Three framed movie posters hung on Christopher Landons wall when we chatted via Zoom. One was for Disturbia, the first big-screen smash he wrote. Another was Burning Palms, Landons little-seen directorial debut; even he calls its quality a mixed bag. The third was Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, the film that began to establish his reputation as a steward of winky genre mashups.

Its really embarrassing because this is our shit throwaway room in our house, said Landon, who recently became a father. And its the only room that my husband let me he actually put these up because hes sweet like that. But now its the only quiet room in my house, and so its the only spot I can do this [interview] in, and now its sort of like, Oh, look at my ego! Im like, It really wasnt meant to be this. It was not the background by choice.

None of those movies are the ones Landon is best known for. Over the past several years, in addition to scripting four Paranormal Activity installments, he has chopped and screwed a number of cinematic classics. With 2017s Happy Death Day, Landon turned Groundhog Day into a rollicking slasher romp about a narcissistic sorority snob (Jessica Rothe) who gets killed and wakes up in the same dorm room every morning. Its follow-up, Happy Death Day 2U, paid homage to Back to the Future Part II and satirized the redundancy of most horror sequels.

Landons newest film, Freaky , presents a clever spin on Freaky Friday and other body-swap comedies, animating them with the voltage of a thriller. Kathryn Newton plays Millie Kessler, a bullied teenager caring for her widowed mother (Katie Finneran) when the infamous Blissfield Butcher a serial killer who has long evaded capture shows up before her schools homecoming dance. His mystical Aztec dagger causes Millie and the murderer to switch places, meaning she suddenly finds herself in the physique of the assassin himself, aka Vince Vaughn. Millie has 24 hours to break the curse, yielding a series of frightful mix-ups as she navigates the world in a mans body and the butcher resembles a 17-year-old girl.