This cheapie Canadian tax shelter flick is pretty much a perfect example of an 80’s slasher flick. It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination but it has a lot more going for it than most of the cheapie horror films that piggybacked on the success of Friday the 13th.
Viewed at this late date (the film was made in 1981), Happy Birthday to Me looks like an instruction manual for the many slasher films that would follow in the next two decades. The film is set at a prestigious boarding school (as later films like Urban Legend and Cry Wolf would be). It centers around the most popular kids in school as they drink and carouse and get picked off one by one (as in I Know What You Did Last Summer or Graduation Day). Its protagonist has a horrible event in her past that she’s trying to outrun but that has implications for the murders currently being committed (just like Scream and The Fog and Boogeyman and Jeeper Creepers). And finally, the end is one twist after another as more and more information is revealed (just like any self-respecting horror flick ever made).
Since the slasher genre doesn’t get much attention in film history textbooks and in college classrooms, I don’t have quite as good a handle on the history of the genre as I do on, say, the detective film or the western. So I don’t know if Happy Birthday to Me was a big deal when it came out and therefore can’t say for certain that this film was hugely influential. But judging by the films of its ilk that have come after it, either Happy Birthday to Me was the prototype for a great many films or else it just happened to touch on all the things the genre would eventually embrace. Either way, it’s a remarkable achievement for a film whose only real reason for being made was to give some doctor or lawyer a tax write off.
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