My Bloody Valentine

Twenty years before the film opens, the mining town of Valentine Bluffs was devastated when two supervisors abandoned their posts to attend the annual Valentine's Day dance, leaving five miners trapped by a methane explosion. Only one survived: Harry Warden, who lasted underground by cannibalizing his coworkers and emerged unhinged. A year later, on Valentine's Day, Harry escaped the asylum, murdered the two negligent supervisors with a pickaxe, left their hearts in candy boxes, and warned that the town must never hold another Valentine's dance.

The town has obeyed for two decades. As the film opens, the young adults of Valentine Bluffs — most of them miners themselves — convince the mayor to allow the first Valentine's dance since the tragedy. The mayor receives an anonymous candy box containing a bloody human heart and a warning note in verse. The sheriff cancels the party.

A love triangle simmers underneath: T.J. Hanniger, the mayor's son, has returned to town after a failed attempt to start a new life out west and is trying to win back his ex-girlfriend Sarah, who is now with his friend Axel Palmer. As bodies pile up — Mabel the laundress killed and stuffed in an industrial dryer; Happy the bartender pickaxed through the eye behind the bar — the killings are all tagged with hearts and verse notes signed by 'Harry Warden.'

With the party officially cancelled, the young miners throw their own at the rec hall and, dared into it, descend in helmet-lamps and party hats into the actual mineshafts. The masked miner follows. He picks them off one by one through the tunnels — pickaxe throws, a drill-press impalement, a shower-head, hangings — leaving a heart at each scene.

T.J. and Sarah find the killer cornering Axel. In the final confrontation, the gas-masked figure is unmasked as Axel Palmer himself. As a boy, Axel witnessed Harry Warden murder his father — one of the two negligent supervisors — and the trauma led him to assume Harry's identity. Sarah and T.J. fight back and trap him. To escape, Axel severs his own arm at the elbow with a pickaxe and crawls deeper into the mine, singing 'The Ballad of Harry Warden' and promising to return. T.J. and Sarah survive; Axel is still down there, alive in the dark.