Freaky: Blumhouse’s body-swapping horror-comedy gets trailer

A teen girl and a serial killer swap bodies in Freaky, leading to a battle for identity in the new horror-comedy from the director of Happy Death Day.

Writer-director Christopher Landon has been courting the teen vote for some time now. He rose to prominence with the Boy Scouts-by-way-of-Porky’s zombie flick, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. Blumhouse sniffed him out for the Groundhog Day horror variant, Happy Death Day (and its sequel). Now he returns with Freaky, a genre update of Freaky Friday.

For anyone unfamiliar, the premise of Disney’s Freaky Friday involved a mother and daughter swapping personalities one fateful day. Freaky takes that premise and swaps out a teenage girl’s personality with a serial killer (Vince Vaughn).

The trailer is fairly standard-issue Blumhouse fare. Whereas their Halloween and Black Christmas updates erred on the side of reverence for their forebears, their lighter offerings are promoted with the slick gloss of a music video (not surprisingly, Die Antwoord’s “I Fink You Freaky” features prominently here).

Freaky itself looks overproduced in the manner of many modern horrors, not to mention heavy on visual FX and self-aware stereotypes (“You’re black! I’m gay! We’re gonna die!”). The trailer begins with self-referential irony as our protagonist, Millie (Kathryn Newton) posits that she’d be the first victim in a slasher flick. (Which is strange, because despite her status of wearing the school-mascot costume during a football game, she looks exactly like Amber Heard.)

While Newton seems appealing enough to carry the premise of this as-yet-unrated film (the trailer alludes to some deaths that could deliver the gore, if Blumhouse resists the PG-13 siren song), it’s a treat to see Vaughn return to his comedic roots. It may not be Swingers-style genius, but his moments (as “Millie”) are genuinely amusing. After a couple pitch-dark turns that showcased his dramatic range (Dragged Across Concrete, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Season 2 of True Detective), it’ll be nice to see him get in touch with his goofy side again.

Freaky will be released theatrically on Friday, November 13.

Let us know what you think of the Freaky trailer in the comments.