It’s a Wonderful Knife Filmmakers on Turning a Christmas Classic Into a Slasher

Turning classic movies or movie tropes into slashers has become something of a trend lately. Happy Death Day brought thrills to the Groundhog Day plot. Freaky took its cues from Freaky Friday and other body-swap films. The recently released Totally Killer put a bloody spin on Back to the Future. This weekend, It’s a Wonderful Knife, and you can guess which classic Christmas movie inspired the new slasher.

Tragedy Girls director Tyler MacIntyre and Freaky screenwriter Michael Kennedy teamed up for It’s a Wonderful Knife, taking the iconic story of George Bailey and giving it a modern spin, while also putting a serial killer at its center. It’s a Wonderful Life is already a tragic story at times, but turning it into a slasher is a challenge in and of itself. Ahead of the film’s release, ComicBook.com spoke with MacIntyre and Kennedy about how they brought the killer Christmas tale to life.

“I’ve always wanted to do a Christmas slasher, and so when I just thought about how I would do Freaky and Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life was the first thing that came to my head,” Kennedy said. “There’s such a unique template to that movie to begin with that also fits really well in horror, and I think that movie in a lot of ways has some horror elements, whether people realize it or not. With [the idea that] you’re not born and the world sucks because you’re not around and you want to kill yourself. There’s just a lot of darkness in that movie already that I felt it was worthy of exploring in the genre.”

There are times when It’s a Wonderful Knife gets pretty meta with its connections to the original Christmas classic, going as far as to name drop characters like George Bailey and Clarence. But it never takes the meta commentary too far, focusing in on the journeys of its leads, Winnie and Bernie.

“We did talk early on about not being too preoccupied with it being meta, knowing that with the number of references and stuff like that, that things would naturally float to the top,” MacIntyre explained. “But we were more concerned about trying to keep the main story authentic. That was always the kind of guiding thing we wanted. If you’re telling a slasher story, usually they’re not super uplifting. The goal was like, ‘Can we land that plane? Can we do the uplifting slasher movie, that is uplifting in the way that It’s a Wonderful Life is?’ And that was something that we were much more concerned about than the tools. We definitely wanted it to be fun the whole way through, but primarily just kept out beat on the emotions of it.”

It’s a Wonderful Knife is now playing in theaters. The film will be available to stream exclusively on Shudder at a later date.