Review: Freaky Delights in Leaning into and Deconstructing Horror Tropes

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

Freaky
Photo: Universal Pictures

If every middle-aged actor whose movie-star allure has dimmed is due for some kind of renaissance, Freaky might be Vince Vaughn’s chance. It’s not so much that the actor reinvents himself here, but that the gleefully gory tone of this Blumhouse production offers a surprisingly fitting home for the more manic side of his sarcastic-oaf persona. Director Christopher Landon, who was also behind Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day horror comedies, gives Vaughn room to play around as a teen girl stuck in the body of a serial killer.

Freaky doesn’t even attempt to mask what was surely its high-concept pitch: “Freaky Friday meets Friday the 13th.” The film’s title, and the fact that the bulk of the action is set on Friday the 13th, announces the pastiche loud and clear. In addition, Freaky opens with an assertively brainless sequence that Landon might as well have lifted out of Marcus Nispel’s abysmal Friday the 13th reboot from 2009, with four crudely stereotyped horny teens’ plan to fool around in an expansive home they have all to themselves interrupted by their violent murders at the hands of a hockey-masked killer, the so-called Blissfield Butcher (Vaughn).

Blissfield’s teens are imbued with a deep cynicism. Their hardened, impolitic dialogue—“I love your black wiener!” Josh (Misha Osherovich) shouts at a middle-aged black man holding a dark-furred dachshund—contrasts with the almost cartoonish suppleness of their bodies as the Butcher easily rips them apart. It’s a bracing, equal-opportunity-offender form of humor that has already worn thin by the time the big body-switch moment happens about 15 minutes into the film. At that juncture, though, Freaky adds the element that ties its broad horror parody together: Vaughn’s performance as a diminutive high school student who suddenly finds herself in possession of the outsized power and presence of a hulking killer.

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The body-swapped student in question, Millie (Kathryn Newton), gives off distinct Laurie Strode vibes: shy, virginal, and with family problems and a limited social circle. Participating in high school culture in marginal, risible ways like performing as her school’s Beaver mascot at football games, she’s due for the kind of transformational gauntlet that being hunted by a deranged murderer offers such horror-film heroines. Instead, she’s transplanted into the body of the Butcher via a haunted Aztec knife that he plunges into her shoulder.

Once Millie processes that she has essentially swapped her Beaver costume for the body of a six-foot-something middle-aged man, her first task is to convince her best friends that it’s her underneath Vaughn’s imposing frame. Millie’s fellow outcasts are Josh, a broadly characterized catty gay kid, and Nyla (Celeste O’Connor), who has little definition beyond being their token black friend. “You’re black, I’m gay. We’re screwed!” Josh shouts as they run from the person that they believe to be the Butcher, in horror films’ umpteenth rehash of the post-Scream trope of deconstructing horror clichés even as they’re enacted.

If Josh and Nyla aren’t especially novel characters, it’s at least fun to watch them resume their friendship with Millie now that she’s trapped in the Butcher’s large, disheveled body. They unite to hunt down the killer, who’s taken Millie’s body and turned her into a seductress who seems to be aiming to kill the school’s jocks—many of whom, the film suggests, probably deserve it anyway. Inevitably, they not only discover a method and a deadline for switching Millie and the Butcher’s bodies back, but they’re outwitted by the cold calculations of the consciousness now inhabiting Millie’s body. And it all culminates at the homecoming dance.

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As Millie, Vaughn doesn’t channel much that’s specific about Newton’s performance, as the actor is more or less just putting on a “Vince Vaughn as an immature girl” routine. It’s an effective one though: Playing an easily startled girl lacking in self-confidence and prepossession, he captures a visually comic detachment between interior and exterior. As a body that’s lost the brutal grace of the inhuman stalker and now awkwardly hides in bushes, accidentally knocks over people in the park, and barely scrunches into the backseat of Josh’s beat-up hatchback, Vaughn achieves some irresistible humor reminiscent of his memorable roles in films like Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Wedding Crashers.

Undoubtedly some viewers will pick up on a seemingly subversive impulse in the film, given that the story hinges on granting the slasher’s archetypical “last girl” the almost superhuman powers of her eternal pursuer. But even if it ends with Millie finding empowerment through her scary-comic ordeal, Freaky is more broadly irreverent than it is in any significant way subversive. While gender roles are playfully and briefly mixed, they’re not really upended. And besides, a final moment of empowerment for the heroine—an appropriation of the killer’s phallic power—is a defining trope of the slasher film. Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

Score: 
 Cast: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Misha Osherovich, Celeste O’Connor, Alan Ruck, Katie Finneran, Melissa Collazo, Dana Drori  Director: Christopher Landon  Screenwriter: Michael Kennedy, Christopher Landon  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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