Welcome to Horror Secret Handshakes, a monthly column spotlighting horror stories off the beaten path which serve as an instant vibe check with new friends, acquaintances, and fellow fans. If you both know the story, you feel the bond.
In the years following the success of Scream, the slasher subgenre enjoyed a revival whose effects are still echoing through horror cinema. Films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, Urban Legend, and of course the Scream sequels gave a new generation their own slasher icons.
Everyone has their favorites from this era of the slasher, but if you talk to horror fans who've really been through the whole crop of hits and flops alike, one title keeps coming up: Cherry Falls.
Released in October of 2000 on the USA Network, Cherry Falls never got a proper theatrical release in the United States, though it did run in theaters overseas. This limited exposure, coupled with its streaming scarcity in recent years, means that even millennial slasher deep divers have often missed it. Those who know, though, recognize it as a smart, often darkly hilarious descent into the intersection of horror movies and teenage sex, a smart, wild thriller with a black heart that more fans should know about.
In the town of Cherry Falls, someone is murdering teenagers, and as the daughter of the local sheriff (Michael Biehn), local teenager Jody (Brittany Murphy) is feeling the pressure and fear more than most. As her high school is gripped by the terror of a killer targeting teens left and right, an interesting detail in the case goes public: The killer seems to not only be targeting exclusively virgins, but marking them by carving "virgin" into their bodies.
Naturally, the idea that kids need to have sex or they'll be murdered sets off a firestorm in the smaller Southern town of Cherry Falls, as parents wonder how to navigate an impossible situation and teens both enthusiastically and reluctantly start to couple up in the hope that they'll survive.
It's here that Cherry Falls really starts to find its feet, after a brutal opening murder sequence and a first act that gamely sets up all the classic archetypes and tropes that come with slashers about horny teenagers. Like Scream before it, this is a very self-aware film that understands exactly what it's poking at with its core idea. While Scream introduced and played with the "If you have sex in a horror movie, you're dead" rule, this film inverts it and asks what happens when an entire town comes to see sex as the only way out. I won't give too much away in terms of how it all plays out, but if you were around in the early 2000s, you know that teen purity culture was a big deal, and a horror film that makes those things literal life-and-death decisions with this level of humor and intelligence is a wonderful thing.
Then there's the killer themselves, who departs from the traditional masked slasher approach and arrives looking like something out of a Dario Argento or Brian De Palma film, clad in a black leather jacket and stockings and sporting long black hair that hides their face. At a time when everyone was running around in Ghostface masks, it's both refreshing and something of a throwback, twisting Cherry Falls into something a bit closer to an Italian giallo film than a lot of modern slashers. That's just the horror nerd in me digging the design, but it really does feel like something quite different from the hits of the era.
But perhaps the most important ingredient in Cherry Falls' success is the film's sense of humor. It's not that the movie refuses to take its premise seriously. There's a satirical edge here that's honed into something quite sharp, and director Geoffrey Wright and writer Ken Selden never let the film verge into "we know this is dumb" knowing wink territory. Instead, we get kids who reel at the improbability of their situation, adults who flail around trying to find a way out of the most awkward situation of their lives, and a film that's willing to both poke fun at how seriously we take the idea of virginity and how trivial sex can be. It's brilliant, it's laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it never lets go of its scares.
Whether you're a slasher movie completist or a casual horror viewer just looking for something a bit different, if you get the chance to check out Cherry Falls, go for it. One day you'll come across someone like me, or the other slasher superfans I've met, and their eyes will light up when you tell them that you also adore this wild little movie.
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