Freaky‘s Body-Swap Horror Is Funny, Fluid and Frighteningly Successful
On its face, the prospect of resurrecting two franchise IPs which have been endlessly re-made decade after decade teeters on the banal and unimaginative. Yet director Christopher Landon’s Freaky effortlessly weaves together the conventions of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, eschewing the confines of “remake,” instead creating a unique genre hybrid that’s slick and endlessly entertaining—all the while maintaining a clever self-awareness which enlivens the film’s jump-scares and punchlines without descending into the horror-comedy pitfall of self-referential metaness.
Millie (Kathryn Newton) is a shy 17-year-old who has become even more reclusive since the death of her father. Her family life is imperfect: Her mother (Katie Finneran) struggles with alcoholism while her police officer sister, Char (Dana Drori), buries herself in work and largely neglects connecting with her younger sister. Her only respite are best friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich), presented as fellow outcasts due to Nyla being Black and Josh’s openly gay identity. However, Freaky is conscious of horror tropes, employing clichés only to demonstrate how useless they are: Josh yells to Nyla early on in the film’s chilling plot, “You’re Black, I’m gay! We are so dead!”
Evidently, their small town has more sinister problems than simple bigotry: A serial killer known as the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn) has been culling the town’s teen population for years, notably committing a quadruple-homicide on Wednesday, November 11. Two days later, on Friday the 13th, Millie makes the classic mistake of electing to wait for her mom to pick her up on a lonely bench after a football game instead of taking a ride home with Nyla and Josh. Moments later, the killer is chasing Millie through bleachers and the vast football field, eventually pinning her down and stabbing her with an antique Aztecan dagger (that the Butcher stole from the house of his previous murderous rampage). Char arrives in time to scare the killer off, but at midnight, visions of the dagger arrest Millie’s dreams—and when she rouses, she doesn’t recognize herself.
What follows is a binary-bending comic exercise in sexual fluidity and gender expression which juxtaposes Vaughn’s hefty stature with Newton’s petite frame in order to prod at the horror genre’s previously held notion of who is perceived as weak, both in attitude and appearance. Vaughn and Newton give stellar performances, channeling the other’s mannerisms while poking fun at their own corporeal limitations and their immediate (dis)comfort within their new vessels. Newton’s Butcher quickly notes the advantages of his new appearance as a teenage girl, dually weaponizing Millie’s heretofore unrealized sex appeal and her simultaneously unassuming, innocent life as a high schooler in order to lure victims in and avoid suspicion. That the clearly unstable killer wakes up in the body of a young woman and immediately thinks, “I’m going to give this bitch an Ariana high-pony, some contour and a red lip,” perfectly exemplifies the overarching theme of gender performance and fluidity that is inextricable from the plot of Freaky.