Freaky Writer: “Streaming Isn’t the Enemy”

The global covid-19 pandemic has only deepened the divide between many feature film directors and their audience, with filmmakers centering “the theatrical experience” as the end-all, be-all of cinema, while audiences just want to be able to see a movie without traveling 40 miles to the only open cinema, or risking their health in a crowded room during a pandemic. So it’s refreshing to see Michael Kennedy, writer of the 2020 slasher comedy Freaky, take to social media to offer a somewhat more nuanced take. While acknowleding that it’s nice to have a “normal” theatrical release for your movie, Kennedy offered the perspective that streaming “isn’t the enemy.”

He noted that Freaky, which only earned about $13 million at the box office after opening last November, is finding a new life on HBO Max. He also said he was happy to know that the movie gave people an opportunity to enjoy something during a pretty dark time.

You can see the tweet below.

A riff on the Freaky Friday concept, Freaky centers on a teenage girl who unintentionally switches bodies with a middle-aged male serial killer. The movie stars Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Celeste O’Connor, and Alan Ruck, and was produced by Blumhouse, and directed by Christopher Landon, the son of legendary TV actor Michael Landon and director of Happy Death Day and Paranormal Activity: the Marked Ones.

Kennedy is a longtime animation producer on Family Guy and served as a writer on the short-lived animated comedy Bordertown. His next movie, Time Cut, is expected to be released in 2022.

It isn’t unusual for horror movies to be the tip of the spear when it comes to changes in how the audience interacts with film; after all, Full Moon Features and their catalog of direct-to-VHS hororr movies changed the face of home video in the 1980s, just as Blockbuster was becoming a household name and movie studios were able to rely on million in sales and rental revenues to help offset theatrical disappointments like Tremors and Mallrats, making them cult classics and giving them permanent homes on movie lovers’ shelves.