We have been waiting far too long for a really great Valentine’s Day slasher movie.
You know what I mean? Sure, we had My Bloody Valentine, but that’s abjectly awful and not even Jensen Ackles pouting his ass off can save it – there are a handful of great romantic horror movies, too, but that’s still not quite what I’m talking about. Valentine’s Day is the perfect fodder for a good seasonal slasher – I mean, the symbol of the holiday is a damn internal organ, for God’s sake! Why hasn’t someone managed to adapt that into a suitably grotesque gorefest for all of us miserable and mordant monsters out there?
Well, good news – it’s finally happened. Or, at least it did last year, with Heart Eyes, a romantic-comedy-slasher directed by Josh Ruben (who I grew up watching in the CollegeHumor Hardly Working sketches in high school, and whom I am so delighted to see get some legit mainstream success like this) and written by the brilliant Christopher Landon of Happy Death Day fame. Following Ally (Olivia Holt), a hapless pitch designer, and Jay (Mason Gooding), a freelancer hired to help her fix a disastrous first attempt, as they work against the clock to create a Valentine’s Day promo for their demanding boss. Oh – and there’s a serial killer on the lose.
Heart Eyes, fundamentally, is a romantic comedy with a slasher movie taking place in the background. Which, while it’s a fun idea, is an enormously difficult one to pull off; it’s primarily sold as a horror movie, but that doesn’t mean that it can get away with letting the romcom elements feel secondary, given that they dominate a good chunk of the movie’s first hour. At the same time, making it a little too convincing runs the risk of leaving the film lurching awkwardly into a horror-centric third act with little build-up – striking the balance between two such disparate genres is, on paper, a disaster waiting to happen.
But the way that Ruben and company go about pulling it off here is downright ingenious. The marriage (if you’ll excuse the pun) of the two genres kicks off right in the opening kill – it’s a beautiful Insta-ready engagement shoot that turns into, well, a very different kind of shoot by the time the ring hits that finger. From there, the movie gleefully embraces the classic romcom tropes – crashing into each other at a coffee shop, fake dating, the shocking discovery that the hot dude who ruined your morning is actually your new co-worker, the career girl balancing a tragic love life with an equally tragic work one. And, all the while, the tale of the Heart Eyes slasher plays out in the background, via news reports and social media posts, slowly encroaching on the romance blossoming between our leads until the stories come crashing irrevocably together. Hell, it’s even a classic romcom trope – an attempt to make shitty exes jealous with a big, romantic smooch in the street – that attracts the attention of the killer to our leading couple, dovetailing the two plots in gloriously gory fashion.
And when the horror really gets going, it’s exactly the kind of gleeful, blood-spattered chaos you’d expect from a slasher like this one. The subversion of the pink and red Valentine’s day imagery makes for an enormously fun palette to play with, giving the movie a sickly sweet feel that contrasts so well with the abject gore of its kill sequences. Ruben makes great use of the city backdrop for some genuinely thrilling chase sequences, and the urban setting makes for an interesting switch-up from the deep-in-the-woods stumbling about that so often dominates slashers of this nature.
Heart Eyes is as much a love letter to the romcom genre as it is to the horror one, and that’s what makes it work. It’s the Valentine’s Day horror we deserve – and the perfect date night for the horror lovers amongst us this V-day.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Cineworld)
No But Listen 