Psycho Killer
Christopher Landon’s riff on the body-swap genre finds Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton become a teenage girl and a brutal serial killer respectively. It might seem unusual, but the film finally sees both sides of Vince Vaughn come together. Niall Glynn maps the actor’s trajectory from comedy, to Psycho through to his freakiest success yet.
Late into 2013’s absurd comedy sequel Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, the titular anchorman Ron Burgundy’s old rival Wes Mantooth arrives. Played by ‘00s comedy icon Vince Vaughn, he bursts in to save Ron from a murderous news team, pouring out gasoline from his motorbike and threatening to send them all sky high. When the suicidal nature of the plan is pointed out by his intended victims, Mantooth breaks out into a cold, dry cackle before proclaiming: “With the things I've done in my life, oh, I know I'm going to burn in hell. So I sure as shit ain't afraid to burn here on Earth.”
Although played for laughs, with an incredulous reaction from Burgundy and co, the scene offers a reminder of Vince Vaughn’s hidden darkness – a long dormant side of the actor. His comedy has for some time been characterised by cool indifference, usually unphased or irritated by the wackiness surrounding him. Whether on a sports team with an unexplained pirate in Dodgeball or playing Santa Claus’ estranged deadbeat brother in Fred Claus, Vaughn rarely allows the madness of his environment to dictate his actions, instead acting as both an audience surrogate and straight man to his chaotic co-stars. However, the release of Christopher Landon’s body-swap horror comedy Freaky finally treats Vaughn’s comedy and horror chops with the equal respect they deserve. It’s an ingenious premise: what if Jason Voorhees became the final girl? With this excellent new release, it’s time to trace Vaughn’s path from laughter to slaughter.
Before the comedy Vaughnaissance – which historians date circa 2003/2004 with the one-two punch of Old School and Dodgeball – the tone of his career had yet to be so clearly defined. A few forgotten dramas, the cult sex romp Swingers, and a thankless bit role in the second Jurassic Park film made it seem like the ‘90s were set to be a fairly forgettable decade for Vince Vaughn’s career. But, for better or worse, everything changed when Gus Van Sant decided to cast Vaughn as one of cinema’s most iconic psychopaths, in his ill-advised Psycho remake.
Arguably the most extravagant film school experiment ever committed to celluloid, Van Sant’s remake is an almost shot-for-shot recreation of Hitchcock’s original 1960 thriller, even using most of the same script. But Vaughn, as the film’s antagonist Norman Bates, makes for the most striking deviation. Where Anthony Perkins played the role in a nebbish, distinctly dorky manner while playing up his imposing yet gentle physicality, his slim build crucial to the visuals of the identity-revealing twist. Perkins was relatively likeable as Bates, to the point where audiences might believe he wasn’t a murderer, merely a victim to his domineering mother instead.
Vaughn, however, played Bates as a more traditional serial killer – a stereotype that didn’t even exist when Hitchcock made his film. Twitchy and unblinkingly intense beneath his massive, domineering build, this Bates feels downright dangerous, long before the pivotal murder scene. Vaughn’s take on the character joyfully riffs on a classic character while making him unsettling enough to offset the tone of the overly reverential recreation that is Van Sant’s picture.
After Psycho, roles in surreal serial killer film The Cell (2000), Travolta-led thriller Domestic Disturbance (2001) and obscure celebrity culture takedown I Love Your Work (2005) followed. These were the closest Vaughn would come to horror again for over a decade – and each was poorly received by critics, wasting Vaughn on underwhelming supporting roles. The short-lived thriller period came to an end, followed by a string of bland comedies that threatened to damn Vaughn’s on-screen persona as a noughties relic.
Enter S. Craig Zahler. Following his Western horror Bone Tomahawk in 2015, Zahler directed a duo of incredibly brutal thrillers with Vaughn, finally giving him the edgier roles he had been waiting his entire career for. Both Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete are hyper-violent, bleak films, swapping Vaughn’s usual easygoing humour for stomach-churning gore and misanthropic morality. Despite being cast as criminal Frank Seymon in the second season of True Detective in 2015, the eight-episode run was a huge step down from the first, and the attempted return to dramatic roles for Vaughn even turned into a short-lived meme due to some preposterously overwrought dialogue. Zahler, however, got to the core of Vaughn’s potential, showing a newfound edge on both sides of the law as both police detective and inmate across both pictures.
This new career direction led to Freaky. As archetypal slasher villain the Blissfield Butcher, Vaughn finds a new challenge as an incident with a cursed dagger results in a body swap between the Butcher and hapless teenager Millie Kessler. The opening scene finds Vaughn in full Michael Myers-mode, eerily silent and performing coldly calculated and brilliantly gory murders, shoving a wine bottle down a teenage boy’s neck, and smashing a young woman’s head with a toilet seat. So perfectly executed, the film starts like a traditional slasher – but when the body swap kicks in, that’s when Vaughn truly thrives.
Playing an insecure teenage girl trapped in the body of a demented, hulking slaughterer pushes Vaughn out of his comfort zone and gives him his best work to date. His pairing with Kathryn Newton as Millie is astonishing. Vaughn channels so many of Millie’s quirks and mannerisms in a bizarrely seamless transition – from her amazingly expressive eyes to her joyfully dorky run. When he’s playing the Butcher straight he’s awfully threatening, with a bone-dry sardonic wit that calls back to Vic Mantooth’s nihilistic humour. In a story about shifting dynamics between power and powerlessness, Vaughn and Newton’s balance is perfect.
For the actor, Freaky represents not a career 180°, rather the result of a natural progression in the works for almost 30 years. Finally, years after first trying to emulate Norman Bates, Vince Vaughn has finally found his own horror icon in a film that’s sweet but no Psycho. A true killer role.
Niall Glynn is a Cardiff-based filmmaker, writer and podcaster who regularly contributes to Fresh Take Hub and GamEir. In between projects, he is often found watching Columbo to the point of obsession and tweeting far too much.