]

- They're so raw, those phone calls are so intense.

- Let me lick your pretty, pink, [bleep].

- That's so insane, I don't even feel like

anyone would put that in a movie now.

- Pretty, pink, [bleep].

- Even though I feel like, as a society,

we've gotten more vulgar, those phone calls just still shock.

- I'm going to kill you.

- Then he murders them one by one.

- Ahhh!

- And that is where a lot of the slashers

take their root, and the idea that we can do

it at Christmas time just brings this whole 'nother level to it.

[carollers singing]

- It makes it all shiny, and beautiful, and pretty,

and then the blood feels that much more bloody.

[dramatic music]

- [giggles]

- Bob Clark knows that to make us fear for the characters,

we have to care about them first.

- I thought the characters felt so real, and that was my

favorite thing about it, just, it felt like a real group

of friends, enemies, you know, just a real group of women.

- Oh, come on, this is a sorority house, not a convent.

- Margot Kidder, and Keir Dullea,

and Olivia Hussey and Andrea Martin,

the cast really made that movie something really special.

- Oh, why don't you go find a wall socket

and stick your tongue in it, that'll give you a charge.

- As her friends disappear, the film's heroine, Jess,

grapples with her decision to have an abortion.

- You don't want it.

- No.

- It's a bold plotline for a film made the year after

Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling

protecting a woman's right to choose.

By making her disapproving boyfriend a suspect...

- Peter, Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.

- The abortion debate becomes part of the murder mystery.

- You selfish bitch.

You're talking about killing our baby as though

you were having a wart removed.

- Now can you see why I didn't want to tell you?

- And you're like, "Oh my god, her boyfriend is now

stalking and killing her because she wouldn't

have his baby..."

[glass shatters]

- ...because she feels like she's too

young and she wants to finish college.

- Retrospectively, we look at "Black Christmas"

and it's very progressive.

- You can't ask me to drop everything I've been working

for and give up all my ambitions because your plans have changed.

- There's a lot going on with these characters that is

reflective of what was happening

in the early '70s for women.

- Clark's direction was just as forward thinking.

- Hey!

- Introducing many of the stylistic

tropes that define the slasher genre,

baiting the audience with a whodunit mystery.

- You think it's my fault, don't you?

- Staging a series of brutal murders,

each more outlandish than the last.

[chainsaw rumbling] - Ahhhh!

- And having the killer hide inside

the house with his victims.

[phone ringing]

- Taunting them by telephone.

- The caller is in the house,

the calls are coming from the house.

[dramatic music]

- And this is kind of one of the first great examples

of the subjective camera in a slasher movie.

But it's something that critics jumped on later on, in "Friday

the 13th," they really attacked it because they were saying,

"Oh, it's putting you in the killer's point of view,

it's attacking women, and it's misogynist."

No, at least in the beginning, that's not the point.

The point is, you never see the face,

that's what's so scary.

You have no idea what this guy

looks like, all you see is his eye.

[dramatic musical sting]

- Jess is the only survivor of the massacre,

making her one of the first final girls in horror.

She confronts her boyfriend and kills him.

But unlike "Halloween" and other slashers to come,

there's no cathartic victory.

The police, assuming the murders are over,

leave her asleep in the house, then the phone rings.

[phone ringing]

- Because her boyfriend was not the killer,

and the cops are wrong, and they didn't get him, and now

she's probably going to die because of their incompetence.

[phone ringing]

[eerie music]

- And it's written that way deliberately to infuriate us.

We're supposed to see how society leaves

this woman vulnerable.

[phone ringing]

- As those credits are rolling and you just hear

that phone ringing, and ringing, and ringing,

it's supposed to leave you uneasy,

like even after the credits stop, you know, you're like,

"Okay, am I safe now?"

You know, and you don't know.

- And we weren't safe because "Black Christmas"

led to "Halloween" and the slasher glut of the 80s.

- Ahhh!

- Agghh!

- Ahh!

- Perhaps in penance, the next holiday film

Bob Clark directed was "A Christmas Story,"

a film as warm and fuzzy as "Black Christmas" is cold

and creepy, but even that film featured a bad Santa.

- Ho, ho, ho.

- Ahhh!

- Sinister Santas were soon to become fixtures

in the landscape of holiday horror.

- Naughty!

[dramatic music]

- Chris Kringle, Father Christmas, Saint Nick,

Santa Claus, we know him by many names.

He's a jolly old elf.

- Merry Christmas!

- But in horror, even Santa has a dark side.

- If you think about Santa Claus,

the whole thing is creepy.

There's a man coming into your house, down your chimney

to bring you gifts, and you feed him, it's low-key grooming.

- I want you to remember to stay good boys and girls.

Now if you do this, I'll make sure you get

good presents from me every year.

- It's weird.

- Sinister Santas have

popped up in movies for decades.

- Ahh!

- The most notorious remains "Silent Night, Deadly Night"

from 1984.

- If you've seen all the slashers,

you're a little taken aback by "Silent Night, Deadly Night."

- Ahh!

- The idea of putting on a Santa Claus suit and going

out and killing, taking horror to that level, it's brutal.

- The movie begins as young Billy watches a man

dressed as Santa Claus murder his parents.

- No! No!

[tires squealing]

[gunshots]

- No!

- Billy grows up and gets a job at a toy store.

When he's forced to dress as Santa Claus for Christmas,

he has a psychotic break.

- You remember what Santa Claus does on Christmas Eve, don't ya?

- Where are ya, you little bastard?!

- Yeah, I know what he does.

- He starts killing everyone he deems naughty.

- Punish.

[glass shatters]

Punish!

Punish. - Ahhh!

- People who don't understand the concept of slasher movies,

to them, it's all violent porno, as far as they're concerned,

because they just don't get it, and most of the films that they

made a big deal about, I wish they were closer to what

they think they were, I wish they were that strong.

- Mm-hmm. - "Silent Night, Deadly Night"

is [bleep]ed up for a horror film fan.

[eerie piano music]

- The film's desecration of Christmas caused a scandal.

Protests by angry parents and religious groups led

to the film being pulled

from theaters after only a week.

But the figure of a sinister Santa

has been around for centuries.

Europeans grow up haunted by stories of Krampus,

St. Nick's sinister doppelganger.

The film "Krampus" brought him to suburban

America and satirized

the commercialization of Christmas.

- I was getting a little bit more cynical

about the holidays,

and I think it was an effort to sort of try and turn the tide

inside of myself and rediscover the magic of Christmas,

even if it was through a horror story.

- "Krampus" begins like a family relationship comedy.

- Merry Christmas!

- Move it, we don't have to keep the traffic jam going now.

- Oh, let me help you.

[thud]

- Two families are getting together for Christmas.

They're very different types of families.

- Well, I just thought you guys might like a break

from macaroni and cheese with hotdogs.

- Yeah, okay.

- They don't necessarily get along and they don't

share a lot of the same worldviews.

- Honey, we said no gun talk at the dinner table.

- This family needs a little gun talk whether

it's at the dinner table or anywhere else.

- I think it was really fun that the family was

kind of dysfunctional 'cause it kind of reminded

me of every Christmas dinner out there where

you invite the cousins you don't like...

- [belches]

- The uncle you never see.

- Ha ha, that's my boy!

- It sure is.

- Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner,

the late great Conchata Ferrell.

- Looks like Martha Stewart threw up in here.

- Allison Tolman, these are all actors that you almost

would expect to see in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation"

or something like that.

- The center of the story is young Max, played by

Emjay Anthony, who is struggling

not to lose faith in Christmas.

- He's trying to desperately hold on to the family.

He misses his big sister, you know,

he wants to actually have good things happen for his family.

- Wait, mom, aren't we gonna watch Charlie Brown?

- And the second he gives up...

- I just wanted to Christmas to be like it used to be,

but forget it, I hate Christmas, I hate all of you.

- The Krampus is like, "Yep, you messed up now."

- Krampus is a shadow of St. Nicholas.

He represents everything that Santa Claus isn't and he's

dispatched to punish non-believers on the holiday.

- And so, power goes out, then their daughter goes

to see her boyfriend, now she's missing.

Something is happening,

something monstrous is out there.

- I've hunted a lot of game in my day, those are hooves.

- The house starts getting attacked by all

manner of Krampus minions.

- Ahhh!

- Oh sh--

- From these trollish, dwarfish, horrors,

gingerbread men...

...beautifully, creepy, sinister clown snake.

- Come on.

[roars]

- Shoot it, Tom, shoot it!

- So this whole family that normally doesn't like

each other, is forced to come together, put aside

their differences, and overcome Krampus and his minions.

- Shepherd's gotta protect his flock.

[monster roaring]

- Like many Christmas tales,

everyone learns a valuable lesson...

- I'm sorry.

- The hard way.

- Noooo!

[dramatic music]

- Ahh, ahhh!

- It's a very personal statement for myself,

just how hard it is to maintain optimism

and a belief in the goodness of human beings when

you're confronted with the opposite every time you

wake up in the morning and turn on the news.

- Merry Christmas, Max.

- I do think it's kind of a good family horror movie.

I was so happy to be in it.

I felt like, "[bleep] yes, this is awesome, this is awesome,"

and I thought this is going to just blow people away.

[monsters shriek]

- Holiday partyers are literally blown away

in two famous slashers from the Great White North.

[eerie music]

- Two of the most memorable holiday slashers came

out of Canada in the early 1980s.

The first was "Terror Train" starring Jamie Lee Curtis,

two years after "Halloween."

Can you tell me the plot of "Terror Train?"

- "Terror Train" is a bunch of college kids,

New Year's Eve, taking a train for a party

on the train, and a bad guy shows up.

- On New Year's Eve of their senior year,

a group of pre-meds gather

for an ill-fated costume party.

- Happy New Year!

- Three years earlier, they played a cruel

prank on virginal young Kenny.

- Elena?

- Hello, Kenny.

- Baiting him with the promise of sex.

- Don't be shy, this is my first time, too.

- Then surprising him with a corpse.

[dramatic music]

- The shock drove him insane.

- Ahh, ahh, ahhh!

- Now he's back for revenge.

- All aboard.

- Early on in the film, a character is literally killed

in front of other people and nobody notices because

everybody's in costume, everybody's drunk,

everybody's having a good time, and he's the joker so

they're like, "Ha ha, funny joke, dying."

And the killer assumes this person's identity

by wearing their costume.

Nobody notices that all of a sudden he's

taller or doesn't speak.

- We're at the station with a sword.

- And that's the key essence of the film.

It's--it's a revenge slasher about someone that you never

used to pay attention to except to make fun of,

and now you're still not paying attention

to them, and they're gonna kill you.

- In "Terror Train," appearances

aren't just deceiving, they're deadly.

Beneath their surface beauty,

the students are callous brats,

reeking of unearned privilege.

- Mo and I worked in an emergency

gynecological ward.

- Doc won an award.

- Best pap smear in a supporting role, come on.

- The killer mocks their superficiality

by disguising himself with the masks of his victims.

- It adds to the paranoia because

your sweetheart might be in the gorilla suit one minute,

and then the next minute you think you're

getting a midnight kiss and it's the killer.

- Ahhh!

- "Terror Train" was shot entirely at night

aboard an actual steam train by John Alcott,

the man who photographed "The Shining"

and "Barry Lyndon" for director Stanley Kubrick.

- John Alcott figured out how to shoot in very

low natural light.

In "Barry Lyndon," he would shoot scenes

with natural candle light, for example,

which was something that people

hadn't really seen before.

And that got him an Academy Award.

Now, "Terror Train," in its own way,

it's also a bit of a ground breaker because

they were shooting it, you know, with this real train,

and they had to figure out how to light the darn thing.

- John Alcott wired all of the practical

lights on the train to a lightboard, and he would

light the scene by dials, that's it.

- It's very painterly, if you look at that film,

almost every shot.

I think it's one of the most beautiful

slasher films of the era.

- What are your memories of it?

- I remember that it was nights, I remember it was cold AF,

and I wore big hoop earrings, and I said to them,

"In the fight, it would be great if he pulls

through the hoop earring, and like splits her ear open."

- Ahh!

- But it was all one take and so how was I going to get bloody?

So, I go under, like, a bed or something and there

was a pool of blood that we had left there.

So, when I went under there...

- You'd do your own makeup and come out.

- I did my own makeup and then come out and now it's all bloody

and you really think like, "Wow, he really ripped her ear apart."

- That's third grade stuff.

- Really? [switchblade clicks]

- For much of the movie, we're led to believe that

a magician, played by real life illusionist

David Copperfield, is the killer.

- A magician. - Magician?

- But in keeping with the film's theme,

all is not what it seems.

- The big reveal was that it was his female assistant,

who was trans... - Yeah.

- Was ultimately the killer.

- It brings you back to that illusion idea,

that he's creating this magic trick.

When you see the movie again, you're kind of like,

"It's totally Kenny," but because your brain is

making assumptions, it's not seeing that.

It's saying, "Oh, well, that's the magician,

that's his assistant."

So, you label him or her as an assistant,

it couldn't possibly be the killer.

And so, I really think that the magic theme,

sort of, underscored what they

were trying to achieve with the reveal of the killer.

- It was you.

- Still, seen 40 years later, it's a controversial choice.

- It's a version of the queer panic subgenre that

you [bleep]ed with my sexuality

in some way that made me

question my gender identity and kill people.

[dramatic music]

[train rumbling]

[wind howling]

[thud]

- A year after "Terror Train" made

us leery of New Year's and costume parties,

"My Bloody Valentine" did the same for the day of love.

- Ahhhh!

[dramatic music]

- The night of the Valentine's Day dance,

everybody was there except for seven miners who

were out at the Hanniger Mine.

- An accident on Valentine's Day

in a small mining town

kills a score of men and turns a traumatized

survivor into a cannibalistic serial killer.

The town bans Valentine's Day celebrations.

20 years later, a new generation decides

it's time to get the party started.

- Roses are red, violets are blue,

one is dead and so are you?

- Then the murders begin.

- Mabel!

[dramatic music]

- To me, it's the best of the Canadian

slasher films, partly because it commits

to being a Canadian slasher film.

- Yeah, it's not like well-to-do kids in a sorority

house being picked off.

- No, no, it's in a steel mining town

in Canada where they have thick Canadian accents.

- There ain't nothing to do about it.

- You can't have 'em both, you know?

- I don't want them both.

- You'll be sorry you didn't listen to me, you'll be sorry.

- As the party rages, a mysterious killer

picks off the miners and their girlfriends

one by one in creatively macabre ways.

[heavy breathing]

- Sylvia?

[eerie music]

- Like "Terror Train,"

"My Bloody Valentine" makes the most out of its location.

The last half hour of the film takes place

deep inside an actual mine.

- There's one way out and that way is probably blocked

by your pursuing maniac in a mask.

It's tight, it's dark, there are no places of light

except those that are strung by the mining company.

So you're completely removed from civilization,

and you are thrust

into the most claustrophobic environment possible.

- [gasps]

- Nowadays, "My Bloody Valentine"

is one of the most significant and beloved

of the Golden Age slasher films.

[maniacal laughter]

- Sarah, be my bloody Valentine.

[laughing continues]

- It's really just a textbook example of how

you pull off one of these things.

[maniacal laughter]

- Some people like to head out for the holidays,

to get in touch with old friends,

or spend quality time with dear old mom.

- Ain't we havin' fun?

- Well, I don't know about the two of you,

but I'm getting out of here. - Wait for me.

- Holidays are a great time for a getaway

with your friends...

except in horror movies.

Exhibit A, 1980's "Mother's Day."

Three college friends on a camping trip are

kidnapped by psychotic brothers.

- Why don't you get the Kodak?

- Yeah, I'll get the Kodak.

- They subject the women

to a night of abuse and torture,

all for the entertainment of their sadistic mother.

- My boys.

- One woman dies, the others escape,

but then they turn back.

- We'll get those bastards.

- These women actively said, "We're gonna go back,

and we're gonna hunt these people down, and we're gonna

kill them and get revenge for what they did to our friend."

That was badass, there was a certain

feminist element to it that I really appreciate,

that was unusual for a film of that time.

- Jackie, every way you turned in life you got shit.

Well, now we'll do the fighting back for you.

♪

- When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Mother's Day.

I even screened it at my bar mitzvah party

with my mom in attendance.

I had very tolerant parents.

It's not for everyone.

- Now take care of the big one, Ike.

- But look past the sensationalism

and you'll find a wicked satire of pop culture.

- Wake up, it's me, Big Bird, and it's time to get up.

- The mother has these psychopathic sons who have been

weaned on television and so they have no way

of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

- All right, now, it's beautiful day, see?

You're readin' somethin' real good.

- Yeah, like a muscle magazine.

- All three villains are punished with ironic deaths.

One brother is literally killed by television,

the other gets an axe to the groin,

and the mother meets a uniquely maternal end.

- No, let me be, let me be, I'm a sick woman!

- I wanted something more from the mother's death.

- Yeah.

- Then I thought, "Oh, my God, it's perfect,

mother's been suffocated by the breasts."

- Yeah.

- It's really what made me see what you could

do with a slasher film.

I started watching Mother's Day over,

and over, and over, and thinking,

"Oh my god, you can actually say a lot with a slasher movie."

- "April Fool's Day" from 1986 is another film

about a gory getaway and, unlike some holiday

slashers, it takes its title seriously.

- We've talked about before that I like "April Fool's Day."

- I love "April" for Fred Walton,

man, I mean, what a great film.

- College student, Muffy, invites her smug,

overprivileged friends to her family's secluded island

for an April Fool's Day party.

- We're gonna spend a weekend there?

- The pranks begin almost immediately.

- Well, what--what are you scared?

- Hey, I said give it a rest.

- You have a fake death at the beginning.

You have a guy pretending to get killed.

- We got 'em.

- Ha, ha, April Fools.

- It's like you're never quite sure what's real and what's not.

- The childish prank is followed

by a horrific accident.

- Buck, look out!

- Ahhhh!

[crunching]

- Ahhhh!

- Soon it seems we're watching a whodunnit

slasher where the students are picked off one by

one with not entirely convincing special effects.

- There's that one scene where, you know,

the risky couple's in bed.

- What is this, show and tell?

- And she, like, gives him a nudge and his hands

fall over and we know that he has been dismembered.

- And, of course, they don't bother to think about

all your buddies are getting killed off

on April Fool's Day,

maybe there's something else going on here?

[dramatic music]

- But they're not really the brightest bulbs

so you let it slide.

- The final survivors learn that Muffy's homicidal twin,

Buffy, is the killer.

- No, nooo!

- Then, in one of the most divisive horror endings

of all time, they discover everybody is still alive.

Muffy has pulled a massive prank

on her friends and the audience.

- April Fools!

- I don't condone pranks like that in real life because you

really never know how someone's gonna react to a situation.

- I love you.

- I love you too, babe.

- Ahh, aggh!

- Watching it in a film and having it all play out

on screen, I think, is fantastic.

[laughing]

- For me, the ending was what kept it

from being a classic horror film.

- It's unfair that people write the movie

off because of the ending.

- Does that negate the whole movie, yeah.

- That it negates the whole film.

Now, I really like the ending, now I know what to expect,

I really like the ending.

- But is that about it breaking its own rules?

- Yeah, but in the case of "April Fool's Day,"

I think that's our failure because, no, it's April Fools,

it didn't happen, that's the point.

- They played a joke.

- It's the point of the holiday, "April Fool's!"

It's clearly marked on the label,

it's our misunderstanding of it, they did a perfect job.

- Yeah, you're right, I never even thought

of it that way, that's really funny.

[laughter]

- April Fool.

[eerie music]

- Happy birthday.

- What's worse than being murdered on your birthday?

Endlessly reliving that day and dying over and over again.

- Hey!

[tense music]

See you soon [bleep]hole.

Ahhh!

[dramatic music]

- Holiday horror films are often about the terror

of facing our families.

Christopher Landon's slasher comedy, "Happy Death Day..."

is about the terror of facing ourselves.

- "Happy Death Day" is about a very stereotypical

mean girl sorority member named Tree Gelbman,

who I play, who

kind of only cares about herself until one day she is murdered.

- Ahhhh!

- But then immediately wakes up again on the day

of her birthday.

And then she's thrown into, kind of, this ongoing cycle,

Groundhog's Day loop of being killed again,

and again, and again, no matter what she does.

[dramatic music]

- This has gotta be, like, the strangest

birthday you've ever had, huh?

- You have no idea.

- This being a slasher,

the movie is filled with spectacular kills

committed by a silent murder in a baby mask.

- Ahhhh!

[glass shatters]

- I hate to say it, but I really love killing people on camera.

There's definitely a challenge to coming up with

unusual kills,

but, like, it's also, like, it's really fun

and I've always kind of had a funny knack for it.

- Oh, [bleep].

[explosion thunders, glass shatters]

- As Tree is tested by the ordeal,

her layers of defensive snark break down...

- Mmm, have a little, a few calories won't kill you.

- Revealing her complex inner core.

- In Hollywood, and especially in genre

and horror movies, so often, women get kind of pigeonholed.

You're either the good girl, or you're the bad one who

gets killed right away, or you're the bitch,

or you're the angel, and Tree gets to be all of those things.

[tense music]

- Who are you?!

Show your face you pussy!

- She has this great trauma, she lost her mom, the person she

was closer to than anyone else in the world,

and she's never really been able to process it.

- I bet you miss her.

- Yeah.

You know what's funny, you relive

the same day over and over again...

you kind of start to see who you really are.

- If I have a jam, or a gimmick, or whatever,

it is bringing that grounded emotional stuff and then jamming

it into horror movies where they don't belong, typically.

Because as a horror fan, like, I know all the tricks.

[dramatic music]

- Like, I've grown up watching all

the tricks and so it's really fun to have this grab bag.

- Ahhh!

- But then know that, like, all of that is

going to be infused with something that's

really foreign to-- to these types of movies.

- Happy birthday, baby.

- I love the message that the film has when it

comes to grief and loss, and how you have to, kind of,

confront it and really go through it, and spend some

real time with that loss and not run away from it because

I think Tree's been running for a really, really long time.

[wind whistling]

- Holiday horror films can be cathartic releases

of bottled up emotions...

- Come on!

- Or deliberate stabs in the eye of polite society.

Some find them offensive.

- Merry Christmas, Frank.

- But that's kind of the point.

- Good horror is all about uncomfortable juxtapositions.

It's about taking something like Christmas,

something we love

and find comforting, and then ruining it for everyone forever.

[gunshot blasts] - Ahhhh!

- It is in the nature of horror fiction,

horror cinema, to be a little bit like punk rock.

[gunshots]

- If you fail to piss anyone off...

- Die! - Ahhhh!

- You're probably doing it wrong.

- Oh, God!