‘Heart Eyes’: The Serial-Killer Movie Going Full MAGA About Sex

The seediest operation of the slasher cinema formula, that “people + sex = death,” was established around the premiere of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. Neither he nor Debra Hill intended that dynamic when they wrote the film’s script, but the combination of commercial success and subsequent creative influence immediately codified it into the nascent subgenre’s principles all the same–a conservative ethos for a conservative period of American sociopolitics.

Slashers have kept the tradition of punishing love and bouncy-bouncy with murder ever since, even through decidedly more liberal beats in contemporary U.S. history. So take Heart Eyes, the latest feature from writer, director, and funnyman Josh Ruben, as a sign of the times. Our politics are increasingly more conservative—so says the data—whether related to voter registration, personal identification, or policy preferences.

Heart Eyes doesn’t give this a single thought. It’s a Valentine’s themed slasher, an uncommon commodity even when accounting for films like Lover’s Lane, My Bloody Valentine (the 1981 original and the 2009 remake), and of course, Valentine. Lovers beware; the infamous Heart Eyes Killer is on the prowl for sweethearts to slay. The good news is that “HEK,” as they’re known in the media and by law enforcement, is active only on Feb. 14 every calendar year. The bad news is that they could strike anywhere, like Boston and Philadelphia.

After an opening sequence where HEK interrupts a treacly Instagram wedding proposal with mindless violence, we learn that they’ve picked Seattle as their annual hunting ground. They’ve picked targets, too, but only by misinterpreting signals between pitch designer Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), a freelance rival her boss hires to fix the faux pas of Ally’s “famous doomed couples” fashion campaign. HEK mistakes them for a couple. Technically they are, but a couple of hot twentysomething klutzes. No matter; HEK swings whatever way their whims dictate. So begins a new Valentine’s Day massacre.

Politics are nowhere to be seen in Heart Eyes, apart from politics of the heart. The movie takes care unraveling Ally and Jay’s respective positions on Valentine’s Day specifically, and love more broadly. He’s a romantic. She’s hopeless. They’re perfect for each other. (No wonder HEK stays on their trail despite their relationship status.) But politics are nonetheless baked into the premise–contextualized within slasher cinema, a maniac slaughtering people in the throes of passion makes a conservative brief, even if Heart Eyes is itself focused on other motifs, to say nothing of tone. Ruben is comedic in his DNA; punchlines make up as much of the movie’s material as its kills, whether they’re shot in a pneumatic grape press or the back of a van.

Humor and homicide aside, though, as we wade through the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second administration, marked thus far by blatant cronyism and the early makings of an actual coup, Heart Eyes broadcasts two key messages: the United States has embraced its most conservative collective political identity in years, maybe even decades, and that identity is perfectly in keeping with classic slasher structure.

“Sex equals death” in countless modern slashers, without question. That trope has remained core for slashers, and frankly played a part in other horror niches, too, even as the movies writ large have shied away from sex on screen; its relationship is simply stronger to the outline of “masked lunatic butchers people.”

Ti West’s X and Damien Leone’s Terrifier, the arguable new standards of contemporary slasher series, perform this calculus repeatedly, to their own aims. In X, sexuality is core to characterizing its antagonist, psycho biddy Pearl (Mia Goth); meanwhile in Terrifier 2, happy-go-stabby harlequin icon Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), can’t resist a (painful) dick joke.

But in these films, and in their slasher peers, “sex equals death” is subtext. Heart Eyes makes that straightforwardly into text through its villain’s modus operandi. Normally, literalizing a film’s undercurrents lets all the helium out of the plot. But Ruben foregrounds “sex equals death” deliberately and casually.

Politics are not the movie’s concern; Ally and Jay don’t broach topical subjects that don’t substantially play into Heart Eyes’ narrative or their own emotional arcs. Stripped of any political reading, it’s a movie about how millennials mature in reaction to their parents’ models of intimacy. Positive modeling breeds anxiety expressed as disdain; negative modeling fosters sentimental idealism.

Ruben brings these ideas together with warm charm and no shortage of carnage, but Heart Eyes’ stitching feels no less tied to politics for it. Here, there are no Republicans or Democrats, no sloganeering and no ideological screeds. There don’t need to be. Ruben has given them a proper avatar in HEK instead.