Ever dream about living somebody else’s life for a day? Ever think about what an actual nightmare that would be before the inevitable lessons about what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes are learned?
If not, there are movies for that.
Many movies, actually, because the trope of two people swapping bodies—mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife, bride and random old man—has been part of cinematic history for more than a century, not even including all the takes on reincarnation, possession or wishing you were either big or 13 again.
The latest addition to the genre is the Friday the 13th release Freaky, a bloody horror-meets-humor thriller starring Vince Vaughn as a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher, who switches bodies with a teenage girl. While stuck inside the murderer’s body, Millie, played by Big Little Lies‘ Kathryn Newton, has to figure out how to reverse the swap before her inhabited body kills off the entire class.