Knock on Wood

One of my most potent and specific pleasures as a movie and horror fan is the seasonally themed slasher. The most well-known example is John Carpenter’s seminal classic Halloween, but there are tons of gems for all kinds of different holidays. If you want an excellent whodunnit/gore fest full of wry humor, look no further than Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, or you can get all the trashy punny goodness with the St. Patrick’s Day-themed Leprechaun series, and you can even revel in the Valentine’s Day-based cult classic, My Bloody Valentine. Heart Eyes is in this same vein, recruiting the excellent Josh Ruben as director, Olivia Holt (Totally Killer) and Mason Gooding (Scream) as the leads, and the Michael Kennedy/Christopher Landon team, both of whom have brought us some of the most fun and heartwarming horror films in the modern era. It all coalesces into a genuinely fun horror rom-com that’ll make you laugh and fall in love as much as jump for joy at all the slasher staples it gets so very right.

It feels like such a clear and clever decision that it’s amazing to me I’ve never seen it before. A slasher, the titular Heart Eyes killer, that kills only couples on Valentine’s Day, is on the loose again, and we follow a recently heartbroken girl coming face-to-face with the scariest thing imaginable: an absolute dream of a perfect guy in the form of an immensely attractive Mason Gooding. A rom-com stuffed inside of a slasher isn’t the most organic idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s played so earnestly and unselfconsciously that it really works. The transition in tone from scene to scene can be hard and fast, but once you settle into any given moment it’s always played well enough that it was hard for me to care about the juxtaposition. I found myself laughing at both the over-the-top gore and the cutesy moments they shared together, ripped right out of the mid-2000s genre scene.

Josh Ruben’s previous film was the hilarious Werewolves Within, and I’m so glad he got to bring the same quirky joy to these characters as he did in that film. There are loads of one-off side characters that make any given scene feel special or memorable, including horror veteran Devon Sawa (from Final Destination and Idle Hands) showing up as one of the weirdest cops I’ve seen in any modern horror film. Michael Kennedy, Christopher Landon, and Phillip Murphy’s script also supports the characters and their arcs very well, never allowing any of them to be a full-on stereotype. The leads are given more humanity, emotional stakes, and backstory than most movies of this kind ever feel the need to, and even those one-off side characters can show a surprising amount of role diversity in their limited screen time.

Heart Eyes is a slasher film and a romantic comedy rolled into one. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel in regard to either genre, but the novel approach to their combination gives a fan of either kind of movie something new to see in their respective camps. I had my fun, was surprised by some gnarly and creative kills throughout, and even fell in love along the way. I can’t say in any way that that is a bad time at the movies.

Heart Eyes is playing in theaters nationwide.