How 'So I Married an Axe Murderer' Bombed But Became a Classic Anyway
Anyone who’s seen and loved the 1993 cult classic So I Married an Axe Murderer knows that its title doesn’t describe the plot literally. (If you haven’t seen it, you should know that there are spoilers ahead.) The dark romantic comedy features Mike Myers as Charlie MacKenzie, a sensitive beat poet who is deathly afraid of commitment, at least until he meets the love of his life: a beautiful butcher named Harriet, who may or may not be a serial killer. Charlie falls in love despite himself, but a story that’s all over the supermarket tabloids stokes his fears of getting involved with Harriet. A mysterious black widow called Mrs. X has left a trail of dead husbands across the country: a plumber, an Atlantic City lounge singer, a Russian martial arts expert in Miami. Harriet’s sister Rose, it turns out, is the real killer, quietly murdering her sister’s husbands out of jealousy and allowing Harriet to believe they up and ghosted her.
Axe Murderer started life as an idea for a quite different movie. It began in 1988, when a young screenwriter named Robbie Fox sold a pitch to then-Columbia executive Robert Fried called “The Man Who Cried Wife.” Crucially, in this original version, the protagonist really does marry an axe murderer. Speaking to Spin recently over the phone, Fox described the wry, distinctly Jewish outlook of his first script as “essentially Woody Allen in Hitchcock’s Suspicion,” or like Annie Hall, if Annie was a serial killer. “She was great at a dinner party: bright, funny, great cook,” Fox quipped. “Other than the stabbings, she was the perfect wife.”