How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates

CHAPTER 1

“I suppose I think about murder more than anyone really should. I am constantly amazed by its sheer power to alter and define our lives.”

—Not The Holiday

All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

However, the inherent structural similarities between these two ostensibly opposed genres suggest far wider applications could be obtained from not just their individual study but a complementary investigation.

A more in-depth consideration of these films reveals that they follow an analogous format, one that contains certain rules.

If the protagonists follow those rules, they win.

In slashers, they live. In rom-coms, they find love.

If they don’t follow the rules, they lose.

For slashers, that means getting decapitated in some gruesome, yet satisfying, way (often while topless).

For a rom-com, losing leads to crying in the rain outside an unrequited love’s house, doomed to be alone and sexless forever.

Either of these scenarios could apply to countless classics within the slasher and rom-com repertoire of the late twentieth century.

While these films are dismissed in some circles for an apparent lack of depth and a heavy reliance on tropes, audiences continue to come back for more.

Consider this dissertation a genealogical study of slashers and rom-coms; distant cousins stuck in the same generational cycle. Influenced and precast by their predecessors. Destined to repeat the tropes and clichés of their pa—

“I just don’t see what point you’re trying to make here, Jamie.”

Laurie lifts her gaze from the computer screen, russet-brown eyes squinting over to where I’m perched on the breakfast bar in my garlic bread–patterned blanket hoodie.

I’ve been watching her read the introduction of my dissertation like I’m Norman Bates, but instead of observing her through a peephole it’s from behind the lenses of my blue light glasses.

“I think you need to choose one,” she adds.

I squint back at her.

“Choose one what?”

There’s a slight pull in my gut that tells me I know what she’s going to suggest, but then my soft little heart assures me that she’s my friend—my best friend ever since we met in our Intro to Cinema Studies tutorial at NYU during the first semester of our freshman year.

And she wouldn’t be so cruel and thoughtless and just plain fucking wron—

“Slasher or rom-com.”

The offended, strangled scream that escapes my mouth wouldn’t be out of place in Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Considering how many hours of sleep I missed to work on that opening page, I could double as an undead extra, too.

“That’s the whole point of my research, Laurie!”

“I just don’t think they go together.”

“I’m not saying they go together. I’m saying their intrinsic purpose within the collective discipline of film and their formulaic structures are the same.”

At least that was how I sold the idea—verbatim—to my adviser.

She turns her eyes back to the screen, tilts her head.

“I don’t see it.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” I growl, pointing an almond-shaped, beige gel-tipped nail at her. I got them done yesterday, and I hope they help prove my point. “Because you’re an uninspired, documentary-loving, elitist piece of shit.”

She turns in her chair and points a longer, pointier, fully natural red nail back at me. She had them done this morning, and their effect cannot be denied.

“I am not elitist.”

She doesn’t argue about the other parts. We’ve been friends for too long, lived together in an apartment so small every bowel movement, orgasm, and opinion has been shared, willingly or unwillingly.

This is just a normal Tuesday afternoon.

“Laurieeeee,” I whine, dropping my head into my fleece-covered lap. The heatless curling ribbon I’ve wrapped my blond hair into jostles around my ears as I brace my feet against the bar stool to avoid toppling over. I don’t want to add injury to her insult.

I’ve been slaving away on the groundwork of my dissertation for a year.

My first draft is due in a month, and she doesn’t get it.

Granted, Laurie’s deepest desire is to spend her years making films that document aspects of real life.

She has no interest in grand romantic gestures or gratuitous violence.

Her film preferences extend to an in-depth expository of the daily lives of nomadic sheep farmers and, I don’t know… paint drying?

“I like the title!” she says, and that’s probably the closest I’ll get to consolation.

Laurie’s not really a demonstrative person.

Last year, when my parents called to tell me Cujo, the King Charles spaniel we’d had since I was twelve, had died at the tragically young age of fourteen, she gave me a firm handshake.

Surprisingly, it did make me feel better.

“All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries really speaks to the elitist piece of shit in me.”

“Well, if they’re handing out PhDs based on titles, I—”

“Baby girl,” she says like a warning, and it takes everything in me to keep my lips fashioned in a pout when she uses the pet name we have for each other.

We adopted it after I made her watch 365 Days as payback for having to sit through the nomadic sheep farmer documentary.

Attempts at making Stockholm syndrome sexy aside, what started off as a sardonic joke has evolved into an enduring term of endearment.

It’s the closest thing I’ll get to overt affection from a woman whose general demeanor could rival the impenetrable surface of Crystal Lake at the end of Friday the 13th.

“You need a break.”

“I need to write.”

“You’re ahead of your Gantt Chart.”

She points to where it lies to the side of my laptop, as if I haven’t memorized each little row of achievement like I memorized Kat’s speech in 10 Things I Hate About You.

“Exactly!” I say. “I have all my research, my outline, my title. I know what I want to say, I should just be able to write it.”

“Well maybe, as an ‘elitist piece of shit,’ I’m not the right person to be reading it.

” With that she scoots out of the chair and heads for the refrigerator, making a wide berth around the counter when I fling my foot out at her.

She opens the fridge and inserts her head into the top shelf as she asks, “When do you see Jordan?”

Romero. My adviser. Not related to the Father of the Zombie Film, but certainly wishes he was.

“Friday.”

“Then this seems like a fantastic concern to raise in that conversation.” Her voice sounds tinny in the confines of the fridge, and I have half a mind to swivel around, place my bare foot on her bony ass, and Spartan-kick her into a container of leftover chow mein for being so logical.

It’s not that I don’t believe in my work. I do.

I could talk about slashers and rom-coms for hours. Longer.

If the makers of Saw need an inventive form of torture for a new installment, just stick me in a dirty bathroom with a chained morally ambiguous gentleman and he’d end up cutting his own leg off to escape one of my lectures on how Nora Ephron was a visionary.

I know I know what I’m talking about. But what if? creeps in as easily as a masked killer at a summer camp. My brain forgets I’m perfectly capable of writing about a topic I have spent the majority of my adult life (and even before) studying and researching and unpacking.

Laurie’s right, though. There’s no point dwelling on a problem that has no hope of being solved until I can engage in some academic repartee with my adviser. She knows she’s right, too, but I don’t want her to get a big head.

“Stop being smart,” I mutter at her sweatpant-covered ass.

“Stop being dramatic,” echoes from the refrigerator.

I heave the most dramatic of dramatic sighs, then grin when she backs out of the fridge with a can of passion fruit sparkling water, holding it to her heart and widening her eyes. The pout is a nice touch, too. It’s the last one, and because I’m not an elitist piece of shit I let her have it.

“What time do we have to be there tonight?” I ask as Laurie takes the sacred last can to the couch and turns on the TV, switching it from Netflix to the news. Yeah, she still watches the news. I think it’s a guilty pleasure, the closest thing to fiction she’ll view willingly.

“Cocktail hour begins at seven. Dates start at eight. So be ready by… six thir—No, six fifteen? Google Maps predicts it could take anywhere from thirty to forty minutes to get to the bar from Bed-Stuy.”

“You and Google Maps,” I muse, jumping off the counter and sliding into the seat in front of my laptop.

“If it were a person, we wouldn’t even need to go tonight.

” With a few taps of the keys, I save and close the apparently pointless beginning pages of my dissertation, pulling the screen down in time to see Laurie lift a middle finger in my direction.

“This is as much for you as it is for me,” she calls over her shoulder, keeping her focus squarely on the newscaster who fills the frame of our TV.

“Consider this your allotted ‘popping the thesis bubble and reconnecting with the real world’ time for the week. You can’t spend every hour with masked murderers and men who get all starry-eyed every time a girl trips in a nice dress. ”

I mean, I could spend every hour doing that, but she’s got a point.

And I’ve already paid for the ticket. We’re going speed dating.

It’s not our first singles event. After a particularly heinous nonstarter situationship a few months ago, Laurie went down a Google rabbit hole incited by her own dating app fatigue.

She loves a statistic more than I love a well-executed jump scare, and when the numbers showed that a lot of people in our generation were as fed up with swiping as her (“Seventy-eight percent of users, Jamie!”), I accepted her proposal to attend at least one in-person social event a month.

It was an easy decision, since I’m vehemently against apps (it seems more likely you’ll get murdered rather than find love through Tinder these days).

And while speed dating definitely has a kind of dated, nineties feel to it, I’ve had fun at the other events we’ve gone to in the past. They’ve never led to actual dates—especially not after we went to a film trivia night, and I got a little too passionate during the horror category—but I like the idea of a real-life meet-cute.

I like the idea of locking eyes with someone and thinking: Oh, it’s you. I like it a lot.

I just haven’t seen it outside of the movies yet.

The newscaster changes their angle upon the completion of the weather report and the inset image flips to a story about a pretty woman around our age who was found with her throat slit.

I don’t even blink. It’s not the first time this has happened this year.

The banner slowly crawling across the screen with the words “Brooklyn Serial Killer” is evidence enough of that.

There’s been four murders in about as many months, and now Casey Langenkamp is number five.

The photos pulled from her social media depict a sweet-faced twentysomething who wouldn’t look out of place on a poster with Glen Powell.

She fits the usual victim profile that incites fervid, yet fleeting, public interest: blond, petite, pretty, loved by all, and of course she lit up the room when she walked in.

All the classic markers of someone who is destined to be murdered and discarded like the rose petals that have been found surrounding each of the bodies.

There’s a clip of a stern-looking woman—the lower third at the bottom of the screen identifies her as a police captain—confirming that the police believe the murders are connected, and then the report closes with the newscaster encouraging women to:

Be vigilant when out and about.

Ensure you share your location with someone you trust.

Avoid dark, isolated, or obstructed areas if walking alone.

And my favorite:

Trust your instincts.

Because, duh, if you’re a woman and you happen to find yourself in a situation where you end up murdered, you really do have to consider the part that you played in getting to that point.

Things like murder don’t just happen to women.

It’s because your instincts were off. As if every woman’s intuition isn’t a finely tuned divining rod for identifying danger.

The reality is you can’t avoid that danger if someone really wants to manhandle you into its path.

The reporter allows a moment of grim eye contact with the camera before, with a head tilt and lip quirk, they move on to some “good news” segment to counteract the brutal murder coverage.

It’s a stark change of tone. One accepted and extended by Laurie when she bends her head over the couch, a pensive look on her pretty little face as she asks, “So, what are you wearing tonight?”