‘Scary Movie’ turns 25: how one movie ruined the parody genre forever
It’s been 25 years since Scary Movie debuted on screens, which, love it or hate it, marked an undeniably seminal point in cinema history. Until then, the parody genre had spawned some genuinely acclaimed pieces of work, like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and the 1980 disaster movie spoof Airplane!, but as the new millennium emerged, something shifted. The parody genre cheapened, becoming too on-the-nose and ridiculous, and with the release of Scary Movie, it was never the same again.
Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, the film used the Scream franchise and I Know What You Did Last Summer as the basis for the plot and characters, blending the two in a not-so-subtle parody of the teen slasher genre. However, just a few years before, Scream had already emerged as a satirical look at the horror genre, readily poking fun at tired tropes and stereotypes and using them to its advantage. Wes Craven’s film was a hit, not only because it took a meta approach to the genre but because it was as funny as it was scary. For all of the quotable lines like, “Please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel”, there were many seat-gripping moments, shocking twists, and gruesome kills.
Thus, by using Scream as its basis, Scary Movie essentially parodied a parody, just without the intelligence and cinematic skill that Craven—already an established horror filmmaker—wielded. Yet, for all of its ridiculous moments, like Anna Faris’ character Cindy Campbell having the biggest bush you’ve ever seen, or Ghostface’s rap (“Peel your foreskin off and make a winter coat”), the film is an iconic artefact of 2000s cinema that you’d be lying if you said you’d never laughed at.
Sure, it’s full of inexcusably problematic jokes, like the interpretation of Dewey from Scream as the intellectually disabled Doofy. Yet, when Ghostface stabs Drew, played by Carmen Electra, and a silicone breast emerges on his knife, much to the killer’s confusion, you can see why it became a commercial hit. Made on a budget of $19million, the film made a whopping $278m, proving that if there’s one thing audiences want to see, it’s mindless jokes about sex, drugs, and violence. And you have to hand it to the (many) writers of Scary Movie, who certainly delivered.
It doesn’t claim to be a piece of high art, and all of its references, from The Blair Witch Project to The Matrix, are spot on. Yet, it quickly devolved into an even more critically derided mess of sequels, all becoming worse than the one that came before, and soon the parody genre lost its spark. Two of the writers of the film, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, are partially to blame for this sharp decline in interesting parody movies, with the pair going on to make a string of genuinely awful spoofs such as Date Movie and Epic Movie.
They are the kind you find sitting on charity shop shelves, likely donated by the parent of a teenager who has since grown up and no longer has the need for watching these crass and offensive excuses of comedy during sleepovers.
If Scary Movie hadn’t been followed by the array of awful parody movies that came in its wake, then perhaps people wouldn’t consider it such a cinematic crime. Unfortunately, it proved that all you need to do to make a quick spoof story is rip off a much better film, use some toilet humour, and throw in some misogyny, ableism, and homophobia. This formula has since been used more than enough times and has essentially carried the genre to its dying end.
Brooks’ parody films were controversial, sure, but they had a purpose to them; he used satire and humour as a way to criticise oppressive structures and stereotypes. The parody movies of the 2000s are devoid of such thinking, only adding to the club with their insensitive humour (in Disaster Movie, Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City is parodied by a male actor, only furthering the sexist attitudes commonly targeted towards Sarah Jessica Parker’s looks at the time).
Scary Movie is still loved by many fans who grew up watching the infamous movie way before they were old enough to, but with the dawn of the internet age, where fast-moving memes are the new comedic currency, the parody movie simply can’t exist in the same way anymore. Emerging shortly before social media took over, Scary Movie marked the end of a genre, for better or for worse.
