The slasher first established itself as the dominant art form of 1980s horror by capitalizing on the calendar. Arguably beginning with Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), the formula began to solidify by setting brutal killing sprees on the dates of beloved holidays. With the subsequent success of Friday the 13th (1980), directors clamored to claim their own occasion and create a defining slasher film with a series of themed kills highlighting seasonal iconography. It was a win-win for both filmmakers and audiences–an annually rewatchable horror film allowing genre fans to eschew saccharine traditions and celebrate in style.
Lee Thompson’s Happy Birthday to Me (1981) features a slightly more nebulous occasion–after all, every day of the year is someone’s birthday. Rejecting the concept’s seasonality, Thompson and screenwriters John C.W. Saxton, Peter Jobin, and Timothy Bond patterned the mysterious killer’s actions around the idea of a grisly birthday party. The film follows Virginia (Melissa Sue Anderson) and her classmates at an elite New England boarding school. Though it never attained the ubiquitous status of the aforementioned classics, Happy Birthday to Me is a cult favorite–a festive whodunnit nearly bursting at the seams with red herrings and creative kills.
Partnering with Stop the Killer, author Armando Muñoz brings back another beloved piece of the slasher’s golden age: the novelization. Before the days of streaming and VOD, these paper retellings allowed us to experience our favorite horror films in the seemingly interminable stretch of time before they hit video stores. Following the success of last year’s Silent Night, Deadly Night, his new novelization Happy Birthday to Me and its accompanying game, is a grisly page-turner perfect for any season. With his trademark sickness, Muñoz indulges in the macabre and amplifies the story with more kills, more sex, and more murderous scandal than any slasher fan could wish for.
Virginia is a popular senior at Crawford Academy and a member of the school’s academic Top Ten. This bizarre club of high-performing nepo-babies treats the tiny town as a playground and indulges in their every whim and expensive desire. One particularly egregious game involves jumping their lavish cars and motorcycles over an opening drawbridge, betting on who can make the most death-defying leap. Virginia abhors this dangerous game and has decided she doesn’t want a celebration for her upcoming 18th birthday. But someone else has other ideas. The aptly named Cake Cutter begins stalking her friends and murdering them one by one in hopes of creating a sinister birthday soirée. As Virginia reckons with her rapidly dwindling friend group, darker memories emerge. A horrific accident and resulting head injury may hold the key to the birthday girl’s strange–and possibly dangerous–behavior.
Muñoz faithfully recreates this outlandish story, beginning with a slobbery dog fake-out and Bernadette’s harrowing death at the hands of a gloved stranger. We then meet the rest of the Top Ten at a local bar (inexplicably serving high school students along with belligerent conventioneers), followed by the infamous game of drawbridge chicken that nearly totals an expensive Firebird. Each scene is faithfully recreated with exciting divergences and salacious details thrown in along the way. Muñoz expands upon the bodies, dismemberment, and violence in almost gleeful descriptions of splattering gore.
Thompson’s film culminates in the birthday party from hell, with decaying corpses staged around a gruesome cake, but Muñoz dives head-first into this upsetting tableau. We meet the so-called Cake Cutter after the first kill and follow them as they delight in staging this grisly party scene. Each subsequent murder provides more disgusting details as the secretive killer poses and “feeds” each ruined body with crumbling slices of a rotting cake. This pastry motif pairs well with the companion game from Stop the Killer. The object is to draw hexagonal cards and “bake a cake” by matching the edges to create a blood-spattered formation before drawing all six “kill cards” depicting illustrations of each iconic murders.
One of the more comical elements of the 1981 film is the use of generic music to avoid copyright issues. Virginia relaxes in her bedroom to music akin to what one might hear in a hip elevator and the kids later dance to anonymous approximations of timely pop hits. While no one would begrudge Thompson for spending his budget on special effects, this music has developed its own notoriety. With none of the same concerns, Muñoz seems to indulge in name-dropping. Virginia is a fan of Blondie and covets a red velvet hat worn by Debbie Harry while performing “Heart of Glass.” Weight lifting enthusiast Greg is obsessed with bodybuilding icons and remembers meeting both Franco Columbu and Arnold Schwarzenegger. More central to the plot, Alfred hopes to be the next Tom Savini and spares no expense creating his own gruesome gore effects–a detail that makes the film’s Mission Impossible-esque twist feel more believable.
Muñoz adds additional elements to the story including a peak into the lives of each doomed student. Amelia is mourning the disappearance of her older sister, a devastating detail that adds humanity to this series of ominous disappearances. Etienne is still an underwear-stealing creep, but we learn of a previous flirtation with a woman he thinks is Virginia, offering an explanation for why he feels entitled to come on so strong. We also get to “see” these deaths in their totality, without the need to cut away from the action. Each kill splatters onto the page with over-the-top violence and gleefully gruesome descriptions of dismemberment and mutilation. Muñoz also gives us the deaths of the remaining Top Ten instead of just those who happened to fall under the killer’s knife. No one who interacts with the infamous Cake Cutter is safe, and the story’s print version racks up a significantly larger pile of bodies.
Amidst all the birthday gore, there are a few sour notes and missed opportunities. We learn about the doctor’s predilection for electricity and that he died trying to copulate with one of his own machines, but Muñoz stops short of giving us any of these salacious details. Similarly, he hints at skeletons in Dr. Faraday’s own closet, but shies away from expanding on what they are. With hints of pedophilia, it’s perhaps for the best that we don’t dig too deeply into this strange arrangement, but it does feel like an unusual choice to withhold a potentially horrific backstory. Instead, we get more details about Mrs. Patterson, the school’s nagging headmistress. Unfortunately, this bit of gruesome indulgence veers into distasteful territory. Culminating in an animal death, the addition feels both unnecessary and garish, standing out as unfairly cruel amidst other thrilling tangents and over the top violence.
But Muñoz doesn’t linger on this upsetting detail and hurtles towards the film’s exciting conclusion. The Cake Cutter goes into murderous overdrive and begins racking up victims at an alarming rate. The shocking twist recreates the ending originally envisioned by Saxton, Jobin, and Bond while adding a chilling backstory for the surprising killer. Though still ridiculous, Muñoz amps up the bizarre factor with an anthropomorphized animal and a surprise party filled with birthday balloons, pitchers of gore, and gift-wrapped heads. The bodies squelch and rot as killer and victim tangle with each other in a deadly party game. With its series of over-the-top deaths, grisly mutilation, and a genuinely terrifying killer reveal, Muñoz’s Happy Birthday to Me is a tantalizing pile of literary gifts any horror fan would kill to open.
