Happy Birthday to Me (1981) on Netflix
R19811h 50mHorrorMysteryThriller
Virginia Wainwright, a senior at Crawford Academy, belongs to the Top Ten, the school's elite clique. As her 18th birthday approaches, members of the group are murdered one by one.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.0/1012,678 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes29%
Trailer
Plot summary
Virginia Wainwright is a senior at Crawford Academy, a private school, and a member of the Top Ten, the elite group of popular and privileged students who gather each night at the Silent Woman Tavern. She returns to school after surviving an accident at a drawbridge and an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure performed by her psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday. Virginia suffers from memory loss and blackouts, and as her 18th birthday approaches, members of the Top Ten are murdered one after another. While she tries to resume a normal life, she cannot account for where she is during her blackouts.
Cast
- Michel-René Labelleas Etienne Vercures (as Michel Rene Labelle)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director J. Lee Thompson became known for tossing buckets of blood around the set of Happy Birthday to Me to increase the on-screen gore, with producer John Dunning saying that Thompson, helped by special effects man Tom Burman, would be splashing blood all over the place.
- The drawbridge scenes were shot in Phoenix, New York, not near the Montreal production, because the expansion of the highway system had made suitable bridges scarce. The whole town watched the stunts, in which fifteen cars were junked and one stunt driver was hospitalized with two broken ankles.
- Columbia Pictures submitted Happy Birthday to Me to the MPAA repeatedly and it kept getting an X rating for graphic violence, so the studio cut some of the gorier sequences, including Amelia's axe murder, before it was finally granted an R rating.
SPOILER
The screenplay was rewritten mid-production with a new ending that made Ann the real killer instead of Ginny, and the change required the effects team to craft a plaster cast of Melissa Sue Anderson's face to design the latex mask Ann is revealed to be wearing in the finale.- The subplot about Virginia Wainwright's brain injury came from producer John Dunning reading an article about regenerating frogs with electricity, which he thought could form the basis for a murder mystery about a girl troubled by flashbacks and blackouts.
SPOILER
An April 1980 draft of the screenplay had Virginia revealed as the killer, possessed by the spirit of her dead mother, but the filmmakers dropped that twist because they thought the scripted ending was not climactic enough.- Make-up effects artist Tom Burman was brought in to replace Stéphan Dupuis on Happy Birthday to Me just three weeks before the cameras were due to start rolling.
