Happy Birthday to Me is a 1981 Canadian slasher film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker, Frances Hyland, Tracey Bregman, and Lisa Langlois. Set at a New England high school academy, the film follows a series of brutal murders of students who are part of an elite clique in the days leading up to the birthday of one of its members.
Happy Birthday to Me was filmed in Montreal and upstate New York in 1980.
Happy Birthday to Me was distributed by Columbia Pictures, who invested $4 million in promotional materials. The studio marketed the film for its elaborate murder sequences, billed as "six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see." The film was released in the United States and Canada on May 15, 1981. It received mostly negative reviews from critics and grossed $10.6 million against a $3.5 million budget.
Plot
Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright is a pretty and popular high school senior at Crawford Academy, a member of the school's "Top Ten," an elite clique of the most privileged and popular students. Each night, the group meets at the Silent Woman Tavern, a local pub. One night en route to the tavern, Bernadette O'Hara is attacked in her car by an unseen assailant. She struggles and plays dead to catch the killer off-guard before running to get help. She then runs into an unseen individual whom she is familiar with and begs for help, but the person slashes her neck with a straight razor.
The Top Ten becomes concerned when Bernadette fails to arrive at the pub. Upon leaving, the group sees the nearby drawbridge raising and decide to play a game of chicken. Ginny is pushed into a car by Ann Thomerson, and each of the group attempt to cross the bridge as it raises; the car Ginny is in barely clears the bridge, crashing as it meets the other side. Distraught, Ginny runs home, stopping at her mother's grave in an adjacent cemetery. At her home, Etienne, a Top Ten member, breaks into Ginny's room and steals her underwear.
Bernadette fails to show up at school the following day. Ginny, who is plagued by repressed memories, visits her on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday, with whom she previously underwent an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure after surviving a harrowing accident at the drawbridge. As Ginny attempts to resume her normal life, her fellow Top Ten members are murdered in vicious and violent ways: Etienne is strangled when his scarf gets thrown into the spokes of his motorcycle, and Greg's neck is crushed in his room while lifting weights. Ann and Ginny go to Alfred's house as he has been acting odd lately and discovers he is an elaborate prosthetic make up artist with a creepy replica of Bernadette's head.
One night, Alfred, a Top Ten member who is infatuated with Ginny, follows her to her mother's grave. In retaliation, she stabs him with a pair of garden shears. On the weekend of Ginny's 18th birthday, her father leaves for a business trip. After a school dance, Ginny invites Steve to her house and prepares shish kebabs. While the two are drinking wine and smoking marijuana, Ginny begins to feed Steve with the kebab, but violently shoves the skewer down his throat.
Ann arrives at Ginny's house the following morning and finds Ginny taking a shower. In the shower, Ginny has a flashback of her mother's death: Her mother, a newly inducted socialite, invites the Top Ten to Ginny's birthday celebration four years earlier and is concerned when no guests have arrived. After being questioned by her mother, Ginny tearfully mentions the group are attending a party Ann is having instead. Humiliated, her mother drives drunk to the Thomersons' house with Ginny, where she is denied entry by Mr. Thomerson's gatekeeper. Enraged and upset, she attempts to drive across a raising drawbridge, causing their car to fall into the water. Pinned beneath the steering wheel, Ginny's mother drowns. Ginny, however, manages to swim to safety. A ship passing by injures Ginny's head, which why she needs the experimental brain procedure.
Paranoid that she may be murdering her friends during blackout episodes, Ginny visits Dr. Faraday. When she confronts him over the procedure she underwent, he is evasive, and she murders him with a fireplace poker. Mr. Wainright returns home during a thunderstorm for Ginny's birthday and finds a pool of blood in Ginny's bedroom. He flees hysterically and finds one of Ginny's friends, Amelia, standing in the yard in what seems to be a state of shock, clutching a wrapped gift. In the cemetery, he discovers his late wife's grave was robbed, with Dr. Faraday's corpse lying beside it.
Mr. Wainright notices a light on inside the family's guest cottage. Inside, he finds the bodies of each member of the Top Ten seated at a table alongside his dead wife's corpse. He then sees Ginny enter the room with a birthday cake, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself, seeming to have lost her mind. Ginny's father cries. Ginny suddenly slashes her father's throat. He dies, failing to notice another girl is seated at the table with her head down. Ginny then goes toward the girl, who also appears to be Ginny. As the seated Ginny wakes, the murderous Ginny we have seen throughout the film yells that she did it all for her, as she ruined her last party. Suddenly the two Ginnys struggle and the other girl is revealed as Ann, who has disguised herself as Ginny with an elaborate latex mask probably made by Alfred. Ann removes the mask, ranting and raving about her father's affair with Ginny's mother and how it destroyed her family. Ann reveals that she and Ginny are half-sisters and it's all her fault. Ginny manages to wrestle the knife from Ann and stabs her to death. As she stands over Ann's corpse holding the bloodied knife, a police officer enters the cottage and says, "What have you done?"
Cast
Production Development Happy Birthday to Me was produced by John Dunning and André Link, as a Cinépix production. Dunning and Link would team up again on another Canadian slasher, My Bloody Valentine (1981), which went into production within a week of Happy Birthday to Me wrapping; however, My Bloody Valentine was actually released first, rushed to meet a February 11, 1981 release date in time for Valentine's Day. Keen to get their classier, bigger-budgeted Happy Birthday to Me released, Dunning and Link quickly realized that gimmicks were being used up by other slasher movies in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980). Dunning and Link felt that a slasher film centered around a birthday could have universal appeal. They hired John Saxton, a University of Toronto English professor, to develop the story. The subplot involving Virginia's brain injury came from Dunning reading an article about regenerating frogs with electricity; he figured this could form the basis for a murder mystery where a girl suffers flashbacks and blackouts yet is unsure of her role in the mayhem around her.
A third draft of the film's screenplay, dated April 1980, features a different plot twist in which Virginia is revealed to be the killer, possessed by the spirit of her deceased mother. Although this ending logistically makes more sense than the ending that was filmed, the filmmakers thought that what was originally scripted was not climactic enough. Still, the majority of the film does point to this original ending, which indicates the switch came well into production. This version of the script also features a good number of scenes that were either never shot or rewritten, including some that show more clearly Alfred's love for Virginia and Virginia's difficult relationship with her father. The script was completely reworked by screenwriting team Timothy Bond and Peter Jobin before production started.
Director J. Lee Thompson had actively been looking to direct a thriller, and was hired as director. In the press material for the film, he stated: "What attracted me to this script was that the young people stood out as vivid, individual characters. The difference between a good chiller and exploitative junk, at least in my opinion, is whether or not you care about the victims".
Casting
Actress Melissa Sue Anderson, who had garnered childhood fame for her portrayal of Mary Ingalls on the television series Little House on the Prairie, was cast in the film's lead, marking her major feature debut. Lisa Langlois auditioned for the role of Ann, but the role went to Tracey Bregman instead.
Glenn Ford signed onto the project, portraying the role of Virginia's psychiatrist, as he was an admirer of director J. Lee Thompson.
Filming Happy Birthday to Me began filming in early July 1980.
The film's make-up effects were done by special effects artist Tom Burman (who replaced Stéphan Dupuis just three weeks before the cameras were due to start rolling). Dupuis later did the duties on another bigger budget Canadian slasher, Visiting Hours (1982), but left the production for undisclosed reasons. Ironically, in an issue of Fangoria from 1981, Burman criticizes the level of gore in films at that time. Director Thompson became known for tossing buckets of blood about on the set of the film to increase the on-screen gore. According to producer John Dunning, with the assistance of special effects man Tom Burman, Thompson "would be splashing blood all over the place".
Happy Birthday to Me completed filming in September 1980. Much of it was shot in and around Loyola College in Montreal, while the drawbridge scenes were actually filmed in Phoenix, New York, just outside Syracuse. The producers found it difficult to find the right bridge closer to the main production, as the expansion of the Highway system had made them increasingly rare. The whole town of Phoenix came to watch the dangerous stunts, where a total of fifteen cars were junked, and one stunt driver was hospitalized with two broken ankles. The bridge itself has since been removed and replaced by a bridge farther to the north. Additional photography occurred on the campuses of Concordia University and McGill University.
During production, the film's screenplay underwent rewrites, including an entirely new ending that featured Ann as the real killer instead of Ginny. According to actress Melissa Sue Anderson, her character of Ginny "was so convincing as the good girl, they didn’t want to sacrifice the audience’s sympathy," leading screenwriters Timothy Bond and Peter Jobin to rework Saxton's screenplay. This mid-production alteration required the special effects team to craft a plaster cast of Anderson's face to design a latex mask, which Ann is revealed to be wearing in the finale.
Music Bo Harwood and Lance Rubin provided the film's score. Syreeta, one-time wife of Stevie Wonder, provided the closing track, composed by Lance Rubin that plays over the credits.
Release Columbia Pictures submitted the film for review by the Motion Picture Association of America multiple times, and the film was repeatedly granted an X rating due to its graphic violence. The studio truncated some of the film's gorier sequences, among them Amelia's axe murder sequence, before it was finally granted an R rating. The film was originally planned to be released on the Friday before Easter 1981, but was delayed. Instead, the film was theatrically released in North America on May 15, 1981 in 1,124 theaters.
Marketing