My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981)
Will you be mine?
A favorite film for horror aficionados to watch around February 14 each year, My Bloody Valentine is a legitimately great slasher movie. Set in the Canadian mining town of Valentine Bluffs, it features a homicidal miner who previously survived being buried alive, then sought revenge on those whose negligence caused the mine collapse — because they clocked out early to attend the town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance.
By the time it was released in 1981, the tropes of a successful slasher flicks had become more or less codified into popular cinema, following the evolution of Black Christmas, Halloween, The Driller Killer, Friday the 13th… But My Bloody Valentine doesn’t neatly follow these now-established rules of the genre. This is not your typically formulaic slasher movie. And it’s all the better for it.
After a brief cold open — in which two masked miners deep underground reveal they’re actually a young couple intent on a subterranean quickie, only to further reveal that the guy is actually a psychopath who impales his would-be lover on a pickaxe — we are thrust into the modern day Valentine Bluffs where the exposition of the town’s horrific past are conveyed efficiently and in an original and organic manner that doesn’t feel like the film is force-feeding you.
As the town prepares for it’s first Valentine’s dance in two decades, the film focuses on two distinct groups of people: a motley assortment of young adults (twentysomething miners and their girlfriends who apparently work all day and party all night every night) and a tight-knit group of adults (the Sheriff, the Mayor, and a pleasant community-minded woman who is spearheading the town’s festive decorations).
All the adults vividly recall the grisly murders of yesteryear, but they don’t like talking about it, save for hushed asides between themselves alluding to this being the first Valentine’s Day dance in 20 years. But after the Sheriff receives an anonymous gift — a heart-shaped chocolate box containing an actual heart — they being to worry that maybe the VD killer from the town’s past has returned. Harry Warden has supposedly been locked up in a psychiatric facility ever since his murder spree, but when the Sheriff calls the hospital to make sure he’s still safely where he can’t hurt anyone, the hospital can’t find any record of him being there…
And then the pleasant woman is unalived. Still, the Sheriff and Mayor don’t want to cause a panic, but they agree to scrap the plans for the Valentine celebrations out of an abundance of caution, knowing that it will likely prompt a repeat of the previous horrors. The kids, who up to this point have been removed from any sense of impending terror, decide that if they can’t have an officially sanctioned party in town, then they’ll throw their own secret soiree in the cafeteria at the mine instead.
And this is where the horror really begins. As the party proceeds, individuals and couples are slowly picked off in grotesque fashion. But before the youths realize that there’s a killer in their midst, a group of them venture down into the mine itself. Naturally, the killer stalks after them, culminating in a downright scary game of cat and mouse which makes for some gorily thrillingly cinema indeed.
My Bloody Valentine is a truly great horror movie, and a refreshing remix of our beloved slasher norms. Although most of the horrors are confined to the second half, there is enough nasty business before that to reassure you that this is most definitely a horror movie.
Up until they arrive at the party at the mine, our time with the younger Valentinians serves to familiarize us with them all as distinct and engaging characters. So, when a handful of our favorites ultimately find themselves trapped in the bowels of the earth with a madman, our hearts really do go out to them.