Creeptober Day 20: April Fool’s Day (1986)

Celebrate April Fool’s Day in October with today’s Creeptober movie! Why choose April Fool’s Day for Halloween-season viewing? Well, it’s an excellent movie, and it’s a ton of fun. What else do you need? A twist? It has one of those. A fairly notorious twist at that. So if you’ve never seen April Fool’s Day, stop reading this and go watch it right now. Then come back so we can discuss.

Read on for our thoughts on April Fool’s Day (1986) as well as a recap of the movie, and join the conversation on our Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram!

Reacting to April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is super fun. It has great characters, a good story, and a memorable finale. It was released during the waning stages of the golden age of slashers (or after the end of it depending on whom you ask) when deconstructing and parodying the slasher genre was becoming more common. But I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a full deconstruction, and it certainly isn’t a parody. I’m not even sure I’d consider it a slasher movie either, despite its common association with the genre.

My reasoning for not thinking it’s a slasher has nothing to do with the big reveal at the end. [Here’s your final spoiler warning!] The fact that nobody is dead at the end of the movie isn’t a direct factor in why I’m pondering whether or not to call April Fool’s Day a slasher movie. That’s just a by-product. My reasoning has more to do with the fact that nobody is ever “slashed.” Meaning, we don’t ever see any scenes of “killing” by any means (with one exception noted below). We don’t even see a killer, only the occasional foot or hand of some mysterious person hidden off-screen. So my argument is more about how the movie is presented to the audience, and less about the resolution of the story.

There are no kill scenes depicted in April Fool’s Day with the exception of Nan pretending to kill Muffy at the end of the movie. Everyone else just disappears, or they are seen in the early stages of what appears to be an abduction, and their bodies are found later. Having no kill scenes isn’t necessarily grounds for disqualifying a movie as a slasher. Some TV movies and PG-rated horror films are slashers, and lots of slashers cut away from the moment of violence. But without kill scenes, and without a killer being seen enacting lethal violence, that pushes April Fool’s Day towards a related genre: the murder mystery.

The character Nan is right when she looks at Muffy’s dining room and says, “it’s just like an Agatha Christie.” It’s known that April Fool’s Day was partially inspired by the movie Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1945). That film was based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name, and the similarities between April Fool’s Day and Christie’s story are abundant. There is no question that this movie is a murder mystery—as Muffy puts it, a “whodunit.” And sure, there are plenty of whodunit slashers. But without “slashing,” it’s just a whodunit.

It is true that April Fool’s Day uses conventions of the slasher genre in the telling of its story. There is blood, even if none of it is real. Kit could possibly be considered a final girl if murders were actually happening. There is a (fake) body count. And it’s true that Agatha Christie film adaptations are early precursors to many of the later slasher movies. But none of that is a defining characteristic of what makes a movie a slasher. Consider Clue which came out a few months earlier in 1985. No one calls it a slasher, but it has multiple dead bodies, and it has kill scenes which are more direct in their violence than April Fool’s Day. Both movies are murder mysteries, one just doesn’t have any real murder.

If you consider April Fool’s Day to be a slasher movie, that’s cool. Who am I to say otherwise? It was definitely marketed like a slasher movie—but director Fred Walton was not a fan of the way his movie was sold to audiences. It definitely deserves to be in the conversation with slasher movies since people’s perception of it during its initial release had an effect on the mainstream view of the slasher genre as a whole. But really, these are just my immediate musings about April Fool’s Day after this most recent viewing. My stance might shift as I think about it more. Plus, I just like thinking and talking about this kind of thing. What do you think?

April Fool’s Day – A Recap

A group of college students gather on a pier. They are there to catch a ferry to an island where their friend Muffy is hosting a weekend getaway at her family’s mansion during April Fool’s Day weekend. Most of the students—Kit, Rob, Nikki, Chaz, and Arch—are all friends with each other. Nan and Harvey (aka Hal) are new to the group, but they know Muffy from school. The last of the group of eight is Skip, Muffy’s distant cousin.

On the ferry trip over to the island, Arch and Skip play a prank that makes it look like Skip is stabbed with a switchblade. Skip is fine, and he and Arch think it’s hilarious. As an indirect result of the prank, the ferry’s deckhand, Buck, is horrifically injured when the ferry runs into his face while he is in the water. On the island, the local constable lets the ferryman use his boat to take Buck to a hospital. The constable takes Muffy’s boat and warns everyone to stay on the island in case he needs to get more information from them.

Skip blames himself for Buck’s injury and begins drinking heavily. Everyone else is ready for a good weekend. It soon becomes clear that Muffy has set up various pranks around her home. Most of the pranks are harmless and silly (a whoopee cushion, dribble glasses, breakaway chairs, etc.), but some of the “pranks” involve items stashed in the guest rooms that potentially hold dark and upsetting meanings. While everyone else goes to their rooms, a drunken Skip wanders near the island’s shore. Skip enters a boathouse, and he is grabbed by an unseen person.

The next morning, Muffy seems different. She is disheveled, skittish, and acting very oddly. Also, nobody has seen skip since the previous night. While Kit and Rob make out in the boathouse, Kit sees Skip’s body floating underneath the floorboards. They rush outside, but they can’t find him. Rob, Chaz, and Arch search the grounds for Skip. Meanwhile, Nan confronts Muffy about the recording of a crying baby that was left in her room. Nan is upset due to what feels like a personal attack about a painful memory, but Muffy claims not to know what she’s talking about.

While searching for Skip alone in the woods, Arch is caught in a snare trap. He is terrified as he sees someone approaching. Nan also goes missing. Rob tries calling the police, but he can’t get through. The water in the house stops working, so Harvey and Nikki go to the well. They find Nan’s body and the severed heads of Skip and Arch in the water. The survivors suspect that it might be Buck who is stalking everyone, but the constable calls and says that Buck is still in the hospital. The constable says he’ll come out to the island. While they wait, the survivors argue and split up, either in pairs or alone.

While in the attic, Rob tells Kit that the constable told him that no one on the island should be trusted, especially Muffy. They see a flare shot by the constable, and they go to gather everyone so they can leave. Kit and Rob find the bodies of Chaz, Nikki, and Harvey. The constable isn’t at his boat when Kit and Rob arrive. Instead, they find a letter describing Buffy, Muffy’s twin sister who recently escaped from a mental institution. Forced to go back to the house to find the boat’s key, Kit and Rob are chased by Buffy (who has been masquerading as Muffy). Rob is locked in the kitchen, and Buffy slowly approaches Kit with a knife.

As Buffy strikes the door behind Kit, Kit escapes into the next room. There, everyone thought to be dead is alive and well (the constable is there too). Muffy (who was playing the role of Buffy who doesn’t actually exist) explains that everything this weekend was a trial run for a murder-mystery experience, a “whodunit weekend,” that she plans to open. Buck, the ferryman, and the constable (who is actually Muffy’s uncle) were all in on the plan. Everyone else, including Skip who is actually Muffy’s twin brother, was brought into the plan once they were “killed.” Muffy admits that some of the clues placed in the rooms were too personal, but everyone had fun, right?

Everyone parties. Later in the night, Muffy goes to her room alone. She finds a jack-in-the-box which reminds her of a gift that scared her as a child. As it pops open, Nan grabs Muffy and cuts her throat… but the knife and blood are fake. Nan smiles and laughs. April fool’s!

Keep Up with Creeptober!

• The entire list of 31 movies is here: Join Us for Creeptober: 31 Horror Movies in 31 Days
• Discuss on Facebook
• Even more on TikTok and Instagram