‘Heart Eyes’ and the Suffocating Weight of Millennial Anxieties

I was one of the people who fell head over heels for Heart Eyes last year. I’m a slasher girl, but it had been a hot minute since a new killer landed on the big screen that was cool enough for me to lean in. However, this was cool, funny, bloody, and just unique enough to make an honest woman out of me. It quickly became one of the few bright spots in what was another shitty year for everyone born in my generation.

Because I am broken, when I love something, I have to take it apart until I figure out why I like it. I have this unhealed urge to overanalyze it until I get answers. What I discovered is that this horror rom-com works for someone as jaded as me, because it reflects these unprecedented times. It captures what it’s like to try to live a life while constantly fighting to survive chaotic and unimaginable circumstances.

Can I Gush For A Minute?

Heart Eyes is a damned great time by all accounts. It was helmed by Josh Ruben and written by Phillip Murphy and Christopher Landon & Michael Kennedy. The film follows two co-workers, Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), who have the misfortune of becoming targets of the Heart Eyes Killer. As this beast’s pendulum swings from horror comedy to romantic comedy, they find themselves running for their lives as they fall for each other. It’s very cute, but never cloying.

One of the things I love about Heart Eyes is that it never loses track of either genre it firmly plants its foot in. It is just like all the slashers that get me out of bed in the morning. However, it also understands those rom-coms that my mom had a seemingly endless supply of when I was a kid. I rolled my eyes through enough of them to pick up on the beats and realize why certain leading men and ladies got more work than others. So, watching a movie that honors both sides of this chaotic marriage of genres is fascinating. 

Picking up on how the threat of HEK is always looming behind (or over) our characters is key to understanding why this movie reflects what it’s like to be a millennial. Right from the main characters’ meet-cute ending with Jay looking up into the coffee shop TV for HEK updates. Or even Ally and her bestie Monica (Gigi Zumbado) joking about Heart Eyes at lunch. Even their meal momentarily pauses for more breaking news about the killer. HEK has a presence throughout the entire film, even when not actively murdering people. Meanwhile, the city doesn’t stop for this, and our characters are unfazed by the threat until they are the targets. This is sadly relatable. 

Is This Movie About Us?

As a 90s kid, I remember a few big catastrophes earning a moment in the collective consciousness for a few hours. However, at some point, they started coming too fast and too furious. I also vaguely remember news segments asking if we had become too desensitized to school violence, mass shootings, and national tragedies. That always struck me as weird because I don’t think most of us have. I think we just had to accept that living through the most unprecedented of times means things are always going to be shit. We have learned to compartmentalize. We had to in order to capture the occasional moments of joy in what feels like decades of shit tornadoes coming to snatch us out of Kansas.

While Heart Eyes is a fun time, it also understands that waiting for the perfect moment to do something means never doing the thing. Something awful is always happening, and we should still feel bad about it. However, at some point, we realized it’s never going to get better. The movie knows we have seen it all, live with a constant sense of dread, and are trying to cobble together some semblance of a life anyway.

Before I Make This About Me and We

This is especially fascinating from a film nerd perspective because Ruben and Kennedy’s first horror features arrived in 2020. We were all in quarantine, and these movies became comfort watches. While clearly filmed before that particular shared trauma, both Scare Me and Freaky unintentionally became part of the COVID experience. Which is why it’s ironic that Heart Eyes is the film that feels reflective of surviving that era. For many of us, things have always been bad. However, something happened in 2016 that has led to every new year feeling like a new circle of hell. We thought 2020 would be the peak because we were still naive. Because we never get to catch our breath, we have two choices. We pick ourselves up and keep running from our “killer”, or sit down and tell him to get it over with already. 

I assume if you’re reading my ramblings, you also chose the first option. It’s not fun or easy. It also makes us another annoyed final girl in this franchise (which none of us asked for) that is life. However, it also sheds a huge light on why even jaded assholes like me are rooting for Jay and Ally. I wanted them to survive this bloody night, and I even hoped those two kids would get it together. This is in part because if you swap out the romance for whatever drives us, their relationship goals become something even bitches like me understand. There is a lot of issues to choose from because anyone staying even remotely informed is sharing some of this trauma. For simplicity, I’m choosing the pandemic. However, insert anything we have lived through over the last decade and my point still stands.

A Choose Your Own Traumatic Moment 

Like most people, 2020 was supposed to be my year. Also, like most people, I was tired of life punching me in the face whenever something almost worked out for me. That year, I had just quit my job at an opera house (talk about horror) and decided to freelance full-time. I was also primed to have so many of my plays produced and workshopped after clearing over 230 script submissions in 2019. I was about to enjoy the fruits of my labor, find a manager, and finally get serious about segueing into writing for television.

Plans were made and everything was finally paying off. I even got a passport and took my first international trip in March…of 2020. Much like HEK interrupting Jay and Ally every time they have a moment, COVID shut it down for me. My time in France on my first playwright retreat was cut short. All of my productions were cancelled. My childhood traumas reactivated. That anxiety was through the roof. I don’t have to explain any of this to most of you, because you lived through it too. Even if we’re strangers we have so much shared trauma just from being alive at the same time.

It’s All Unprecedented Down Here, Georgie

While lying around and being traumatized like everyone else, there was nothing but the constant barrage of updates on the global pandemic. Like most events that we have had the misfortune of witnessing, it hurt on macro and micro levels. All of us who had managed to survive life with a bigoted predator in office had to watch loved ones die from a distance. We had to watch capitalism dictate that our friends and family were suddenly essential workers forced to risk it all for minimum wage. While things were bad before, they somehow got worse. They continue to get worse every day as I look around the room. Have you checked on the Twin Cities? Or, those families who lost their homes in LA wildfires last year? Or, literally any of the other hundreds of issues that deserve our time, money, and attention?

So, while Heart Eyes is a fun movie, it also has more layers than we give it credit for. It especially hits differently when you watch it with some of that unhealed trauma in your passenger seat. 

Sorry I Killed the Mood

I didn’t just write this to remind you that we finally have an excellent horror movie to watch for this Hallmark holiday. I also planned this before the Heart Eyes 2 news hit the streets because I have to work ahead (another trauma response). I’m pissing in your lemonade because horror is political, and great horror captures the time in which it was created.

Look at all of the children-centric horror inspired by Roe v. Wade in the 70s. Artists are in constant conversation with the world around them, whether they want to be or not. Their work becomes part of a funky time capsule filled with the anxieties from which they were created. People tend to forget that, especially when it comes to slashers and rom-coms. I’m even guilty of disregarding rom-coms on sight. Yet, how many people do we know who had their wedding plans wrecked in 2020? Much like the opening couple in Heart Eyes, who we like to laugh at. How many of us watched whatever we’re passionate about get disrupted because the government is playing fast and loose with our rights and lives?

So, anywhos, I think that’s one of the silent reasons Heart Eyes has so many of us in a consensual chokehold. At least that’s what I have landed on after a few rewatches and repeatedly asking myself why I love it so much. It works on whatever level you approach it from. However, when you skim that surface, it’s hard to not wonder if this is about us.