Happy Halloween
Written and directed by Brittney Greer, this low-key, likeable slasher movie harks back to the great days of disposable movies – it has a few nods to the greats in a Carpenter-quoting score and one of those obsessed-with-a-holiday small towns (as seen in My Bloody Valentine) and perhaps unusually riffs on a particular sub-set of slasher (cf: Pranks, The Prowler, Graduation Day) where there’s a whodunit element. Indeed, as in My Bloody Valentine, everyone in town is so convinced that a just-released bogeyman is the killer that we naturally suspect everyone else – the Mayor … the school principle … the class joker … the cool rebel … the blonde best friend … the cop uncle … the twitchy teacher … the mother … the new boyfriend … even the heroine/final girl.
This town has a twin obsession with corn and Halloween – the big attraction is a spooky maze made out of maize – and it opens with the murder of a kid by a masked knifer in a cornfield, with ‘Happy Halloween’ carved in his chest and gruesome pics pinged to every kid in school’s phone. Hadley (Emma Reinagel) is just back after a traumatic year – her old boyfriend went crazy pulling a nasty prank and also stabbed her – just as the killings start, with some tension about a local election (topical?) and the usual debate about whether to ban trick or treating or the high school dance.
Greer writes good kid characters and a fresh, appealing cast – Aline O’Neill, Cameron Mabie, Graham Weldin, Jack Cathcart – make the victims-slash-suspects mostly good company. Despite the one or two kill-crazy bad apples and a tendency for factional fights to break out between the teenage kids of the contestants in the Mayoral election, not all teens in this film are snarky assholes and they do well by fleshing out their stereotypes – O’Neill and Weldin are especially good as peppy best pal and hulking fullback, respectively. The killings are gory but staged as pranks – eye heart halloween is memorable, for instance – and it has a nice, colourful holiday look.
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