‘Firestarter’ Is a Sign That Zac Efron Needs to Call His Agent. Immediately.

During the 2000s, horror fans were besieged by remakes that were neither wanted nor liked, including (but not limited to) 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2005’s The Fog and The Amityville Horror, 2006’s Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes, The Wicker Man, The Omen and When a Stranger Calls, 2008’s Prom Night, 2009’s Friday the 13^th and The Stepfather, and 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was a dreary era of substandard do-overs that put a glossy modern sheen on works that had never demanded such treatment, and save for the rare exception (notably, Rob Zombie’s two Halloween films), they were tossed-off cash-grabs that exploited familiar and easily marketable properties to a new generation of genre audiences eager for something sinister and sick to enjoy with their friends on a Friday night.

When that trend died, another cropped up, led by Stranger Things and likeminded projects that strip-mined beloved 1970s and ’80s gems for nostalgic homages. It’s up for debate whether those remix ventures were any more original than the remakes which preceded them, but it’s in that context that we now get Firestarter, a new Blumhouse-produced take on Stephen King’s 1980 novel about a young girl with the ability to set things on fire with her mind. It was always one of the author’s lesser early efforts, but it wedged itself into the public consciousness primarily via Mark L. Lester’s 1984 cinematic adaptation, which starred a young Drew Barrymore—fresh off her breakthrough part in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial—as Charlie, a pyrokinetic kid struggling to come to terms with her unruly habit of igniting conflagrations. Not that it deserved to be remembered; despite an impressive cast rounded out by George C. Scott, Martin Sheen, Louise Fletcher, Art Carney, David Keith and Heather Locklear, it was a lousy film that lacked horror, suspense, personality or an intriguing thought in its infernal head.

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All of which brings us to Keith Thomas’ 2022 iteration of King’s tale, a misbegotten undertaking that straddles the line between the crummy rehashes of 20 years ago and the more recent tributes of the last decade. Premiering simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock today (May 13), Firestarter feels, from the start, almost completely DOA—a somewhat shocking turn of events given that director Keith Thomas’ prior The Vigil was a restrained and efficient slice of religious horror. Thomas’ knack for menacingly low-lit action is once again evident in his latest. Yet the only mood conjured by this dud is one of extreme torpor, and the only response it elicits is confusion as to why anyone—including headliner Zac Efron—thought this was worthy of their time or energy in the first place.

In a generic house in a featureless town in an unidentified location, Andy (Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) are living with their daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who’s anything but normal, as evidenced by an opening dream sequence in which an infant Charlie sets fire to her crib—and then her own head! Andy wakes from this reverie shaken, and subsequently finds his daughter playing with a zippo lighter in the dark in their kitchen. She talks about how “something feels weird in my body,” meaning her capacity for shooting flames out of her torso (aka “the bad thing”). Andy reminds her that when that uncontrollable sensation washes over her, she should calm herself by focusing on everyday objects in her line of her sight. Once Vicky appears, he offers to make them all pancakes, although because Efron can’t sell himself as a dad (even with a perfunctory beard), this gesture of loving fatherhood comes off as laughably inauthentic.