It's been pretty rough to be a movie fan in 2020. Due to theater closures and production delays we just haven't seen as many movies as we usually do and there hasn't been nearly as much to get excited about. Of course, this means that when something that looks good does hit, we can get really excited. Such has been the case with Freaky, the new Blumhouse horror movie starring Vince Vaughn. We've only actually seen the trailer, but based on that alone the film has made a huge fan of one guy who knows a bit about horror, Stephen King, who did not hold back the language of his praise.
The prolific author took to Twitter after the Freaky trailer dropped to not only sing the praises, quite explicitly, of what he thinks looks like an excellent film but also to specifically single out Vince Vaughn, as Stephen King is already willing to put Vaughn in for Oscar consideration.
Freaky is a body-swap movie like Disney's Freaky Friday, which obviously inspired the title of the new Blumhouse feature. However, while those films have always been exclusively comedies, this one one is a horror film, though one that obviously isn't without a sense of humor. Vince Vaughn's character is a serial killer who stabs Kathryn Newton, but instead of killing her, he switches bodies with her. This turns the young girl into a serial killer and the older man into somebody with the mind of a young girl.
This means that throughout most of the trailer, and one assumes most of the movie, Vince Vaughn is actually playing a high school girl. This is where the praise for the performance by Stephen King, and a lot of other people as well, is coming from. Vince Vaughn does a pretty impressive performance as a high school girl.
And to be fair, if Freaky were another sort of movie that had an actor so convincingly playing somebody so much unlike themselves, even just playing against type, it's possible that Vince Vaughn could be considered for major awards. The fact that Freaky is a horror movie, and not only that but a horror-comedy, would normally make any sort of serious consideration unlikely. But then again, it's 2020, so who the hell knows? We fully expect the next Academy Awards to be pretty wild due to all the release delays, so anything is possible.
If you haven't had a chance to see Vince Vaughn's allegedly Oscar-worthy performance yet, check it out in the Freaky trailer below.
I'm not sure if Freaky is going to be winning any awards, but it does look like a pretty good movie, and at this point that's really all we can ask for. Freaky is scheduled for a theatrical release on November 13.
