Finn Wolfhard Took Inspiration From Unlikely Comedies To Make His New Slasher Horror Movie [Exclusive]

Folks, I'm going to be the one person brave enough to say it: 2025 has not exactly been great so far. I won't get into all the reasons why (have you checked your 401k lately?), but even narrowing the aperture to only the world of movies, things have been pretty rough out there. A majority of the big studio films have been disappointments, and the box office was struggling mightily until "A Minecraft Movie" came along. There have been a few highlights — I loved "The Ballad of Wallis Island," for example, and I really enjoyed Steven Soderbergh's one-two punch of "Presence" and "Black Bag" — but the first few months of the year weren't exactly filled with non-stop bangers.

Given the bumpy road movie lovers are currently experiencing, I felt a palpable sense of relief when I saw the new horror/comedy "Hell of a Summer." It's not the type of film that's going to save the box office, but it's a fresh, hilarious take on a familiar camp slasher story that actually cares about its characters and feels like it was made by people who were creatively invested in what they were making instead of just checking boxes to please shareholders.

One of those filmmakers is Finn Wolfhard, who you probably know best as Mike from "Stranger Things." Wolfhard wrote and directed "Hell of a Summer" alongside his pal Billy Bryk, and the two of them play two camp counselors who are fighting for their lives when a mysterious masked killer starts picking off the counselors the week before the campers arrive. The film marks Wolfhard and Bryk's feature directorial debut, and I recently spoke with Wolfhard about what kind of movies inspired them when they were trying to make "Hell of a Summer." He cited Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead," which has come up several times during the press tour as a North Star due to the way it puts a focus on its characters instead of simply going through the motions of a genre film, but there were two other films he cited that surprised me.

"It's hard to not just talk about Spielberg all the time, so being able to frame shots, there was definitely a lot of inspiration taken from him in some scenes and the way some stuff was shot," Wolfhard told me. "But I remember, there's a fight scene in the film that is happening, this kind of big action sequence, and we took inspiration from the fight scene in 'Raising Arizona' and the fight scene in 'Pineapple Express,' as well — two movies that are not horror movies, but we found had really good, messy fight scenes. So yeah, there was a bunch of stuff, and I think in the writing as well, there were a lot of little references to things we grew up watching."

The Spielberg influence is not surprising — there's a clarity of vision present here that seems like it could be traced back to The Beard — but the other two movies aren't nearly as obvious. I'd argue that there's nothing as extended and manic as the "Pineapple Express" fight scene in "Hell of a Summer," but after revisiting both that clip and this fight scene from "Raising Arizona," I can absolutely see why Wolfhard and Bryk looked to those movies as examples for what they wanted to accomplish. There's a tactility to these fights that makes them feel more real than typical staged movie scuffles, and the specificity of people scraping their fingers on a ceiling or smashing their heads into porcelain toilets makes the audience wince and feel for the characters instead of having their eyes glaze over as characters perform feats of strength that no one can relate to.

You can listen to my full interview with Finn Wolfhard, which also touches on "Stranger Things" and his experience working with Willem Dafoe in A24's upcoming "The Legend of Ochi," on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

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"Hell of a Summer" is in theaters now.