It’s been a long time since a really great parody came along, but some of the best comedies ever made have been spoofs.Airplane!is practically a remake of the corny disaster movieZero Hour!and it’s hailed as a comedy masterpiece.Monty Python’s Life of Brianis a jab at Biblical epics that doubles as the ultimate satire of organized religion. Mel Brooks made a legendary career out of spot-on spoofs of everything from westerns toStar Warsto Hitchcockian thrillers.
In order to make a spoof work, filmmakers need to spoof something that’s actually worth spoofing. TheAustin Powersmovieslampooned the outdated tropes of the James Bond franchisein hysterical fashion.This is Spinal Tap’s take on rockumentaries was so authentic that some viewers thought it was about a real band. Keenen Ivory Wayans’Scary Movieis a fantastic spoof with plenty of fun riffs on horror classics, but what prevents it from being a truly great parody is its strange choice of target.
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Compared to all the “Movie” movies that followed –Date Movie,Epic Movie,Disaster Movie–Scary Movieis aCitizen Kane-level cinematic masterpiece. But the writers should’ve picked a different horror movie as their primary point of reference. While the backstory of a group of teenagers killing a man in a hit-and-run was taken fromI Know What You Did Last Summer,Scary Movie’s story of a school being terrorized bya killer in a Ghostface maskis a clear reference to Wes Craven’s meta horror gemScream. The titleScary Moviewas actually taken from the original script that eventually evolved intoScream.
ParodyingScreamdoesn’t make a lot of sense, becauseScreamisalready a satire of the horror genre. On the surface, it might seem like a run-of-the-mill slasher with elements of whodunit mixed in. There’s a masked killer, a string of teenage murder victims, and a badass final girl. But it’s a subversively self-aware take on the genre. All the characters are familiar with the kind of horror movie they’re in. In one scene, Jamie Kennedy even outlines the rules for surviving a horror movie based on the genre’s rigid tropes and conventions.
What madeScary Moviework was the Wayans brothers bringing their unique comic sensibility into the familiar context of horror cinema. The movie doesn’t necessarily have anything insightful to say aboutScreamitself; the Wayans brothers just used its story as a loose framework upon which to layer a bunch of absurdist gags. ButScreamwas the wrong movie to parody. They could’ve borrowed the structure of pretty much any other pre-2000 horror classic besidesScream. They could’ve tolda story likeThe Texas Chain Saw Massacreabout a road trip through the South being interrupted by a family of cannibals, or a story likeThe Evil Deadabout a group of friends traveling to a cabin in the woods and unwittingly unleashing demonic spirits.
The self-aware edge ofScreamrevolutionized horror cinema. ParodyingScreamis like parodyingDeadpool. They’re both great examples of their own genres, but they also poke fun at those genres. Spoofing a spoof is redundant.Date Moviehas a whole section that parodiesMeet the Parents, but since all the jokes inMeet the Parentsare already solid, all the makers ofDate Moviedid was copy those jokes verbatim, dialing down the subtlety and dialing up the scatology.
The best moments inScary Movieare the scenes that spoof other movies besidesScream. It has jokes lampooningThe Shining,Halloween, andThe Sixth Sense, all of which would’ve made a better basis for a parody thanScream. There’s a hysterical reference to the infamous snot bubble fromThe Blair Witch Project. There are even a few fun nods to non-horror films, likethe climactic fight scene referencingThe Matrixor the twist reveal referencingThe Usual Suspects.
The sequel toScary Moviepicked more sensible spoof targets. After the first one set out to satirize slashers by satirizing a much stronger satire of slashers,Scary Movie 2tackledsupernatural horror movieslikePoltergeist,The Haunting, andThe Exorcist. Unfortunately, the writing of the secondScary Moviewas a lot weaker and lazier than the first one. They went all the way up toScary Movie 5, but each one was worse than the last. It’s a shame we never got the best of both worlds with a well-writtenScary Movieinstallment parodying a movie worth parodying.
LikeAirplane!orHot Shots!orTop Secret!,Scary Movieshould’ve parodied a movie that takes itself too seriously and falls far short of its ambitions.Screamis the opposite of that:it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy in its own rightthat doesn’t take itself seriously at all, but it’s also a terrifying horror movie with a bunch of memorable scares and iconic images. Spoofing that was a fool’s errand.
