‘It’s a Wonderful Knife’ Director Reveals Joel McHale’s ‘Darker’ Role in New Holiday Slasher (Exclusive)

It’s a Wonderful Knife, a new holiday slasher movie, opens in theaters this week, and is certain to turn your white Christmas into a bloody red one. The film features a fantastic cast, including Justin Long (Barbarian), Jane Widdop (Yellowjackets), Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps), Jess McLeod (One of Us is Lying), Cassandra Naud (Influencer), former Community star Joel McHale. Recently, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with It’s a Wonderful Knife director Tyler MacIntyre (V/H/S/99), and he shared some insight on what it was like to work with McHale in this much “darker” role than fans are used to seeing him in.

“Joel is awesome,” MacIntyre told us. “He’s very much known as these kinds of heavier comedic roles where he’s very acerbic and often just a very sharp kind of cynical character. We wanted to play him a bit against type. We wanted to play him as the kind of Hallmark dad. He’s a bit ‘gee whizz,’ he loves his family, loves Christmas in a sincere way, so he still gets a couple of his one-liners in there, but he was up for playing the position and that was really great to see. Then, as the story progresses, he gets to do some darker stuff and some more dramatic stuff, which he’s not always known for but does amazingly well.”

MacIntyre noted McHale’s brief “sledgehammer” role in , adding, “He’s a guy who’s very much like ‘project first.’ We had a long discussion about tone and he checked out a bunch of my work and was really kind of there to just be somebody who’s on the team and set a great example for the younger cast. He shot kind of early in the schedule and they all really looked up to him because a lot of them grew up with Community and things like that.” The filmmaker also shared that McHale “was just always prepared and super professional and really was bringing some ideas but not overstepping and was just very giving as a performer and really helped support them. It kicked us off on just the right foot, which is awesome to see.”

It’s a Wonderful Knife is a Scream-esque horror homage to It’s a Wonderful Life, spinning the story into a wintery holiday slasher. The film’s official synopsis reads: “A year after saving her town from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve, Winnie Carruthers’ (Widdop) life is less than wonderful – but when she wishes she’d never been born, she finds herself in a nightmare parallel universe and discovers that without her, things could be much, much worse. Now the killer is back, and she must team up with the town misfit to identify the killer and get back to her own reality.”

Speaking about how the film evolves some of the more bleak aspects of its source material, MacIntyre explained, “That movie’s essentially about a guy whose life’s going so poorly that he goes out to a bridge to kill himself. And people were like, ‘oh man, the feel good times around the holidays.’ So, there’s an irony there that we were very aware of and we wanted to…” MacIntyre then redirected, “Our movie is a very different structure to it. In that film, he makes this magical wish where he is sort of shown a nightmare version of his town, but he does that an hour and a half into the movie. It’s pretty late. They don’t really spend much time there. It’s a very quick of set of scenes.”

MacIntyre continued, “That movie itself is riffing on A Christmas Carol. So, that kind of goes to Christmas present stuff. I think that’s very interesting to me, but we needed to cover that ground really quickly. So, we ended up leaning into the slasher tropes of it where essentially the first 15 minutes of our movie is kind at the end of another slasher movie. Then we sort of deal with the fallout of somebody surviving this kind of horrific night and their friend’s dying. Then that puts them in this very dark place where their family’s not there to support them and they kind of come to a similar conclusion, but they’re doing that 25 pages in not 95 pages in.”

The director added, “That way we get to have more of the fun and games in the nightmare version of the town where the slashers run amuck. I think that was understanding those structural differences let us set the stage for leaning into a lot of the satirical stuff. We still have suicides very much like a theme in this and people kind of feeling a bit alienated around the holidays is definitely something that is a theme, especially with the Bernie (McLeod) character. We were quite aware of that, but we have sort of the inverse problem that It’s a Wonderful Life has, where we’re sort of trying to find the light within the darkness rather than the other way around. It’s a Wonderful Knifeopens only in Theaters on November 10th, 2023, and will stream on Shudder at a later date.