Is Groundhog Day a Horror Movie?
Imagine going back to 1993, telling Harold Ramis that in 30 years, journalists, scholars and movie fans would still be poring over Groundhog Day for deeper meanings.
We’ve already heard how Phil’s experiences resemble the stages of grief. We’ve already seen his journey to enlightenment compared to Buddhism and Siddhartha. We’ve even entertained the theory that he stays in the loop for more than 10,000 years.
One of the more recent ideas that’s gained traction online originally came from an article by the culture writer Megan Gaber in The Atlantic, titled ‘Groundhog Day Was a Horror Movie All Along.’ In this piece, I’ll dive a little deeper into Gaber’s theory and see why it, and the movie, continues to resonate six years later. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find some of the movies we mention on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
What is Groundhog Day About?
If, for some reason, you’ve yet to see Groundhog Day, I’m both jealous and not jealous—in a way. Ramis’s stone-cold classic is amazing to see for the first time, of course, but it’s also one of the most rewarding movies on rewatch—in fact, seeing it for the sixth, 12th or 18th time has a way of revealing different things. It helps that not a second of its 101 minutes is wasted and that each frame is crammed with little jokes and ideas.
The story follows Bill Murray’s Phil Connors, a comically arrogant Pittsburgh weatherman, as he makes his annual professional pilgrimage to Punxsutawney to cover the local tradition of seeing whether a groundhog will come out of hibernation on February 2, thus predicting how many more weeks of winter there’ll be. While there, for no reason other than karmic justice, some higher power decides that Phil has to live this day repeatedly—or at least, you guess, until he learns to be a better person.
What Does Groundhog Day’s Plot Have to Do With Horror Movies?
In a sense, Ramis’ screenplay borrowed the blueprint of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (Murray had even starred in Scrooged a few years earlier) as well as movies like It’s a Wonderful Life but kind of gamified it, allowing him and his co-screenwriter Danny Rubin to dream up a bunch of side quests for Phil to go down before getting to the more sobering parts of his journey. The director wanted to lean towards comedy, but Murray insisted it be darker—one of the main reasons the movie is so great is that they found a way to split the difference.
The horror movie vibes come downstream of the stages of grief that Phil experiences: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Seen from another angle, his actions also start to look like the seven deadly sins—and it’s only after committing these, and getting no satisfaction, that Phil starts to lose the will to live. This leads to a bout of nihilism and several suicide attempts that the movie just about plays for laughs.
To call it a horror movie would, in a way, be like calling A Christmas Carol (even the Muppet version) and It’s a Wonderful Life horror movies, too, which, in a sense, they both are. And to think we’ve been arguing about Die Hard for all these years…
Is Groundhog Day REALLY a Horror Movie? (It Depends On Your Perspective)
Another thing that links the movies we’ve mentioned is that they all at least partially play out in uncanny realities—places that are familiar to the characters but where something is off. It’s a feeling that you get while watching movies like The Truman Show or shows like Pluribus: stories set in worlds with fewer consequences, by design, but where things have been stripped of meaning as a result.
Indeed, one person’s heaven can easily be another person’s hell. It’s like that story about the man who wakes up on a golf course with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan. When his first shot flies in, he goes wild, but as he keeps sinking them, one after the other, he starts to feel uneasy. “That’s the problem with this place,” Stalin explains, “every shot you hit is a hole in one.”
