Happy Birthday to Me is a 1981 slasher film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker, Frances Hyland, Tracey Bregman, and Lisa Langlois. Set at a New England high school academy, the film follows a series of brutal murders of students who are part of an elite clique in the days leading up to the birthday of one of its members. A co-production between the United States and Canada, Happy Birthday to Me was filmed in Montreal and upstate New York in 1980. Happy Birthday to Me was distributed by Columbia Pictures, who invested $4 million in promotional materials. The studio marketed the film for its elaborate murder sequences, billed as "six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see." The film was released in the United States and Canada on May 15, 1981. It received mostly negative reviews from critics and grossed $10.6 million against a $3.5 million budget.
Plot Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright is a pretty and popular high school senior at Crawford Academy, a member of the school's "Top Ten," an elite clique of the most privileged and popular students. Each night, the group meets at the Silent Woman Tavern, a local pub. One night en route to the tavern, Bernadette O'Hara is attacked in her car by an unseen assailant. She struggles and plays dead to catch the killer off-guard before running to get help. She then runs into an unseen individual whom she is familiar with and begs for help, but the person slashes her neck with a straight razor. The Top Ten becomes concerned when Bernadette fails to arrive at the pub. Upon leaving, the group sees the nearby drawbridge raising and decide to play a game of chicken. Ginny is pushed into a car by Ann Thomerson, and each of the group attempt to cross the bridge as it raises; the car Ginny is in barely clears the bridge, crashing as it meets the other side. Distraught, Ginny runs home, stopping at her mother's grave in an adjacent cemetery. At her home, Etienne, a Top Ten member, breaks into Ginny's room and steals her underwear. Bernadette fails to show up at school the following day. Ginny, who is plagued by repressed memories, visits her on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday, with whom she previously underwent an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure after surviving a harrowing accident at the drawbridge. As Ginny attempts to resume her normal life, her fellow Top Ten members are murdered in vicious and violent ways: Etienne is strangled when his scarf gets thrown into the spokes of his motorcycle, and Greg's neck is crushed in his room while lifting weights. Ann and Ginny go to Alfred's house as he has been acting odd lately and discovers he is an elaborate prosthetic make up artist with a creepy replica of Bernadette's head. One night, Alfred, a Top Ten member who is infatuated with Ginny, follows her to her mother's grave. In retaliation, she stabs him with a pair of garden shears. On the weekend of Ginny's 18th birthday, her father leaves for a business trip. After a school dance, Ginny invites Steve to her house and prepares shish kebabs. While the two are drinking wine and smoking marijuana, Ginny begins to feed Steve with the kebab, but violently shoves the skewer down his throat. Ann arrives at Ginny's house the following morning and finds Ginny taking a shower. In the shower, Ginny has a flashback of her mother's death: Her mother, a newly inducted socialite, invites the Top Ten to Ginny's birthday celebration four years earlier and is concerned when no guests have arrived. After being questioned by her mother, Ginny tearfully mentions the group are attending a party Ann is having instead. Humiliated, her mother drives drunk to the Thomersons' house with Ginny, where she is denied entry by Mr. Thomerson's gatekeeper. Enraged and upset, she attempts to drive across a raising drawbridge, causing their car to fall into the water. Pinned beneath the steering wheel, Ginny's mother drowns. Ginny, however, manages to swim to safety. Paranoid that she may be murdering her friends during blackout episodes, Ginny visits Dr. Faraday. When she confronts him over the procedure she underwent, he is evasive, and she murders him with a fireplace poker. Mr. Wainright returns home during a thunderstorm for Ginny's birthday and finds a pool of blood in Ginny's bedroom. He flees hysterically and finds one of Ginny's friends, Amelia, standing in the yard in what seems to be a state of shock, clutching a wrapped gift. In the cemetery, he discovers his late wife's grave was robbed, with Dr. Faraday's corpse lying beside it. Mr. Wainright notices a light on inside the family's guest cottage. Inside, he finds the bodies of each member of the Top Ten seated at a table alongside his dead wife's corpse. He then sees Ginny enter the room with a birthday cake, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself, seeming to have lost her mind. Ginny's father cries. Ginny suddenly slashes her father's throat. He dies, failing to notice another girl is seated at the table with her head down. Ginny then goes toward the girl, who also appears to be Ginny. As the seated Ginny wakes, the murderous Ginny we have seen throughout the film yells that she did it all for her, as she ruined her last party. Suddenly the two Ginnys struggle and the other girl is revealed as Ann, who has disguised herself as Ginny with an elaborate latex mask probably made by Alfred. Ann removes the mask, ranting and raving about her father's affair with Ginny's mother and how it destroyed her family. Ann reveals that she and Ginny are half-sisters and it's all her fault. Ginny manages to wrestle the knife from Ann and stabs her to death. As she stands over Ann's corpse holding the bloodied knife, a police officer enters the cottage and says, "What have you done?"
Cast
Production
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