Freaky, or, Jason Takes Third Period Shop Class

According to IMDb’s numbers, Freaky was a financial success, mostly because of its relatively tiny budget. I don’t normally pay attention to that kind of thing, but I’d been curious why it didn’t seem to have a bigger impact. It’s a ton of fun, and it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

Then I saw its release date: it came out in 2020. I have to wonder if it would’ve been bigger if not for the pandemic. And also if it hadn’t had a seemingly last-minute title change from its original Freaky Friday the 13th.

Pretty much the entire premise of the movie comes from that no-brainer of a title: a kind-hearted and bullied teenager, whose family is still trying to recover from the death of her father a year earlier, is attacked one night by a ruthless serial killer. He stabs her with a ceremonial dagger he’d stolen during a previous killing spree, which somehow causes the two to switch bodies overnight. Now she’s only got 24 hours to do the same thing to him, or the change will become permanent.

A movie based entirely on a gimmick and a mashed-up title shouldn’t work as well as this does. And yet it does work, not only as a horror comedy slasher with a few memorable kills, but also by surprisingly hitting all the right notes for a teen body swap comedy. It even uses home invasion to teach a lesson about believing in yourself.

Obviously a whole lot of that comes from the perfect casting of the leads. Vince Vaughn has the charisma going at dangerous levels, drawing from wells of charm that might not have been tapped to this extent since the days of Swingers. Here he gets to make fun of how big he is and how old he’s gotten1, and he plays two roles really well.

Not the “murderous psychopath” and “teenage girl” that you’d expect from the premise, but in how he plays the character Millie. There’s plenty of the “middle-aged man acting like a girl” schtick, and it is somehow still funny and charming in its corniness, but he also transitions seamlessly in and out of inhabiting the actual character: a kind-hearted teenager enjoying hanging out with her friends. It’s even easier for the audience to immediately accept that these two have swapped bodies than it is for the characters around them.

Also he’s a 50-year-old man kissing a teenage boy, and I was wondering if they were going to go there, and it made me even more uncomfortable than all the dismemberment! (I checked and the other actor was 23 at the time, but still… I guess I respect that they didn’t just cop out).

The other half of that is Kathryn Newton, who gets genre movies and horror and comedy all on an atomic level, and she knows how to nail the tone perfectly throughout. Much like her performance in Abigail, she’s got the ability to inhabit a part without being too showy, but still seemingly effortlessly is the most interesting person on screen.

In Freaky, she’s got the more thankless part of spending most of the movie as a character who deliberately has zero personality besides “murderous psychopath.” Still, she understands the reason the movie focuses on her side of the swap, and it’s more than just a way to set up the next kill (although there is plenty of that). She makes it read as a metaphor for Millie defining herself and standing up for herself — on her own terms, not those of the murderer who’s currently controlling her body. You can see a preview of the person she’s going to become after the experience is all over.

The rest of the cast is pretty fun, too. They’re all stock characters from a teen comedy, deliberately so, and the movie has fun both acknowledging that and then going on to use them exactly the same way a standard teen comedy would. Millie has the same two diverse friends that every misunderstood outcast white teen girl should: an extremely supportive black girl and an extremely sassy gay boy.

My favorite line of dialogue in the entire movie is when they’re all escaping together from the police, and the cops announce over the radio: “Suspect spotted with two youths. Teenagers. One black female, one white, uh… excited.”

I enjoyed seeing a movie that so thoroughly mimics the feel of 90s and 2000s teen comedies playing out now with more modern sensibilities. The gay kid is thoroughly, unmistakably out, and the movie simultaneously milks it for all it’s worth, and also just accepts it. There’s a scene where he tries to tell his mother2 that he’s straight to excuse having a teenage girl tied up in their dining room, and she simply says, “You are a lot of things, but you are definitely not straight.” There’s even a scene with a teenager who is still closeted and self-loathing, and the movie doesn’t present it as a tragedy, but that he’s the weird one for being both bigoted and as cocky and sexually aggressive as the other jocks.

All the cliches are in full effect here: popularity-seeking, snobby mean girls; insecure, bullying jocks; the sensitive jock who’s the object of our hero’s crush; an over-the-top sadistic asshole teacher3; a mom struggling with alcoholism in her grief. They all perform exactly the same story role that they would in any teen comedy, existing in a kind of deliberately fantastic version of high school that is far from realistic, but also not dated or too shallow to be meaningless.

Pretty much the entirety of Freaky is like that: pulling up a ton of familiar elements from familiar movies and letting each of them work exactly like you’d expect them to, but combining them into something new. Or if not exactly “new,” then at least really charming and satisfyingly well-executed.

The end credits play out over graphics that show brightly-colored images of the type you’d see in a teenage girl’s notebook, which are slashed away to show their gruesome horror movie counterparts. A heart becomes a human heart, a selfie becomes a corpse’s face, candy turns into a saw blade, a stuffed unicorn turns into a hanging teddy bear with the eyes slashed out, etc. Obviously it’s a repeat of the movie’s whole mission statement; the premise isn’t at all complicated!

But it’s also the vibe of the entire movie, navigating through genres to hit the right balance of corny vs heartfelt, silly vs scary, gory vs charming, familiar vs novel. It has to keep its kills inventive while still being more horror-house fun than sadistic, and it mostly succeeds, but more difficult than that, it has to make use of the premise to be about something when it’s all over.

1
Even though he’s only a year older than I am, and hey man, back the hell off

2
Who he’s extremely close to, based on the fact that every photo hanging on the walls of their house shows them together at glamor shots

3
Played, appropriately, by Alan Ruck, who was more or less Millie-analog Cameron in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off

1 Even though he’s only a year older than I am, and hey man, back the hell off

2 Who he’s extremely close to, based on the fact that every photo hanging on the walls of their house shows them together at glamor shots

3 Played, appropriately, by Alan Ruck, who was more or less Millie-analog Cameron in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off