Love Could Be Deadly in First Trailer for V-Day Slasher Heart Eyes

Horror geeks and slasher devotees, take note: A first trailer has dropped for one of the year’s buzzier offerings, the third film from one of the more promising writer-directors of modern horror comedy around. Heart Eyes is a modern slasher from Josh Ruben, the former prolific CollegeHumor video producer turned feature filmmaker, whose first two films were Shudder’s Scare Me and the perfectly pitched Werewolves Within, a welcome starring role for Detroiters‘ Sam Richardson. Heart Eyes, meanwhile, is from a screenplay by Phillip Murphy, Michael Kennedy and Freaky‘s Christopher Landon, and anchors itself firmly to holiday-set slasher tradition by taking aim at everyone’s favorite mid-February attraction, Valentine’s Day. This has been done before, of course, in the 1981 golden age slasher classic My Bloody Valentine, but it seems safe to say we can probably expect fewer coal miners in this particular offering.

The Heart Eyes trailer below actually seems to run counter to what we had previously known about the film, and what I’d recently written when including it in our list of the most anticipated horror movies of 2025. The only synopsis we have to date says the following: “Co-workers working late on Valentine’s Day are mistaken for a couple by the infamous Heart Eyes Killer.” Those co-workers are played by Olivia Holt and Scream‘s Mason Gooding, and the premise seems to suggest an extra layer of comical mistaken identity: The couple being stalked isn’t actually a couple at all. Looking at the trailer below, though, we can clearly see Gooding and Holt sharing a meet cute, date and even a kiss. So is the premise not quite what had been previously reported, or is this all just another layer of misdirection? Ruben’s films have to date been more clever than most horror in wide release, so we’re inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.