‘It’s a Wonderful Knife’ is the Gay Holiday Slasher Movie You Need
It’s a Wonderful Knife. Kennedy’s debut effort, 2020’s Freaky, a robustly entertaining riff on body swap films, co-written with Christopher Landon, was met with both critical and audience acclaim.
But what to do for a follow-up?“I thought, ‘There haven’t been a ton of Christmas horror movies. That’s what I want to tackle next,'” says the 43-year-old Ohio native, before we’re briefly and adorably interrupted on Zoom by his dog, Bandit. “I thought, ‘What if I took a Christmas classic and turned it into a slasher movie?’ And It’s A Wonderful Life immediately came to mind.”The beloved 1946 Frank Capra chestnut concerns George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a despondent businessman who, on Christmas Eve, decides the world would be better off without him.
His suicide is stopped by an angel who shows him what life in his small town would have been like had he never existed. The results aren’t reassuring.“As an adult, you realize how fucking dark that movie really is,” says Kennedy, “and how scary, at times, it can actually be.
There is a horror element to it in the last 30 minutes. So I sat down and started creating my own narrative, and was like, ‘I have a really genuine way to tell a heartfelt Christmas movie through the lens of a horror movie.'”Directed by Tyler MacIntyre, the resulting film cleaves faithfully to the original’s basic premise, with a few shrewd twists to give it a bloody razor’s edge.
