‘Mean Girls’ is Actually a Horror Movie

Mean Girls may have its own, unofficial holiday — October 3 — but don’t let it pass you by that behind it’s pink, comedic façade, there is something more sinister at play. Tina Fey’s masterpiece isn’t just a comedy… It’s a horror movie. And that makes it perfect for the spooky season that is Halloween. Don’t believe us? Let’s run through the evidence.

For starters, Mean Girls is based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, a parental guide to teenage girls. This is the film at its terrifying core, as new girl Cady Heron is forced to endure all of the horrors that make up girlhood in America: loneliness, the struggle to fit in, and the fear of being a loser. To Janice Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), she is “new meat”– prey for them, and the rest of the student body, to feed on. And that’s not metaphorical, either: Cady envisions attacking Queen Bee Regina George (Rachael McAdams), leader of popular kids The Plastics, “like in the animal kingdom.”

There’s another aspect of Mean Girls, a scared, terrifying hot pink object that acts like the puzzle box in Hellraiser, but for teenagers: the Burn Book. If you thought everyone would forget about you making out with a hot dog “one time,” think again. Like the lemarchand configuration, the secrets held in the Burn Book cause death; though of a social variety. When the pages of the book are photocopied and released into the wild of the school hallways, no one is safe from the truth of their insecurities.

And most horrifying of all? What eventually kills Regina’s power over the school is her literally getting run over by a bus; not something you’d expect from a comedy movie. She miraculously survives, but as the movie ends, Cady threatens to hunt down anyone who plans to destroy the new social order of High School and teases the scariest, most true to the horror genre detail of all: a return of new Plastics in a terrifying sequel that will never live up to the original film.

Sure, Mean Girls does not operate in the traditional sense of a horror film; and doesn’t necessarily sit at that same table as films like Halloween or Scream. But it definitely has all the elements that make for a perfect scary movie. It’s the story of someone struggling to fit in, who must defeat evil in order to stay alive while also fighting being turned by that same evil. It’s the story of witches and the way that their rumors can tear down a society. But more importantly, it’s a classic teenage horror film – the scariest detail being that we somehow managed to survive High School.