10 / 10
Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U are two of the best time loop films ever made. Seen each three times. The 10 rating is what it deserves. Christopher Landon directing both films. Jessica Rothe leading both as Tree Gelbman. Blumhouse Productions delivering its standard high-margin model. The first film made $125 million on a $4.8 million budget. The sequel made $64 million on a $9 million budget. Both films owe their commercial success to actual craft.
I adore these two films. A slasher about a mean sorority girl stuck in a loop sounds like a gimmick somebody pitched on a napkin, and Landon and Rothe turned it into the most purely fun pair of horror comedies I know, with more heart than they had any right to carry. If I’ve got a complaint, it’s that there are only two of them.
The Setup (First Film)
Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up in a college dorm bed on her birthday with a hangover and no memory of the night before. She insults her sorority sisters, snubs a one-night stand named Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), and dismisses everyone else who crosses her path. She walks across campus on her way to a birthday party that night. A masked killer in a Bayfield University baby mascot mask stabs her to death in a tunnel.
Tree wakes up in the same dorm bed on the same morning. The day repeats. She tries to change the outcome and dies again. The day repeats. She tries different approaches. She dies different ways. Each repetition leaves her with the previous day’s accumulated injuries, exhaustion, and knowledge but no permanent damage.
The killer is wearing the mask of Bayfield’s mascot, a baby in a bonnet. The mask is intentionally silly. Landon and screenwriter Scott Lobdell understood that pure horror wouldn’t have worked. The mask signals from the opening that the film is going to play with the form instead of punish the audience with it.
The Groundhog Day Influence
Groundhog Day (1993) established the time loop comedy structure. The protagonist relives a day until he becomes a better person. Edge of Tomorrow (2014) ported the structure into science fiction action. Happy Death Day ports it into slasher horror. The combination shouldn’t work. A time loop is structurally a comedy device. A slasher film is structurally a horror device. Landon makes the combination work by treating the horror seriously and the loop comically.
Tree’s transformation across the film mirrors Phil Connors’s transformation across Groundhog Day.
She starts the film as a self-centered sorority queen with a contemptuous attitude toward people who try to be kind to her. She’s been having an affair with a married professor. She’s cut off contact with her father since her mother’s death three years earlier. She’s been making her sorority sisters smaller because making them smaller makes her feel less small. The loop forces her to face all of it.
For Writers
A familiar premise can work in a new genre, and Happy Death Day shows how. The time loop structure was already worn out by 2017. Landon and Lobdell didn’t invent anything new. They moved a known structure into a genre that hadn’t absorbed it yet. The lesson for writers is that originality is overrated. If you have a structure that works and you can apply it to material it hasn’t been applied to, you have an angle. You don’t need a new idea.
You need a different combination of existing ideas. Most successful genre fiction works this way. Happy Death Day’s actual creative contribution is the slasher-time-loop combination. The slasher elements are conventional. The time loop is conventional. The combination is the work.
The Jessica Rothe Performance
Rothe leads both films with a performance that has to work at multiple tones. Early Tree is the sorority queen the audience doesn’t like. Mid-loop Tree is exhausted, frightened, and starting to recognize what the loop is trying to teach her.
Late Tree is the person Tree could have been if she’d paid attention earlier. The way Rothe makes that change feel real in about ninety minutes is what sells me on the whole franchise.
Rothe handles the comedy and the horror with the same commitment. The death montage where Tree dies eight different ways in succession is physical comedy played at the rhythm of a slasher film. The scene works because Rothe takes the deaths seriously. The audience laughs because the deaths are absurd, not because the actress is signaling that they’re absurd.
The performance is one of the strongest leading roles in 2010s horror. Rothe was twenty-nine during filming. Most actresses get cast as sorority queens at twenty-four.
Rothe brings the maturity of a slightly older performer to a role written for someone younger. The age helps. Tree’s arc is about a woman who’s older than her behavior suggests learning to act her actual age. Rothe plays both states convincingly.
The First Film’s Resolution
The killer turns out to be Tree’s roommate Lori (Ruby Modine), who has been poisoning her on previous loops with a poisoned birthday cupcake. The reveal is structured as a fakeout. The film identifies a hospital patient named John Tombs as the killer, has Tree confront and kill him, and then reveals that the cupcake Lori made was the actual murder weapon. The death loop has been about Lori’s jealousy over Tree’s affair with the married professor.
The resolution sequence is the film’s clearest demonstration of the Tree transformation. Tree refuses to eat the cupcake. She eats it anyway when Lori insists. She’s decided that breaking Lori’s homicidal jealousy is worth dying for one more time. The choice is the character growth made literal. Old Tree wouldn’t have died for anyone. New Tree dies on purpose to fix the loop.
The cupcake gambit is the kind of plot mechanic that shouldn’t work. The audience has spent ninety minutes watching Tree avoid death. The final move is to embrace it. The mechanic works because Rothe has sold the character’s commitment. The audience believes Tree would make this choice because the film has shown her growing into someone who would.
The Setup (Second Film)
The sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, opens on Ryan Phan (Phi Vu), Tree’s boyfriend Carter’s roommate, getting murdered by the same baby-mask killer.
Ryan starts looping. Tree, awakened by the violence, learns that Ryan is now stuck in his own version of her experience. The cause is a quantum experiment Ryan has been running with two grad school friends. The machine, called Sissy, has trapped Tree in the loop in the first film and has now trapped Ryan.
The sequel pivots from horror toward science fiction within the first ten minutes.
Ryan, Andrea (Sarah Yarkin), and Samar (Suraj Sharma) are trying to build a quantum cooling system that creates time bubbles. The system has been the cause of Tree’s loop the whole time. The sequel’s task is to fix Sissy without killing anyone. The setup is more ambitious than the first film’s. Landon understood that pure repetition wouldn’t have worked.
The Dimensional Twist
The grad students fix Sissy. That sends Tree into an alternate dimension where the events of the first film happen differently. In the new dimension, Tree’s mother is still alive. Carter is dating someone else. The professor Tree was sleeping with in the first dimension is Lori’s boyfriend in this one. The film becomes a study of what Tree would give up to keep her mother alive.
The choice is the film’s emotional core. The first-dimension Tree had cut off her father after her mother’s death and had been drifting through college as someone who refused to feel anything. The new-dimension Tree gets to have her mother back. She also has to give up Carter. The film respects the difficulty of the choice. Tree spends most of the runtime trying to find a way to keep both lives. The film denies her that resolution.
A follow-up that could have coasted on the gimmick hands Tree a choice between her mother and Carter, and that’s what made me like the sequel, because the choice moves me more than anything in the first film. Refusing to let her keep both is the bravest call in the franchise, and I’m grateful Landon had the nerve to make it.
For Writers
How do you write a sequel that justifies its existence? Happy Death Day 2U shows you. Most horror sequels repeat the first film’s structure with a different killer. The Happy Death Day sequel expands the premise instead of repeating it. The first film was a slasher with a time loop. The second film is a science fiction film about alternate dimensions that happens to contain the time loop. The shift respects the audience’s investment in the first film without asking the audience to watch the first film a second time.
The lesson for writers is that sequels work when they treat the original premise as a setup instead of as a template. If your sequel asks “what else can the world of the original do,” you have a sequel. If your sequel asks “how do we do that again,” you have a copy.
The Christopher Landon Direction
Christopher Landon came to Happy Death Day from a career producing and writing Paranormal Activity sequels.
The Paranormal Activity work taught him to deliver scares on Blumhouse budgets. He brought that discipline to Happy Death Day and 2U. The first film cost $4.8 million. The sequel cost $9 million. Both films use the budgets visibly but never look cheap. The sets are college campus locations that the production dressed without much modification. The visual effects are simple enough to remain credible.
Landon’s direction is tonally precise. The horror sequences play horror.
The comedy sequences play comedy. The transitions between the tones aren’t labored. The audience accepts that the same scene can shift tones because Landon has built the trust through careful execution. He’s done similar work since with Freaky (2020) and We Have a Ghost (2023). Happy Death Day 2U remains his peak.
The Bayfield University setting works partly because Landon shoots it as a real campus instead of as a horror movie set. The dining hall has students eating. The library has students studying. The killer’s mask is incongruous against the realism of the setting. The contrast makes the killer scarier because the background is mundane.
The Supporting Cast
Israel Broussard plays Carter Davis in a similar key across both films. Carter is decent. Carter is patient. Carter doesn’t understand most of what is happening to him because Tree keeps showing up to his door yelling about time loops he hasn’t lived through. Broussard plays the bewilderment without making it stupid. Carter is the kind man Tree should have been paying attention to. The performance keeps the romantic stakes real.
I’ve got a soft spot for Carter. Broussard makes plain decency funny, and that’s hard to do, and every time he opens his door to another frantic Tree I’m completely on his side.
Ruby Modine plays Lori in the first film and across the sequel. The first-film Lori is the murderer. The sequel Lori is dating the murdered professor. Modine plays both versions as the same person with different circumstances. The choice supports the films’ argument that the dimension changes alter context without altering the underlying person.
Phi Vu, Sarah Yarkin, and Suraj Sharma fill out the grad student trio in the second film.
The ensemble works because the three performers play distinct characters who happen to be friends. Vu’s Ryan gets the early loop sequences. Yarkin’s Andrea handles the technical exposition. Sharma’s Samar provides the emotional anchor. The three of them keep the sequel’s expanded premise feeling tractable.
For Writers
Both Happy Death Day films use the time loop to force their protagonist into character growth she wouldn’t have chosen voluntarily. The mechanic makes the loop morally productive instead of just structurally repetitive. Tree isn’t learning to escape the loop. Tree is learning to be someone who deserves to escape the loop. The lesson for writers is that repetitive structures need a moral engine to justify themselves. If your protagonist is just trying to survive the repetition, your repetition is structurally circular.
If your protagonist is trying to become someone who can survive the repetition, your repetition becomes a transformation arc. The Happy Death Day films calibrate this through Rothe’s performance work and the script’s commitment to letting Tree be unlikable before she becomes likable.
The Third Film
Landon has talked publicly about wanting to make a third Happy Death Day film since 2019. Blumhouse hasn’t yet greenlit production as of this writing. Universal originally released the films, and the rights remain with Blumhouse and Universal. The third film would presumably resolve the dimensional questions the second film opened.
Jessica Rothe has said in interviews that she wants to make the third film. Israel Broussard has said the same. The principal cast remains young enough to return. The script Landon has discussed publicly would involve Tree training a new generation of loopers across multiple dimensions. The pitch is more ambitious than the first two films and would require a larger budget than the second film received.
The delay is the standard Hollywood economics issue. The second film underperformed the first film’s box office despite being a stronger film artistically. Studios extrapolate from the comparison instead of from the actual revenue. The second film made $64 million on $9 million. That’s a healthy return. It’s just not the spectacular return the first film delivered. The third film exists in development limbo because of math.
The limbo drives me up the wall. Rothe wants to come back, Broussard wants to come back, Landon has a pitch, and a sequel that made $64 million on $9 million somehow reads as a warning in a studio office. I want the third film badly, and the numbers keeping it off the schedule looks petty from where I sit.
Craft: Two Of The Best Time Loop Films Ever Made
Craft Note
Both Happy Death Day films work at peak within their commercial tone. The Jessica Rothe lead performance leads both films. The Christopher Landon direction handles tonal shifts with precision. The Scott Lobdell screenplay (first film) and the Landon screenplay (sequel) commit to character growth alongside genre execution. The Blumhouse production model delivers maximum visual value per dollar. The Bayfield University setting grounds both films in real-feeling campus geography.
The combined Happy Death Day project is one of the cleanest time loop achievements in cinema. The first film is slasher with a Groundhog Day engine. The sequel is science fiction with the loop mechanic embedded inside a larger dimensional premise. The two films together do what most film franchises fail to do. That’s expand the original premise without abandoning what made the original work.
The 10 rating is what it earns across multiple viewings. Both films reward rewatching. The character work in the first film holds up. The structural ambition of the second film holds up. The third film would complete the trilogy. Until it arrives, the existing two films stand as a complete creative statement about time loops, identity, and the work of becoming someone the loop will release.
Is Happy Death Day (2017) and Happy Death Day 2U as good as people say?
A 10, and both films deserve it. Happy Death Day turns a slasher into a Groundhog Day story with a real character arc, and 2U is braver than any sequel needs to be. Rothe drives both, Landon never lets the tone slip, and the only thing I’d change is that Hollywood still hasn’t let him finish the trilogy.
