Radomír D. Kokeš Masaryk University

Panoptikum nr 22 (29) 2019 Panoptikum 2019, 22: 128-143. https://doi.org/10.26881/pan.2019.22.04 Radomír D. Kokeš Masaryk University Spiral, Slasher, and Sequel: Case of Happy Death Day (2017) and Happy Death Day 2U (2019) This article is going to focus on the films Happy Death Day (2017) and Hap- py Death Day 2U (2019). Both are movies from Blumhouse Productions. Both were directed by Christopher Landon. Both follow the same group of young characters confronted with a mysterious serial killer in a baby mask. Above all, both handle the spiral narrative. As I wrote elsewhere1, as such, we can recognise a specific storytelling pattern with a protagonist stuck in an iterative segment of space, time and causality – and this protagonist is not only fully aware of this situation but also tries to deal with it. What for other unaware characters is a closed loop is for the protagonist an open experience with an odd number of turns of time spiral. That is why I call it the spiral narrative, which is known mostly from high-budget films such as Groundhog Day (1993) or Edge Of Tomorrow (2014). Nevertheless, as will be explained, it occurs in dozens of other theatrical films, VOD films, television films or television shows. However, what are the reasons why, when there is an extensive set of works to choose from, do I take just the doublet of Happy Death Day films? (1) On their example, the article is going to discuss my general hypothesis about spiral narrative works as a series of applications of the innovative narrative schema as 1 See: Kokeš, 2018; Kokeš, forthcoming. 128 Cinema of Puzzles Radomír D. Kokeš an aesthetic tool. Such a hypothesis consists of three broader dimensions: (a) the aesthetic dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as a part of the artistic work; (b) the creative dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as part of the problem-solution process of filmmaking; (c) the production dimension, i.e. the spiral schema as a part of the competition of audiovisual production. (2) An even more important reason, though, for selecting just these two films has been the very fact that Happy Death Day 2U is a sequel of Happy Death Day. In the “post-classical era” of global fran- chises, sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots and transmedia storytellings, this does not seem to be exceptional. However, in the context of the spiral narrative, this is an unprecedented step that raises several questions. It is possible to say that since the 1990s creators have appealed to this schema to innovate already established patterns. It may be the established development of a character (such as a “grumpy and selfish person becomes a better man”, e.g. Groundhog Day). It may be subject matter (such as the “significance of Christmas for family values”, e.g. Christmas Every Day, 1996). It may be a way to effectively motivate the construction of reasonably extreme situations in which the protago- nists of long-term television series are involved (only until 1999, I have discovered eleven episodes of American long-running television series using the spiral schema). Nevertheless, most often, as we will see, the spiral narrative schema seems to be used as a tool of another genre or subgenre innovation. In other words, with the help of the schema application, they can show well-known techniques, situations or characters in a new context. Does it mean that before the 1990s spiral narrative appearances were rarer? No, before the 1990s there were none2. As was suggested, there are three dimensions in which we can think about spiral narratives. Although this article is mainly formally an analytical one, the questions connected to the aesthetic dimension of the spiral narrative will not stay in the centre. Questions like: Based on what principles do spiral narratives work as formal systems? What types of fictional worlds do they establish? What 2 I refer primarily to North American audiovisual production. This is because, although we can speak of several instances of spiral narrative audiovisual works outside North American production, such applications of the schema are highly uncommon. As far as I know, we could not find a country outside the United States and Canada where more than one such film was made (South Korea, Italy, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany). Quite specific examples of spiral narratives are represented in a Russian film from 1987 and a Japanese film from 1984, because both of them are significantly different from all other spiral narratives, in their mood as well as in the parallel narrative techniques they involved. It is a question of if they were known outside their domestic countries before the first American applications of the spiral schema were shot (1990 short film 12:01 PM based on the short story by Richard Lupoff, 1993 television feature film 12:01 based on the same story, 1993 Groundhog Day). Of course we can consider other predecessors like Charles Dicken’s novelette A Christmas Carol, films about one-more-chance to do something (e.g. 1947 Repeat Performance, 1987 Peggy Sue Got Married or 1990 Mr. Destiny) or European loop narrative films (e.g. 1987 Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance). More about this in ibidem. 129 Spiral, Slasher, and Sequel: Case of Happy Death Day... Panoptikum nr 22 (29) 2019 logic do they follow? For us, more important will be the questions focused on creative and production aspects. In the former dimension, we can ask: To what extent and in what ways do filmmakers use a spiral narrative schema to innovate already established patterns? To what degree and how do they negotiate with various patterns, models and traditions? In what ways do they deal with the nec- essarily repetitive features of such storytelling? How do they guide our attention? In the latter dimension, there is another question: Based on what likely strategy producers consider as a good idea to look for innovative potential in a spiral narrative schema? Because despite its modifiable potential, the application of the ba- sic narrative situation is still fairly overlapping. It should be said that on the one hand, it is not in the possibilities of this article to answer this relatively complex set of questions3, while on the other hand, the article is going to consider them while explaining Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2u. Problems, intentions, artworks However, we are confronted with a problem: How can we actually consider a work of art as the result of an innovative process? Let us turn to several sugges- tions formulated by art historian Michael Baxandall who offers thoughts about the artist in terms of problem and solution: “The maker of a picture or other historical artefact is a man addressing a problem of which his product is a finished and concrete solution. To understand it we try to reconstruct both the specific problem it was designed to solve and the specific circumstances out of which he was addressing it. This reconstruction is not identical with what he internally ex- perienced […]” (Baxandall, 1985, pp. 14–15). “Indeed I want explicitly to eschew any ambition to construct a narrative of how [the man] came to his design. […] What we are faced with is simply the task of organizing, in relation to a complex form, a number of heterogeneous circumstances that appear to have had a part in the designer’s conception” (ibidem, p. 30). But how to formulate such a problem in the case of an artwork and how to grasp the eternally elusive concept of an artistic intention? Baxandall writes that “the intention to which I am committed is not an actual, particular psychologi- cal state or even a historical set of mental events inside the heads [of artists]. […] Rather, it is primarily a general condition of rational human action which I posit in the course of arranging my circumstantial facts or moving about the triangle of re-enactment” (ibidem, p. 41). By triangle, he means the relationship between concepts of problem, concepts of culture (resources used or not used) and con- 3 For some answers see ibidem. In my thinking about innovative schema I loosely appear from Ernst Gombrich (Gombrich, 1960; Gombrich, 1971). 130 Cinema of Puzzles Radomír D. Kokeš cepts serves for our description of the artwork. The most important for us is that “what we do if we want to know about [the artist] is to play a conceptual game on the triangle. […] Indeed the whole basis of what I am calling inferential criticism is that one brings all three corners of the triangle, in an active relation to each other, to description of the object. Description and explanation interpenetrate each other” (ibidem, 34). It is time, to sum up, what we can borrow from these considerations for our own interests (however, only in necessary simplifying of ad hoc inspiration). It should be just the conceptual game of inferential criticism that is going to remain at the centre of our attempt to explain the creative as well as the production dimension behind Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2u. The aim of this conceptual game is not reconstructing the actual narrative of the creative process, the actual form, order and causality of artistic decisions in the intentional flux (cf. ibidem, 62–67). The aim is to understand these films concerning the solved creative and production problems: To innovate an established horror subgenre of slasher. To design a sequel to a film with such a specific narrative constellation that had never been “sequelised”. To promote and sell such a film in competition with other films.

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