By 2013, slasher movies had been out of fashion for some time, torture horror was loosening its grip on the genre, and haunted house possession movies were all the rage. So how did a weird little gem featuring the DNA of a home invasion slasher, the black comedy of a meta Wes Craven film, and one of the most underratedly badass final girls in horror history manage to find its place as a crowd-pleasing fan favorite? How did a crew of up-and-coming, mostly unproven filmmakers pull off a slick-looking film on a budget of just $1 million while convincing a scream queen to come out of retirement? And what was the story behind the never-made action-oriented sequel that would have seen our heroine fighting her way through a booby-trapped meth lab?
Grab your animal masks and get your finger paints ready. Because you’re next! This is What Happened to… You’re Next!
While writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard are well-known entities in the horror genre and beyond at this point, having worked on everything from Blair Witch to blockbuster Godzilla sequels, such was not the case in 2010. Hell, their V/H/S segments didn’t even exist at the time. Though Barrett did work on a TV movie called Frankenfish. So there’s that.
Which makes the feat of You’re Next all that more impressive. It started with Barrett telling Wingard that he wanted to make a home invasion movie because it was really the only horror subgenre that still scared him. But they didn’t want to simply repeat The Strangers.
Barrett wrote a script that would feature many subgenres, from an Agatha Christie-style mystery, which he has said was a particular inspiration, to slasher horror and cynical black comedy. Wingard would later say their goal was to make a movie that riffed on horror and all of its subgenres while still being entertaining to the masses. It’s a tough tightrope to walk, but that makes total sense once you watch the movie.
You’re Next keeps you on your toes, wondering what kind of movie it is while delivering entertaining sequences rooted in several different horror subgenres.
So, let’s take a walk through the film itself before we tell the story of how it was made. Warning: spoilers ahead.
We open with horror stalwart Larry Fessenden clearly not doing a particularly excellent job of pleasing a lady. But that doesn’t stop her from throwing on a banger of a song and making a screwdriver. Alright, maybe she’s just not pleased by anything. Or maybe that’s just her face.
Well, now she’s dead, and they’ve written “You’re Next” on the glass in her blood. Hey, at least they don’t know what they did last summer.
We quickly get our second of two off-screen deaths, and we’re off. Kinda weird to have your first two deaths be so lackluster, but there was copious nudity, alcohol, sex, and a GREAT song. All in the first five minutes.
As things calm down before inevitably ramping up again, we meet our presumed leads: the couple Crispian, played by AJ Bowen, and Erin, played by Sharni Vinson. The couple, who met when Erin was Crispian’s student in college, are headed to meet his super-rich family for the first time at a remote vacation home that most of us would trade our actual homes for in a heartbeat. Which just so happens to be next door to where the brutal murders just took place.
At the head of the family are the handsome and beautiful pairing of Paul, played by Rob Moran, and Aubrey, played by horror royalty Barbara Crampton.
As the family and all their respective dates settle into the house, we learn the inner relationships of the siblings through conversations and dirty looks. Erin is clearly in for a long weekend, as she seems to be the only earnest and heartfelt person there. Naturally, everyone kind of hates her for not being as cynical and wealthy as the rest of them.
We’re laying clear and obvious final-girl groundwork here. Or are we?
Finally, the funeral is about to begin. I mean dinner. Or both. What starts off with some pretty funny family infighting, including one brother saying that the other looks like the Elephant Man, leads to the pontificating “serious” documentary filmmaker Tariq, played by famed horror director Ti West, becoming the first to die. He stares out of a window after noticing something and gets an arrow through said window and into his forehead.
Next, atypical a-hole older brother Drake, played by the underrated actor and Drinking Buddies director Joe Swanberg, takes one in the upper back. But he survives. For now. And he’s such a pretentious dick that even as he’s writhing on the ground in pain, he calls his brother Felix, played by the late Nicolas Tucci, a “f*ckin’ low life” because Felix wonders if the killers are using a cell phone jammer that you could get “for like 30 bucks.” It’s hilarious.
This continues as they try to decide who the fastest one in the group is and should run to the vehicles to get help. That just ends with Aimee, played by Amy Seimetz, complaining that no one ever believes in her and Drake calling Crispian fat. Aimee makes a run for it, and in one of the most ingenious and mean moments of the film, her dad opens the doors for her to run directly into a taut wire booby trap that rips her throat open.
While Aubrey is in bed mourning her daughter, the Fox Mask crawls out from beneath the bed and machetes her to death off screen. That’s three off-screen deaths if you’re keeping count. But he does leave a machete in her head and does some arts and crafts, writing “You’re Next” on the wall in her blood.
Why did no one concern themselves with the killer still being in the room?
Kelly ends up getting chased out of the house like a maniac, and a plan is made for Crispian to use the pandemonium to reach a vehicle and get help. Meanwhile, the Lamb chases Kelly down quite easily when she tries to reach the neighbor’s house, Laurie Strode style. But you can’t answer the door if you’re dead.
Now, THAT’S how you stretch out your music budget in a film, as Dwight Twilley Band’s “Looking for the Magic” continues to play on repeat. We don’t mind.
The Lamb proves to be the most sadistic of them all so far, which is done on purpose. More on that later. He plays croquet using his axe as a mallet and her head as a ball. He really got up in there.
Tiger Man breaks into the house using Kelly’s corpse, only to have Erin continue her Australian Sidney Prescott impression when she proceeds to kill the living shit out of him with a meat beater. Probably a better name for that kitchen utensil, but as of now it escapes me.
Meanwhile, Papa goes upstairs to look for his wife’s killer and realizes one of the killers has been hiding inside the house for days, pissing in water bottles. Oh no, don’t walk backward into that room. And he’s dead.
To this point, we haven’t seen much screen time go to his emo son and his new girlfriend, Felix and Zee, played by Wendy Glenn. To be fair, they seemed too obvious to be in on it. But when his reaction to his dad’s throat being cut is “ooh, gross, don’t touch me,” it’s kinda a dead giveaway. And we were right. They were in on it AF.
Meanwhile, we learn that Erin is such a badass because she grew up on a survivalist compound in the Outback with her dad. Definitely the wrong person to try to put in a corner in a Die Hard situation.
Felix then stabs Drake a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. He does it with a handful of weaponry while whining that this is really hard for him too.
And just like that, the jig is up when Erin finds the dad’s body after the couple had lied and told her he was sleeping.
Erin has to escape through a window but gets a chunk of glass lodged in her leg as a reward.
But it is now that we have come to the top of the mountain of completely and utterly messed up as Zee tells Felix that she wants him to sleep with her on the bed next to his dead mom’s corpse. So, apparently, it is not just a Hot Topic infatuation. She’s quite unwholesome deep down.
While the others deal with Erin’s Home Alone-style booby traps, we learn that Felix offered to pay off the trio of animal-mask men with his inheritance if they killed off his family so that he could acquire said inheritance.
Erin stabs the Lamb Man in the face and gets a hero’s shot as it becomes clear that she isn’t trapped in this house with them. They are trapped here with her.
The booby traps will continue until morale improves, to the backing of a sweet synth soundtrack likely crafted by Adam Wingard himself, John Carpenter style.
Erin uses a savvy camera trick to get the Wolf Mask guy down and proceeds to beat him to death with a log of wood.
Afterward, Felix believes he has shot her with the crossbow. Zee is very turned on. But not as turned on as Felix turns out to be when Erin turns on a powered blender in his skull in an all-time horror kill. Right before taking out Zee with a knife to the head, Under Siege–style. Seriously, I don’t think it’s talked about in horror enough what a badass final girl Erin is.
All is done here except… Wait a second. Where the hell is Crispian? Did he stop by Taco Bell for a fourth meal? No.
He calls a now-very-dead Felix’s cell phone, after the jammer was turned off moments earlier, and we learn that he’s been in on it the whole time. That son of a bitch. He explains that he had to leave because “he’s a pacifist,” of course. Just another great line in a movie full of smart dark humor.
Crispian pleads his case, but Erin has had enough and stabs him in the eye before a cop shoots her in the shoulder from the window. I’m sure all this can be explained. But first… Remember that giant axe booby trap by the door? We aren’t going to let this movie end without seeing those fireworks now, are we?
The cop tries to enter the house despite Erin trying to stop him, and biggity bam. The axe comes down. The title card comes up. And “Looking for the Magic” rages on one more time into the night.
Though it feels like they nailed it today, Wingard and Barrett had a rather tough time casting You’re Next. They were mostly unproven outside the indie circuit, and many actors read the script and saw it as a low-budget slasher movie being shot in Missouri. Which apparently wasn’t something many people wanted to do. I don’t know what the hell their problem is with Missouri.
Anyway, as they screened their 2010 film A Horrible Way to Die at Fantastic Fest, Re-Animator writer Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs came up to them and told them they’d enjoyed it. The duo thought they could use that connection to recruit Barbara Crampton. And they were right. Well, kind of.
Crampton had been retired for a few years at this point but signed on to the project immediately after reading the script, with no Re-Animator recruitment necessary. This would jump-start her career in style, as she’s been back at it ever since, with an impressively busy horror resume.
The funny thing about Barbara Crampton is that she doesn’t age. So much so that they had to use makeup in You’re Next to age her and make her look like she could possibly be the matriarch of this family.
As previously mentioned, many of the cast and crew came from like-minded filmmakers and collaborators throughout the group’s career. Which is pretty cool, not to mention nice to see genre favorites like Crampton and Larry Fessenden in a great-looking theatrical release.
When it came to the design of the masks themselves, they weren’t picked just because they were simple and creepy. Barrett says that the idea of the characters having gradually revealed hidden aspects to themselves was also used metaphorically through the masks.
For instance, the Lamb character, who Barrett himself plays, is actually much more ferocious than the Tiger. This is a metaphor for Erin seeming like a lamb and turning out to be a lion. Maybe they just didn’t have any lion masks at the five-and-dime?
Barrett also didn’t feel that it was realistic to have sadistic killers possess a degree in fashion design that would allow them to create intricate masks. They wanted something the killers could have just found and painted white. So they went the simple route. Which works. If it’s good enough for Michael Myers, it’s good enough for you.
Filming took four weeks of night shoots from 7 PM to 7 AM.
When production found the Missouri mansion where they would film You’re Next, many changes had to be made. The location was perfect, but keeping track of so many characters with so many different weapons and motives proved difficult. They had to rewrite the script to accommodate the layout.
The mansion was a historic early-1900s home where they had to be incredibly careful not to damage anything. They filled the house with carpets to protect the floors, covered the walls with fresh wallpaper to protect them from blood splatter, and crafted plexiglass or plywood inserts for shots of crossbow arrows sticking into them.
Wingard spent most of those nights in pain with a mystery tooth issue that had him constantly eating Tylenol throughout the production. Eventually, the pain became so intense that he would take several leftover dog tranquilizers from Barrett’s late dog that amounted to low-level morphine just to be able to function or go to sleep. Which is reasonably hardcore.
At first, the two actually found the idea of working with a half-respectable budget to be more of a bug than a feature. Having come from a DIY background in which they often had only the cheapest viable option at their fingertips, they found the availability of choices daunting. They chose to focus on making the movie from the audience’s perspective and asking their sixteen-year-old selves what they would have wanted to see when sitting in the theater. This led to plenty of the script’s crowd-pleasing shocker moments, like the line “F*ck me next to your dead mother” or the axe being shockingly buried into an innocent man’s head at the end.
They also test-screened the film both internally and in Hollywood to make sure it was finely tuned to audience satisfaction.
One of the many ways You’re Next separates itself from a generic slasher movie homage is in its final girl, Erin. She was purposefully written not as someone who just happens to have the least sex and is therefore given the gift of moral luck. She’s a survivalist who knows what she’s doing. But the genius of it all was keeping that secret for half the film. That also keeps us from the terrible trope of having a character continuously tell the audience how badass they are. In real life, a person with that kind of skill and mental fortitude would often keep that to themselves rather than flaunt it.
Of all the women who auditioned for the role, Sharni Vinson won it because the filmmakers felt that she seemed naturally badass without having to try.
For the death scenes, they found themselves in sort of a sticky wicket. They wanted the film to be made for mass audiences but also didn’t want to shy away from the fun of the horror kill. They took inspiration from Italian horror films such as 1987’s White of the Eye and wanted every kill to feel like something you had never seen before.
While there are moments of your typical knife-to-face death scenes in You’re Next, there is an equal amount of well-fashioned and surprising murder, death, and kills throughout.
For a movie that explores several different moods and subgenres, the music became increasingly difficult to get right. The production ended up with four different composers, one of whom was director Adam Wingard. While he explains that the others did most of the work, Wingard was trying to create a placeholder for the composers to work with. One of them eventually asked if they had the license to use the music already there. They didn’t know the director had made it.
If you hear a moment that particularly sounds straight out of a John Carpenter movie, it was likely Wingard.
But the true centerpiece of the musical side of You’re Next comes from the Dwight Twilley Band’s 1977 classic “Looking for the Magic.” It’s been on my Spotify rotation since the first day we saw You’re Next, and it’s a never skip track that just…puts you in a good mood.
The initial script had referenced a song that would play on repeat, but it was not known at that time that it would be “Looking for the Magic.” Wingard was always a fan of the way Quentin Tarantino would put lesser-known pop songs into his films and wanted to do something similar. They knew they wanted something from the ’70s or ’80s that sounded like a #1 hit but was always a bit under the radar for whatever reason. So they employed composer Kyle McKinnon to find the right song, and he came back with a brief list of nine songs from which they chose “Looking for the Magic.”
Wingard says the song weaved its way into the very DNA of the film as they listened to it on set often.
One thing that separates You’re Next from the low-budget slasher many thought it would be to the well-put-together genre mash-up you see on screen is the cinematography. This film does not look like it cost $1 million. It looks like it cost at least $10 million.
That’s in part thanks to the perfect location, but it’s also thanks to cinematographer Andrew Palermo, who would go on to work as DP on many other high-profile projects like Marvel’s Thunderbolts.
You’re Next debuted to the world or rather Toronto in September of 2011. After its premiere at TIFF and other festivals that year, the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to see it for another two years. Lionsgate acquired the film immediately after its successful screening at TIFF and planned to distribute it in theaters. But all that would change when the company bought Summit Entertainment.
Suddenly, the studio had a slew of other films to release, and You’re Next went from “not now” to “maybe never.” There was a point when Barrett and Wingard were genuinely afraid the film would disappear entirely.
To add insult to injury, when it was finally given a release in August of 2013, it was scheduled just two months after Blumhouse’s first Purge movie. Wingard says the thing that truly annoyed him was that during the rollout of 2013’s Evil Dead, the Purge trailer played directly before the trailer for You’re Next. Which he hilariously and rightfully said “just made us look like assholes.”
What really sucked for them both was that because of the delayed release schedule, they weren’t actually able to enjoy the rollout of the movie when it finally released because they were busy wrapping up another horror banger with Dan Stevens in 2014’s The Guest.
Regardless, You’re Next, now two years in the can and sitting on the shelf, finally released in August and managed to gather more than $7 million on its opening weekend, on its way to a nearly $27 million worldwide haul. The beauty of the horror genre, ladies and gentlemen. When the right talent is behind and in front of the camera, that is…
It did pretty well as far as critics go, too. On the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently boasts a 79% “Fresh” critical score and a 60% “Fresh” audience rating. Which I couldn’t agree with more.
The two biggest standouts are the dark comedy of this twisted, rich family, with some actual nastiness, and its final girl, Erin. I genuinely think she would go toe to toe with any other final girl in history, skills-wise. It doesn’t get talked about enough. Perhaps because she never returned for a sequel?
Well, in the original script, they had it ending with Erin actually being shot in the head and killed. Instead, she takes the hit to the shoulder, and in the end-credits sequence we see that she’s been labeled as a suspect.
While You’re Next in no way whatsoever feels like it needs a sequel (see Ready or Not 2) and will likely never see one because, as Adam Wingard says, the film didn’t make “Conjuring money,” there was at one point talk of a trilogy. The first sequel would have found Erin blamed for the murders and being transported in a prison bus. The bus is attacked by Lamb Face, who survived being stabbed in the face and now can no longer feel pain due to the damage to his frontal lobe. He and his new associates then chase Erin and the other female prisoners she’s still handcuffed to through the woods and to a booby-trapped meth lab full of meth heads, where they will make their final stand. It was said to be a more action-oriented film.
Would you have liked to have seen that sequel? Or are we better off leaving this one as the rare successful horror one-and-done that needn’t be sullied by an attempt at turning it into a franchise? Let us know down below!
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