From sleazy 90s paperback thriller to sleazy early 2000s slasher movie, Valentine is that soft spot in your heart that just won’t harden.
Valentine’s Day and horror make such a pretty pair. Red roses and red blood. Pink hearts and pink guts. Passionate devotion and sadistic obsession. It doesn’t take much to twist the romantic holiday into something violent and mean, which is why Valentine is such a fun story to indulge in every February. It’s the story of a revenge-obsessed killer targeting women on Valentine’s Day for a prank they pulled on him in their adolescence. The amount of drama and mystery varies, depending on which version you explore.
In the 1996 novel by Tom Savage, Valentine revolves around a successful mystery author named Jillian. It’s in late January that she starts to receive handmade valentines at her Greenwich Village apartment. Vague and short, their messages are always signed off with “Valentine.” She confides in her best friend Tara, a television actress, and her boyfriend Nate, an artist, as the cards evolve into more than just threatening words. In alternating chapters, Savage goes back to Jillian’s college days and the clique she was attached to. Savage also gives readers the killer’s POV, amping up the anticipation for Jillian’s next move towards solving the mystery of Valentine.
The film adaptation written by Donna Powers, Wayne Powers, Gretchen J. Berg, and Aaron Harberts, Valentine kicks off with the inciting incident that causes the killer to fall into Cupid-shaped lunacy. A 6th grade Valentine’s dance shows geeky Jeremy Melvin asking the prettiest girls for a dance. After their rejections, he asks another outsider and she agrees. But after being caught necking, she turns on him and claims he attacked her. Thirteen years later, the women are navigating the ups and downs of dating when they start to receive violent, threatening valentines. Each is signed “JM,” prompting them to remember the boy from their past. The group gets smaller as Valentine viciously picks them off and they struggle to figure out which man in their lives is hiding his true face.
It was smart to develop the Valentine script into a slasher. The novel is very much a dark thriller, but suffers from the amount of dating drama the story is built upon. “Do I love him?” “Is he into me?” “We’ll see where this goes,” and so forth isn’t exactly the thrilling content I gravitate towards. The amount of similarities between the source material and the script was a pleasant discovery. The novel buried the lede a bit, but the film might have been too forthcoming. Instead of making Valentine’s identity more of an unfolding mystery, it told audiences right away who it was but not what he looked like. This made the guessing game totally reliant on the strength of its red herrings, which weren’t exactly of a Agatha Christie caliber. What it lacked in elusiveness it made up for in its commitment to slashing and creative kills. The novel does have plenty of murder, but the killer’s commentary was sort of a buzz kill.
The film also sank its fair share of chips into the Valentine’s Day theming. The killer himself sports a cherub mask and strikes some of his victims down with a bow-and-arrow. On the nose? YES. But a themed killer makes any slasher that much more entertaining. Compared to the novel, his valentines are much more vicious (and clever). Red roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and tacky dance parties are integral to each version of the story, but are less of focus in the novel. The adaptation is sleazy in spirit. It’s focused on dating and sex but is more preoccupied with its death count than gratuitous flesh.
Each version does reveal a whopper of a twist, but the novel’s gives just a bit more whiplash. It was deceptive in its formatting, something mystery/thriller readers are going to love.
Who wins?
I have to give it to the film adaptation. I was convinced that the essence of the book was going to get lost in the sauce, but the screenplay conveyed it without a hitch and became its own thing. The novel, pushing nearly 500 pages, is very much a crime thriller that juggles a lot of plotlines and characters. That much dilution distracted from the holiday horror vibes, making most of the text a drama. It had its fair share of disturbing elements, but the villain Victor Dimorta was much too corny and insufferable to be taken seriously against the backdrop of NYC-writer mystery (or perhaps he was perfect for that?!) Valentine (2001) knew exactly what it was and didn’t pretend otherwise. It’s sexy, it’s sleazy, and it’s a slasher that hams up the holiday atmosphere. And with a soundtrack featuring Orgy and Deftones? The book had no chance in hell.
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