Corey Feldman On His Unearthed 2004 Cult Classic-to-Be, The Birthday

By Andy Crump  |  November 15, 2024 | 9:15am
Movies Features Corey Feldman
Corey Feldman On His Unearthed 2004 Cult Classic-to-Be, The Birthday
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Imagine that on the day of your birth, every witness present, including your own dear mother, tacitly agreed to sequester you from society and speak nothing of the matter until you turn 20. That would be a no-no. The laws of man expressly forbid that sort of thing. No such authority exists to keep the same from happening to movies, of course. For movies, timing is everything. They don’t get to choose their moments. That’s up to their authors; then, their distributors; then, and most important of all, their audiences.

Eugenio Mira’s The Birthday enjoyed its world premiere at the 36th edition of the Sitges Film Festival back in 2004. About a year later, the film debuted in North America at the 9th annual Fantasia International Film Festival, and followed that appearance up with a run at the first-ever Fantastic Fest. And after that: Bupkis. You would expect a weirdo genre picture where Corey Feldman spends the best part of two hours channeling the nervous energies of actors like John Cazale and Jerry Lewis, and where the nightmare of meeting a significant other’s haughty parents churns the gut more than the unspoken nightmare lurking in a 1980s art deco hotel, to interest a buyer at one of those three festivals. Each is friendly toward every category The Birthday can conceivably be filed under–fantasy, horror, drama, sci-fi–and each typically rewards ingenuity in craft. (Sitges in particular. Hats off for giving Vincent Price top marks for The Abominable Dr. Phibes in 1971!)

As perfectly suited as it was to its proving grounds, though, The Birthday ended 2005 sans a distribution strategy. Outside of a premiere in Spain, Mira’s home country, and a DVD release relegated only to Spain and, incongruently, Germany, the film had nowhere to go after the festival circuit; other than the crowds present for its screenings at Sitges, Fantasia, and Fantastic Fest, plus scant domestic (and German) audiences, no one had the privilege of seeing it.

These were, recall, the nascent days of digital film journalism, where fewer voices covering the movies for fewer sites didn’t possess the same access to instantaneous news and rumormongering that folks in 2024 take for granted. “The movie [premiered] in 2004,” Mira tells Paste in a recent interview. “That’s one year before YouTube, two or three years before Facebook and Twitter started to hit, before iPhones. It’s in that blind spot at the end of an era.” In that context, The Birthday’s fall from the pop culture radar was nearly inevitable, which doesn’t make it less of a shame. “When it comes to careers and perception and the possibilities of how a film ends up in a place or not, there’s this element that nobody wants to talk about, and that is luck,” Mira adds. Once again, it’s a matter of timing.

It’s a small consolation that what led to the film falling from memory isn’t simply a lack of buzz, but a lack of funding. “The production company who made this film ran out of money during production,” Mira says. “That’s one of the reasons why we had problems with not having a strategy for distributing the film beyond the run that it had around film festivals.” This explains the limited debut in Spain, and the even more limited DVD pressing, and why the version available in those formats clocked in at roughly 95 minutes–20 minutes less than Mira’s original cut, the one that played for audiences at Sitges Film Festival and Fantastic Fest this year. Better late than never, though it’s likely that by now, the recollections of a non-zero number of the people who saw The Birthday in 2004 and 2005 have faded. 20 years is a long time to go without revisiting a movie.

Feldman acknowledges the impact the passage of time has had on the film’s reputation, such as it is. “The lion’s share of our, or at least my, U.S. fan base, has never seen this film, has no idea that it even existed before a year ago,” Feldman explains. “The only time they heard of it was my obscure reference in an interview, occasionally.” Gradually, The Birthday, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist at all, as far as it concerns the moviegoing public and even Feldman devotees; to an extent, the inconspicuousness reflects the struggles of the nebbish but sweet Norman, Feldman’s character. Try as he might, he can’t seize the attention of his girlfriend, Alison (Erica Prior), as she bustles about the posh Royal Fulton hotel greeting the guests for her father, Ron’s (Jack Taylor), birthday party. Norman is effectively invisible to Alison. To everybody else, he’s either a curiosity or a nuisance. (To Ron, he’s both.)

Life imitating art is nothing unusual, though it is perhaps worth raising an eyebrow over life imitating anything as unusual as The Birthday. Something strange and possibly foul is afoot in the Royal Fulton’s bowels, and it isn’t just the malfunctioning heating system, either. The party’s attendees are all met in various fits of pique, the hotel staff are acting squirrely, and the pharmaceutical bros throwing their own shindig on the upper floors, represented by Norman’s old high school “chum” Vincent (Dale Douma), don’t seem like they’re having a good time. The Birthday is uneasy right down in its DNA. Maybe a film so fundamentally agitated is just a hard sell; maybe that’s another reason that no buyers stepped up in 2004 and 2005. Weird genre cinema like this plays to a niche crowd, or at least that’s the likely calculus studios perform when evaluating their bottom lines.

Fortunately, niche crowds include people with big megaphones and an appreciation for the inscrutable, like, for instance, Jordan Peele–who, having stumbled upon a bootleg of The Birthday on YouTube years ago and declared it a masterpiece, is one of the film’s greatest advocates. “It was his idea, you know, to get it to the public in the first place,” Feldman says. Peele made a prediction to Feldman that 2024 was going to be his year. “And I said, ‘What do you mean by that?'” Feldman recalls. “He said, ‘I don’t know how to put it into words. It’s just a feeling that I have.'” That one conversation, which the pair had at Feldman’s home, led to Peele programming a screening of The Birthday at Film at Lincoln Center last year, which led to offers from distributors, which led to the movie finally getting its due justice this fall.

“[Peele] felt that it was his duty after [watching the movie] to bring it to light,” Feldman says. Having a name in your corner that carries weight like Jordan Peele’s helps, undeniably. But even with a boost from the Get Out director, currently one of horror cinema’s great, influential figures, there was legwork to do to get The Birthday ready for another run on the big screen, like giving it a shiny new 4K restoration. That’s not quite the right way of characterizing the TLC to the movie, of course; old movies, lost movies, get restorations, and The Birthday isn’t particularly old, and it certainly was never lost. It’s better to think of that 4K restoration as a fresh coat of paint, and not a new sheet of drywall.

“We’re in 2024, and since the production company ran out of money, they never had a proper master,” Mira points out. “So I assumed the cost of going through the whole thing, locating the materials; the production company allowed me to do it, and I’m thankful for it.” He has good reason to be; apart from the obvious relief of finally having The Birthday out in the world at large after watching it languish for a couple of decades, this moment, where horror is perhaps the most defining element of film’s modern zeitgeist, is practically tailored for productions like it to thrive in. Coralie Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award at this year’s edition of Cannes for The Substance; in 2021, Titane, Julia Ducournau’s mechanophilia body horror picture, won the Palme d’Or, which The Substance was also selected to compete for, as was David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future in 2022. “People” have always taken horror seriously. It’s just that today, more people, people who just five or six years ago would’ve dismissed these movies, are taking them seriously.

If Mira sees these circumstances as mere luck, though, Feldman sees them as proof of celestial intervention. “I believe in divine timing,” Feldman says. “I believe that things happen the way that they’re meant to, whether we like it or not. So in the grand scheme, the grand design, for whatever reason, it was meant to be that this was the moment in time when The Birthday made its mark. It couldn’t have happened any sooner, and it couldn’t have happened any later.”

Viewers should simply be content that it happened at all. Even in horror’s contemporary renaissance, The Birthday stands out: It’s a product of its time that’s nonetheless timeless, unique in its aesthetic and structure, a surrealist love child of directors like Terry Gilliam, Steven Spielberg, Wes Craven, Mary Harron, and David Lynch, where nothing is what it seems, and whatever seems to be, is ten times as bizarre as your imagination can conjure.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.

 
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