My Bloody Valentines at 45: This holiday thriller deserves the same legacy as Halloween

Replacing lots of love with lots of blood

There’s always been a deep irony that follows holiday horror films. Typically, we associate holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day with whimsical joy, togetherness, and romance. Slapping the horror genre on saccharine happiness feels like kicking someone while their back is turned mid-hug.

On the other end of the spectrum, haters of the holidays will feel right at home with holiday horror. If that’s the case for you, then you owe it to yourself to give My Bloody Valentine — the epitome of an anti-Valentine’s Day film — a try on the occasion of its 45th anniversary.

Directed by George Mihalka with a screenplay by John Beaird, My Bloody Valentine takes place in the small mining town of Valentine Bluffs. Two decades before the movie begins, two supervisors working at the mine leave early to attend a Valentine’s Day party in town, while, unbeknownst to them, a cave collapse strands the remaining group of men. A year after the collapse, the only survivor gets his revenge. He murders those two supervisors and leaves their hearts in a box of Valentine’s Day chocolate with a warning for the town: If they ever host a Valentine’s Day dance again, he’ll return to killing.

In the present day, a group of miners and their girlfriends plan to do just that.

Much like other holiday slashers before it, such as the genre-defining Halloween, My Bloody Valentine grapples with the notion of a community changed by death and struggling to move on. When a young Michael Myers kills his sister, the Myers family home becomes the town’s very own boogeyman that the locals refuse to acknowledge until Myers returns to the scene of the crime. For the town of Valentine Bluffs, holding a Valentine’s Day dance is a direct refusal to acknowledge the horrors that occurred 20 years earlier.

Despite the many similarities Halloween and My Bloody Valentine share — a masked serial killer, the iconic weapon of a kitchen knife or a miner’s pickaxe, an appreciation for artistic kills — the latter was never able to reach the same heights as the former. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s review of Mihalka’s holiday slasher was particularly egregious, with Ebert describing it as “a rip-off of Halloween” that, in comparison to director John Carpenter’s masterpiece, was one of many “lackluster imitations.”

But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see the distinct legacy My Bloody Valentine left behind. Mihalka’s schlocky slasher wasn’t the first film to depict Valentine’s Day as a horror show waiting to happen — that honor goes to the 1972 British horror anthology from director Freddie Francis, Tales from the Crypt, and its Valentine’s entry, “Poetic Justice”. Still, My Bloody Valentine undoubtedly capitalized on a growing trend in the same way director Bob Clark did with Black Christmas, only with Valentine’s Day. This is all but confirmed with the film’s changing title, originally titled The Secret in an attempt to hide Paramount’s plan to cash in on the holiday slasher craze. The next Valentine’s Day horror film, with Boaz Davidson’s Hospital Massacre, came out just one year later. In the decades since, countless more Valentines-themed slashers have presented horror fans with a fine collection of films that eagerly replace love and romance with lots of blood.

While My Bloody Valentine earned back what it cost to make, raking in $5.72 million, it was still considered a disappointment compared to distributor Paramount Pictures' previous horror movie, which had brought in $40 million and was released just a year before: the legendary Friday the 13th.

And while it failed to capture audiences’ hearts at its 1981 debut, My Bloody Valentine still managed to garner a cult following, including director Quentin Tarantino. The 2009 reboot of My Bloody Valentine, directed by Patrick Lussier, went on to gross far more than the original, bringing in $101 million on a $15 million budget. With a storyline that, while capturing the essential beats of the original, expanded into something far more appealing to modern audiences — and with 3D technology to intrigue and repulse cinemagoers alike — the reboot showed there was still a lot of love for Mihalka’s horror thriller.

That love is set to continue, with Blumhouse Productions promising to bring the franchise back to life with a reboot sometime in the future. Considering how well the latest Valentine’s Day slasher Heart Eyes did at the cinema, maybe the third time will be the charm for My Bloody Valentine, and this trailblazing franchise will finally get the love its predecessors in the holiday horror genre earned.

My Bloody Valentine is available to stream for free via the Paramount Vault on YouTube.