Embracing The Freakiness Of Swapping Bodies

By Leila Latif

There was a trend a few years ago for re-editing trailers to change the film’s genre. Disney classic Mary Poppins (1964) became an unsettling horror while Hitchcock’s salacious masterpiece Psycho (1960) was now zany romantic comedy. This highlighted how much music and editing can totally transform something from hilarious to horrifying. After all, you only have to tweak the background music a bit to transform Andrew Lincoln silently professing his love for Kiera Knightly in Love Actually (2003) to make it seem (accurately) like the creepiest shit you’ve ever seen.

This could easily be done to virtually every body swap movie. Maybe it’s just me but in Big (1988) or 13 going on 30 (2004) I would be terrified, catatonic, dribbling, asking God why he has forsaken me level of terrified. Independence is great and all but I’ve also just shaved decades off my life! And Freaky Friday (2003) might be delightful but the potentially horrifying oedipal ramifications are skated over far too quickly (these are addressed in the 2007 David Duchovny film The Secret but the less we discuss that film, the better). In these films, there’s often a scene where someone screams into a mirror. This might be the only cliché that even attempts to illustrate the bone-chilling existential experience of transforming into another person.  I don’t know if anyone could bounce back from that over the course of 90 minutes no matter how peppy the soundtrack.

More than anything,  why does no one start planning the perfect crime? Perhaps not everyone lies awake figuring out how to get away with murder (not of anyone in particular but good to have a plan just in case) but if you gave me a different body I would figure out how to use that to do a more effective version of Promising Young Woman’s (2020) fight again toxic masculinity.

While, unlike Vince Vaughn’s character in Freaky (2021), I am not a psychotic serial killer that would immediately use my new body to start hacking away people… I get it.

Freaky, which came out in the US last year and finally arrives in the UK next week is a delightfully unhinged mash up of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th. Vaughn plays The Blissfield Butcher, an ageing serial killer with a mystical dagger. Not much background is given because we horror aficionados know this guy like the back of our hands: he loves to kill, hates horny teens drinking cheap booze and has MacGuyver levels of skill at turning virtually anything into a deadly weapon (particular praise must go to the creativity of his “death by Montrachet”).

He swaps bodies with Kathryn Newton’s Millie Kessler, a mild mannered high school student who is treated abysmally by some of her classmates and teachers. This is where it gets interesting, and the Butcher turns his attention to first her foes and then her friends. It's then down to Millie in the Butcher’s body to stop the Butcher in Mille’s body’s evil plan. Try saying that out loud three times.

Props to Vaughn and Newton for leaning into the physicality of these transformations. Vaughn could easily have ended up doing some lame teen-girl schtick (looking at you Rob Schnieder in The Hot Chick (2002) ), reducing Millie to a caricature, but he ends up with something significantly more subtle. It’s particularly amusing to watch Millie dealing with suddenly being 6’5 and Vaughn’s nailing of how a teenage girl runs is worth the price of admission alone. This is something that is frequently done badly, but Freaky’s central performances are delightfully well observed and mine plenty of comedy between generous helpings of gore with a tone not dissimilar to what director Christopher Landon pulled off in Happy Death Day (2017).

There are times where I wasn’t convinced that they had swapped bodies at all, that this was all going to be some sort of splintered identity situation where Newton was playing the super-ego and Vaughn embodying the id. That maybe this was going to end up being an even more deranged combo of Freaky Friday, Friday the 13th and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) that the marketing had led me to believe. Which of course didn’t come to fruition but if the President of Hollywood is reading this, please make that film. 

More than anything, making Freaky Friday a horror film always made sense and, if anything, Freaky should push the existential horror of body-swapping further in its inevitably sequels. I want Vince Vaughn in the fetal position having an existential crisis, screaming into the void and reading Descartes to figure out the meaning of it all. I’d like to see Kathryn Newton using her newfound body to take a page out of Jigsaw’s book and exact grisly revenge on the American Healthcare System. After all, why be zany when you can be horrifying?

Leila Latif is a Sudanese writer & broadcaster based in London and the editor of Bloody Women. She is a regular contributor to Little White Lies, Total Film, The A.V. Club, Sight & Sound, Front Row and The Arts Hour. She is a horror film junkie who will defend Scream 4, Saw 6, The Evil Dead Remake and season 6 of Buffy with her dying breath.

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