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This Forgotten 2015 Vampires vs. Zombies Horror Comedy Is Pure Halloween Candy
Supernatural species actually can coexist… but prepare for a big, bloody mess.
If humanity ever has to face its worst sci-fi fears and learn how to structure a peaceful world where humans are forced to coexist alongside vampires, zombies, and werewolves — well, using Freaks of Nature (streaming here on Peacock!) as the blueprint for how to do it is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
Wearing its unabashedly slapstick genre tropes on its tattered, bloody (and probably snot-crusted) sleeve, the 2015 horror-comedy puts a silly twist on the whole creature-feature concept by setting its stereotypical small-town horror action within a social order that’s already figured out — just barely — how to intermingle humanity with all its supernatural storybook offshoots. In Freaks of Nature, fangers, shamblers, and just plain old-fashioned people get along and even socialize just fine… so long as nothing too incendiary comes along that could throw the movie’s delicate social system into chaos.
Freaks of Nature: Turning supernatural scares into slapstick screwball comedy
Like any good fright flick, Freaks of Nature is all about what happens to some kids in high school, so it’s a good thing that everyone at least starts out on the same peaceful page. In the tiny town of Dillford, Ohio, the vamps and zombies have equal standing alongside their human counterparts; they hold down jobs, they go to school (hell, they even teach school), and generally integrate seamlessly with their human parent species.
How did vampires and zombies emerge in the first place? Ah, that’s a question for a different kind of movie. For all its campy charms, Freaks of Nature uses its sci-fi setting as the starting canvas to tell a screwball story. not as a perspective-switching platform to ponder existential what-ifs. In fact, there’s hardly a story to be found at all — mostly just a series of gory, goofy sight gags set amid a handful of quieter coming-of-age moments, all shared among the movie’s trio of main-character teens.
Anchoring the action is a (seemingly) human high schooler name Dag (Succession’s Nicholas Braun), who carries around a persisting twinge of cool kid’s guilt for keeping at arm’s length his geeky brainiac childhood pal, Ned (Josh Fadem). Early in the movie, a third piece enters the picture: Petra (Bladerunner 2049’s Mackenzie Davis), a shy girl who’s managing to hold her own in the cruel social pecking order enforced by her high school peers.
That’s about as deep as character exploration gets in Freaks of Nature, which in this movie definitely serves as a no-mistake feature instead of a bug. Aside from a genuinely funny oversharing interlude featuring Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) and Joan Cusack (Shameless) as Dag’s uncomfortably way-too-chill parents, everyone in this flick behaves like an absolute two-dimensional cartoon — all the better, when the time comes, to answer the cartoonish summons demanded by the movie’s main threat.
That threat turns out to be an alien invasion, one that comes with a properly absurd motivation (they’re after the secret ingredient in the local food plant’s mystery meat!) while shattering the surprisingly fragile peace that humans, vampires, and zombies thought they’d created for themselves. Instead of uniting against the shared alien menace, all the town’s species immediately revert to their instinctively violent form and turn on each other — right from the very first moment they see those creepy lights in the sky.
With everyone else staging a hilariously primitive sort of stick-and-brick civil war in the streets, it’s up to Dag, Ned, and Petra to figure out a focused plan to stop the aliens — a task made all the tougher after Ned and Petra voluntarily decide to shed their humanity (he turns zombie; she goes the vampire route) right on the night before the big invasion drops down. But that’s what propels this flick’s gleefully threadbare plot forward: A vampire, a zombie, and a human (or is he?), all working in concert to outwit a higher E.T. intelligence.
How they do that is best left to the movie itself, though the slapstick action makes for some entertaining (and unlikely) drop-ins from the rest of Freaks of Nature’s sneaky-good cast. Keegan-Michael Key shows up as a teacher with serious anger issues; Patton Oswalt gets a fun, short-lived moment as a paranoid doomsday prepper; Vanessa Hudgens (literally) bursts with allure as an ill-fated teenage vampire; and wisecracking comic Dennis Leary shines in the role of the movie’s main human baddie, a cynical, two-bit captain of industry with a killer case of hubris.
Oh, and there’s also one other celebrity drop-in: a mysteriously familiar disembodied voice that’ll have you reaching for the internet (hint: You’ve heard it in The Mandalorian) to see if that’s who you think you’re hearing once the aliens finally do establish actual contact.
It’s just one more clever move in a film whose smarter-than-it-seems comedy is usually overshadowed by a gonzo approach that always goes straight for the laugh button. But if you’re up for a side of winking slyness to go with your crude main course of Halloween humor, it definitely puts Freaks of Nature on the short list of silly popcorn flicks worth watching while we’re still in the thick of this spooky season.
Freaks of Nature is streaming on Peacock here.
