by J †Johnson, Staff Writer

Halloween has Halloween (1978) and Trick ’r Treat (2007), Thanksgiving has Blood Rage (1987) and now Thanksgiving (2023), Christmas has Black Christmas (1978) and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), New Year’s Eve has Terror Train (1980) and New Year’s Evil (1980), and Valentine’s Day has My Bloody Valentine (1981). Maybe 2025’s Heart Eyes will give holiday horror fans more V-Day options and show us new ways the social media monster has enshittified the most Hallmark of holidays, but one thing is certain. As long as birds sing and bees fuck flowers, Harry Warden will hate Valentine’s Day, and we can celebrate that killjoy any time we throw on good old My Bloody Valentine. It’s a love letter to holiday horror and a stone cold slasher classic that warms even the blackest of hearts with its goofy premise and doomed working class horndogs. Let’s follow them down to the mine and get busy!

My Bloody Valentine hinges on time period and location. The small-town working class setting is fully realized in the Valentine Bluffs makeover given to the Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia filming location. Every location is well chosen and beautifully filmed. There’s the actual mine our young lovers descend into like the depths of misogynist hell. There’s the dead car lot where the boys go to heat their dinners on engines, play reluctant harmonica duos disrupted by love triangle drama, and horse around in the carcasses of the automotive industry. There’s the nightmare coat room and attached shower that will never leave us alone. There’s the warm-lit, congenial towny bar and its adorably cranky barkeep. There’s Mabel’s Launderette, decked to the nines for the holiday, redecorated by the killer in the most unsettling (upside-down hearts) and horrifying (look out for that dryer) ways. The gender politics are trapped in small-town 1981, while the genuine rapport and romantic tension between characters sit cozy in the mise en scène. Even if we wouldn’t want to go back and live there, Valentine Bluffs feels like a place we don’t mind visiting once a year.

It’s easy to get carried away with all this texture–accentuated as it is by the high-speed filmstock and processing requirements of the extensive mine shoot–and lose track of the underlying mystery. Who is The Miner slashing their way through town, leaving actual Valentine hearts and mocking poesy for the mayor and sheriff? Is it Harry Warden, whose legend haunts the town named after the holiday it doesn’t dare celebrate for 20 years after the mining disaster that killed Harry’s fellow miners and trapped him for six weeks, with only his dead friends for sustenance? Harry was institutionalized for a year, then returned to have his revenge on the supervisors who left him in that mine without checking the methane levels, eager as they were to get to the big Valentine’s Day dance. Boom. Chomp. Pickaxe to the heart.

Harry hates mine supervisors, Valentine’s Day, dances, and above all, decorations. He will literally rip out your heart over crepe paper streamers and phony little Valentine cut-out butts. With respect and fear for Harry Warden, the Valentine’s dance is permanently called off, replaced by folklore to remind everyone why they can’t celebrate their namesake holiday. The angry bartender, Happy (Jack Van Evera) also keeps the lore and dutifully drops forbidding rhymes as the town prepares to get over its bloody history and get back to semi-formal dancing.

We don’t need to go through the plot here. If you haven’t seen My Bloody Valentine, it’s well worth checking out, despite its corny elements. This viewer first watched it in the ’90s when we learned that the band My Bloody Valentine took its name from an obscure slasher. We found it cool-looking but kind of tiresome, and were completely unimpressed with The Miner who torments the town. After a couple more recent viewings, we’ve developed an affection for My Bloody Valentine, including the totally worthy, physical performance by the actor playing the killer. It could be the softening of age, or the fact that we only watch horror movies anymore, and better know the slasher cycle and holiday horror tradition out of which this film emerges. But it also has to do with the way we watch this film now. Last February we went to Horror Bowl 1981 at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, PA, where we saw the film in the excellent company of people who would rather watch three straight horror movies from 1981 (also on the bill were The Prowler and The Burning) than celebrate the Big Game by watching lots of obnoxious commercials. (OK, the movies were over in time for us to slip off to a local bar and catch most of the Super Bowl.)

My Bloody Valentine looks fantastic on the big screen, where those visual textures and wide shots really sing. To prepare for this essay, we revisited the film on a 4K scan of the uncut original camera negative, lovingly assembled by Scream Factory for a comprehensive box set. It looks great on Blu-ray, but what really made this viewing special is the 35th anniversary restoration and inclusion of extended scenes that had been cut from all previous screened and circulated versions of the film. Almost every kill scene was sanitized by order of the MPAA, and director George Mihalka was so disheartened by four rounds of cutting frames and reformatting the film that he tried to block the whole thing from memory. Though the cast seems to have had a good time making the film (based on all the special features), they had all seen it pass for a time into obscurity.

And just as the citizens of Valentine Bluffs brought back their dance (and their bloody history), fans brought back My Bloody Valentine for its filmmakers. And what a trip it is to see the complete version of a film we’ve only viewed in its anemic form (the box set features an interview with the director called “My Anemic Valentine,” after Mihalka’s pet name for the theatrical version). It’s like remembering key details from a dream, or recovering memories, but in that magical way horror cinema has of making us empathize with traumatic experiences without absorbing personal trauma. Familiar death scenes have uncanny new elements. I’m not sure if I’m only now noticing a new detail, or if it wasn’t there before. It’s a new favorite viewing experience, and I’m no stranger to deleted scenes and director’s cuts. This one is simply the most astonishing extra three minutes of film we’ve ever seen. The “Holes in the Heart” feature effectively showcases the differences between the theatrical and uncut versions. It makes a convincing implicit case for the expressive capacity of explicit gore, when it’s presented with a sense of purpose. Effective gore matters for both tone and character. The collaboration between Mihalka, cinematographer Rodney Gibbons, special make-up effects designer Tom Burton, and the actors is on full display through each of these meticulously crafted scenes, which add up to a much better, more affecting uncut film.

So while we wait for another Valentine horror classic to arrive, whether it’s this year or somewhere down the line, let’s continue to enjoy the heart-shaped boxes filled with anatomical love pumps of My Bloody Valentine, which well earns our continued devotion.

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