Happy Birthday to Me is a 1981 slasher film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dane, Sharon Acker, Frances Hyland, Tracey Bregman, and Lisa Langlois.

Ginny, who is plagued by repressed memories, visits her on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday, with whom she previously underwent an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure after surviving a harrowing accident at the drawbridge.

As Ginny attempts to resume her normal life, her fellow Top Ten members are murdered in vicious and violent ways: Etienne is strangled when his scarf gets thrown into the spokes of his motorcycle, and Greg's neck is crushed in his room while lifting weights.

Ann and Ginny go to Alfred's house as he has been acting odd lately and discovers he is an elaborate prosthetic make up artist with a creepy replica of Bernadette's head.

While the two are drinking wine and smoking marijuana, Ginny begins to feed Steve with the kebab, but violently shoves the skewer down his throat.

He flees hysterically and finds one of Ginny's friends, Amelia, standing in the yard in what seems to be a state of shock, clutching a wrapped gift.

Keen to get their classier, bigger-budgeted Happy Birthday to Me released, Dunning and Link quickly realized that gimmicks were being used up by other slasher movies in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980).

The subplot involving Virginia's brain injury came from Dunning reading an article about regenerating frogs with electricity; he figured this could form the basis for a murder mystery where a girl suffers flashbacks and blackouts yet is unsure of her role in the mayhem around her.

[5] The specialized genre website Retro Slashers has a copy of the script purporting to be a third draft from April 1980, where the major difference is that Virginia is actually the killer, possessed by the spirit of her deceased mother.

[5] Actress Melissa Sue Anderson, who had garnered childhood fame for her portrayal of Mary Ingalls on the television series Little House on the Prairie, was cast in the film's lead, marking her major feature debut.

[7] Happy Birthday to Me began shooting in early July 1980 with British director J. Lee Thompson, famous for the classic Cape Fear (1962).

In the press material for the film, he stated: "What attracted me to this script was that the young people stood out as vivid, individual characters.

Dupuis later did the duties on another bigger budget Canadian slasher, Visiting Hours (1982), but left the production for undisclosed reasons.

According to producer John Dunning, with the assistance of special effects man Tom Burman, Thompson "would be splashing blood all over the place".

[2] The producers found it difficult to find the right bridge closer to the main production, as the expansion of the Highway system had made them increasingly rare.

[10] During production, the film's screenplay underwent rewrites, including an entirely new ending that featured Ann as the real killer instead of Ginny.

[11] According to actress Melissa Sue Anderson, her character of Ginny "was so convincing as the good girl, they didn’t want to sacrifice the audience’s sympathy," leading screenwriters Timothy Bond and Peter Jobin to rework Saxton's screenplay.

[11] This mid-production alteration required the special effects team to craft a plaster cast of Anderson's face to design a latex mask, which Ann is revealed to be wearing in the finale.

Syreeta, one-time wife of Stevie Wonder, provided the closing track, composed by Lance Rubin that plays over the credits.

[2][3] Dunning and Link were displeased with the advertising campaign that Columbia Pictures had planned; they thought it should have been more subtle and worried that it might put off as many people as it attracted.

The United Kingdom-based home media company Indicator Films released a region-free two-disc Blu-ray and DVD combination package in December 2016, which featured promotional materials, a commentary track, and both the original and alternate musical score.

[24] The Baltimore Evening Sun's Lou Cedrone wrote "it is sad to know that a director of this stature has descended to this, a bloody horror film.

Candice Russell of the Fort Lauderdale News praised the film as a "more than competently made chiller", adding that director Thompson "plays out the scenes where we anticipate mayhem like a virtuoso violinist".

[26] Ron Cowan of Statesman Journal commended the acting of Anderson and direction of Thompson, and wrote that he "develops the characters of the young actors enough that they take on the semblance of real people".

[28] AllMovie gave the film a mixed review, writing, "Happy Birthday to Me stands out from the slasher movie pack of the early '80s because it pushes all the genre's elements to absurd heights.

The murders, plot twists and, especially, the last-minute revelations that are dished up in the final reel don't just deny credibility, they outright defy it".