Blumhouse Productions’ 2017 Halloween offering has a pretty unbeatable premise:
Groundhog Day crossed with a slasher film, in which co-ed Tree (short for Theresa) is endlessly chased and killed by a psycho with a knife wearing a nightmare-fodder cartoon baby mask on her birthday. Every time she gets murdered, she wakes up on her birthday again.
Happy Death Day refreshes the time loop premise by making the archetype who would usually bite the dust early in the movie—that is, the clueless sorority girl—self-aware and active in her own fate; as she retains memories of the previous days, she’s able to begin anticipating the killer’s approach to try and evade her own murder. As Tree learns to pay attention to her sorority sisters and the sweet underclassman trying to help her stay alive, as she investigates red herrings and reconciles with estranged family on what is already an emotional bulldozer of a day, she slowly transforms herself into a Final Girl.