Why horror movies like Heart Eyes love Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Halloween

This week, there's a perfect date night movie landing in UK cinemas. Bridget Jones couldn't ever match up to Heart Eyes — a new horror film about a serial killer who slaughters loved-up couples on Valentine's Day. It's a delightful nod to the fact that slasher movies, ever since the genre first caught fire in the 1970s, have been an archetypal first date viewing experience.

But more significantly, Heart Eyes is yet another example of a particular slasher sub-genre — movies based around particular celebration days. Whether it's Halloween, Christmas, or just about any other festival you can think of, there's a slasher movie there to mark it on the calendar in blood.

Part of this is simply that celebration days provide an easy way to sell a slasher movie. These are often films that come without big name actors or big name filmmakers, not to mention the fact they all tend to be quite similar in structure and narrative. If you don't have a high-concept idea at the heart of your story — like Happy Death Day's time loop or Terrifier's killer clown — it's difficult to stand out from the crowd.

There's also a sense of polarity at play. These celebration days are associated with happiness, relaxation, and family. So the contrast between those emotions and the blood-soaked turmoil of the average slasher story is exactly the sort of oil-and-water combination that audiences can't help but find compelling.

As Dr Darren Elliott-Smith, senior lecturer in film at the University of Hertfordshire, told The Guardian in 2018 when talking about Christmas horror: "We like the idea of watching films that offer an alternative to the saccharine films we are encouraged to watch over the festive period. Like a good Christmas movie, a good horror also ultimately encourages survival against the odds and a sense of community that is restored at the end of the film."

Read more: How ‘Heart Eyes’ Director Josh Ruben Made the Leap to Studio Movies Without Sacrificing His Personality (The Wrap, 7 min read)

Christmas is one of the most popular time periods to set a horror movie. The 1974 slasher film Black Christmas — an underrated early classic of the genre — has since been remade twice, in 2006 and 2019, while we've also had films like Silent Night, Deadly Night and the utterly risible Santa's Slay. Terrifier 3 even took Art the Clown into the festive season in 2024. The iconography around Christmas is already red, so they were halfway there even before the blood started flowing.

Halloween, of course, plays host to one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time, with Michael Myers hacking and slashing against a backdrop of pumpkins and cheap fancy dress costumes. Of course, those movies are far from being the only Halloween horrors, with 2007 anthology tale Trick 'r Treat also staking a claim to that crown.

The colourful iconography of October's creepiest night also lends itself well to more family-friendly horror tales. The likes of ParaNorman, Casper, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and Goosebumps have used spooky season to play with horror tropes to give children a healthy dose of scares without the gore and peril of more adult horror tales.

Read more: 10 under-appreciated horror films to stream this Halloween (Yahoo Entertainment, 11 min read)

Heart Eyes, meanwhile, has some company in the Valentine's Day sub-genre thanks to 1980s shlock classic My Bloody Valentine and its 3D noughties remake. Eli Roth, meanwhile, gave us Thanksgiving in 2023, while the anthology film Holidays covers eight separate special days — including St Patrick's Day and Easter. Disappointingly, the controversial 1980s horror Mother's Day — and its 2010 remake — might not actually be set on its titular day at all. Thankfully, Mother's Day did get its time in the spotlight with a segment in Holidays.

On the simplest level, as we pointed out earlier, special days allow you to sell a horror movie easily in a way that gets audiences through the door. It provides the opportunity to twist traditional, familiar iconography into something terrifying — hence all of those blood-spattered Santa hats and the way Heart Eyes transforms symbols of love into a sinister stare.

Read more: Devon Sawa on His New Film ‘Heart Eyes,’ Pioneering Horror and the Appeal of Playing a Douchebag (Us Weekly, 6 min read)

So this is a marketing ploy that isn't going anywhere in the near future. All we have to ask is when Pancake Day will get its time in the horror spotlight. Oh, hang on, the 2009 short film Shrove Tuesday got there first. There truly isn't a single original idea left. What next? A serial killer going wild on Maundy Thursday? We wouldn't bet against it.

Heart Eyes is in UK cinemas from 14 February.