Happy Death Day: Groundhog Day meets Scream in gore-free horror

Happy Death Day is a 2017 American slasher film directed by Christopher Landon, and written by Scott Lobdell. It stars Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, and Ruby Modine. The film was produced by Jason Blum through his Blumhouse Productions banner. The film is also in association with Digital Riot Media and Vesuvius Productions.

It follows a college student who is murdered on her birthday and begins reliving the day repeatedly, at which point she sets out to find the killer and stop her death. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 71% based on 133 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Happy Death Day puts a darkly humorous scifi spin on slasher conventions, with added edge courtesy of a starmaking performance from Jessica Rothe.”

On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 57 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “B” on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it a 52% “definite recommend”.

Critics noted that although the film makes laudatory attempts at merging genres—including romantic comedy, horror and “campus satire”—the end results were mixed. Jamie East from The Sun likened it to a “slasher Mean Girls,” while Chris Agar of Screen Rant said that the “fun, if silly, blending of genre tropes ... ends up being a double-edged sword.”