DETAILS: The cakes of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
The exuberant, gruesome poster for the 1981 slasher film, Happy Birthday to Me, depicts a young man about to be impaled in the throat with a shish kebab. Above this image, the words: "John will never eat shish kebab again." You're not buying a ticket to this movie for its light touch.
I bought my ticket specifically because that poster thrilled me, and I was enthusiastic to see a film about teens getting stabbed with food. It was 1981, I was 16, and it was playing late at night at the Park Twin Cinema in Roswell, New Mexico. In fact, it would be my first midnight movie, and those were fairly rare in Roswell at the time. It felt very Big City to be going.
The poster didn't stop there. "Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see," it claimed. That part felt like a tease destined to leave audiences unsatisfied. I had already seen Friday the 13th and in that movie Kevin Bacon gets stabbed with an archery arrow through his throat from underneath a bed. Later a naked shower-teen takes an ax face-first. After that spectacle, a nation of adolescents were bloodthirsty.
The Happy Birthday to Me viewing experience begins with that exciting poster, then with the trailer, one that features a special cake. The two cakes of the film are not at all the same as the cake used in the trailer. The trailer cake is smaller, neater, decorated with blood-red details spelling out the title on top, a black-gloved hand lighting the candles. Finally, an announcer says, "Pray you're not invited" as an ax slams right into it. It is cake as sideshow carnival barker.
The movie itself features twin cakes. The first one arrives in a flashback where the disturbed mother of Melissa Sue Anderson – whose character has been given the Final Girl all-timer name Virginia – has thrown her daughter a strangely childish birthday party with lots of balloons and streamers, the teens expected to wear those pointy little kid party hats. Naturally, none of her rich prep-school classmates show up because there's a bigger, better party somewhere else, probably with alcohol and sex because, after all, it's 1980, and besides, Virginia isn't even popular anyway.
The flashback cake is very large. Movie cakes denoting celebrations always are. They are signifiers. They are actors giving performances. That one moment in Mildred Pierce where Joan Crawford is shown carrying a truly astonishingly huge supercake she made? That cake is a stunt queen. If it could speak, it would say, "Mildred made me because she is extremely competent. No one here is fucking around." And no one in a film is baking a normal yellow butter cake with chocolate frosting, ever. Movie cakes are rarely normal, not in size, not in shape, not in commanding presence. A normal cake is unassuming, baked in an eight-inch circular pan. One layer if you're casual. Two if it's for friends. Some little grocery store candles if it's a birthday. That's a home cake. It will never be in a movie.
The Happy Birthday to Me cake is constructed of two quite tall graduated layers. The bottom one appears to be at least 12 inches in diameter if not more, the smaller one a little less than that, with white frosting to make it pop on camera, decorative pink details to match the streamers, and disproportionately large pink candles dotting the perimeter of each layer. In real life, you put candles that big on a cake because you didn't have regular-sized birthday candles from the little box you get at the grocery store, the kind you're just supposed to have on hand. You fucked it up.
This cake is decidedly incorrect. Its personality is over-eager and pathetic. Of course, that makes it perfect for the scene. It's a glaring, frilly, humiliation cake chosen – from some gender-comformity-enforcing bakery, not homemade – by an unwell parent who is so determined to make her sad daughter popular that her next act is dragging the kid to the Richie Rich mansion where the fun party is happening and demanding to be let in. Then they have a car accident on a drawbridge and mom drowns.
We see a deteriorated, collapsed, cobwebby version of this cake, years later, still sitting on the table, untouched. The entire house has gone to ruin and all of Virginia's murder victims (not technically a spoiler because there's a twist coming and you'll just have to watch the movie yourself) have been positioned around the table in various states of disembowelment. "Well," you think on first viewing, "If only they'd thought about being nice and going to her party the first time, perhaps they could have avoided being murdered in a bizarre manner." Special weirdness: Virginia's mother is one of the people seated at the table. She's a petrified corpse exhumed from the grave, but wearing the necklace she had on before so you know it's a mommy skeleton. In its original state, the cake was delusional; this blackened, spidery heap of rotted frosting is all derangement and Death.
Then, Virginia brings out a replica, a do-over of the cake from the first party, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself so that you can golf-clap over the fact that the title of the film is being performed. The new cake is identical to the one in the first party scene, right down the annoyingly big candles, as if she'd gone back to that bakery and asked, "Do you remember a couple years ago when you made a cake for me and then my unhinged mom lost her shit and then drowned? Can I get another one exactly like it?"
It is, I'm guessing, the same prop cake from the flashback, but obviously now its meaning has changed. After a series of gnarly little prep-school murders, the Kuleshov effect has kicked in and now it's graduated from sad to psychotic.
Sucks that no one ever got to taste it, but that's how it is when you prioritize bizarre murders over eating.
