Scary Movie

The original film spawned a massive franchise and can be directly credited for the rise of “Genre Movie” as a type of parody film. Some may contest that, but I cannot recall anybody clamoring for the likes of Epic Movie or Superhero Movie.

Scary Movie was the original title for Scream, bringing the meta joke full circle, with this film series that tackled the rise of teen slashers. As such, it’s unsurprising that the primary film that was parodied was Scream, with I Know What You Did Last Summer acting as the latticework for the remaining core of the film. Both were written by Kevin Williamson, and so the similarities between them are notable, but much like Scary Movie, Scream became a smashing success. While all three franchises have come back in the last year, sadly, only Scary Movie and Scream saw continued success. Fingers crossed that I Know What You Did Last Summer does continue with its series.

The film opens with Drew Decker (Carmen Electra), parodying Drew Barrymore’s iconic opening as Casey Becker, before transitioning to Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) and her group of friends, who have a dark and terrible secret. Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall) and Buffy Gilmore (Shannon Elizabeth) are her two best friends, while their boyfriends, Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrahams), Ray Wilkins (Shawn Wayans), and Greg Phillippe (Lochlyn Munro), fill out the majority of their group. Shorty Meeks (Marlon Wayans), Brenda’s brother, is the last major character of their group, and the only one who has no idea that the group ran over a boot one year prior, before dumping a very much-alive man in the lake. Because of this secret, the group becomes the target of a killer in a Ghostface mask.

Because Scary Movie bounces back and forth between those two storylines, it amalgamated the friend groups from both and then gave several of the characters names that were a play on famous actors or, in the case of Cindy, the main character of Scream. From there, the main plot built on them, culminating in the house party that acted as the final set piece for Scream. What makes this interesting is how easy it was for Scary Movie to meld the core plotlines of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer together without losing the guiding spirit of the former or taking time out of its story to parody other stories. One of the most memorable parodied aspects is featured at the end of the film, when Cindy is alone and attacked by the real killer, and it switches from a horror film to The Matrix.

The rest of the ensemble is based on other characters. Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) arrives in town to cover the murders of one, then two, teens (after she shoots one on live camera for interrupting her broadcast). Doofy Gilmore (Dave Sheridan) is the older brother of Buffy and a Deputy with the Sheriff’s department, under Sheriff Burke (Kurt Fuller). Their presence reinforces that Scream is the primary film being parodied, while also giving the film room to parody The Blair Witch Project and The Usual Suspects, during Gail’s run through the woods and the twist ending with Doofy, when it’s revealed he had been feigning his intellectual disability.

What makes Scary Movie so entertaining is that it measured its jokes effectively, understanding when to play something relatively straight versus when to simply exaggerate the material. Partway through the film, Cindy screams at the top of her lungs, “What are you waiting for?!” which, as any true fan of I Know will recall, Jennifer Love Hewitt does the same in the middle of the street. The scene in question was written by a fan, and it was put in the slasher film, while Scary Movie takes it one step further, revealing that they are not nearly as alone… and then a teacher jumps from the top of the school. As mentioned earlier, the inciting incident for the secret is the group’s hit-and-run. Unlike I Know, the main characters in Scary Movie had not actually killed the man, who seemed utterly fine and ready to walk it off, only for them to knock him unconscious and then dump him into the water. Whether that acted as commentary for how unaware horror movie characters are of their surroundings is up to you to decide.

Scary Movie was not attempting to make a run for the Oscars. It built off a pattern of films that had become the dominating topic in horror throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. Its sequels would continue to parody horror films of their respective genres in the same way that Scream acted as a constantly evolving commentary on horror. While the behind-the-scenes drama of Scary Movie would see the franchise taken from the Wayans Brothers after Scary Movie 2, fans tend to agree that it didn’t negatively impact Scary Movie 3 or Scary Movie 4, while most like to ignore Scary Movie 5 outright. The recent sequel, initially titled Scary Movie 6 before dropping the “6,” went so far as to acknowledge every film except the fifth one.

These are the types of films that exist to draw out a laugh, and Scary Movie managed that with near effortless charm. Whether by having the camera literally slam into Cindy when it zooms in on her, or watching Cindy push her grandmother down the stairs to evade the killer, a la Cici Cooper in Scream 2, followed by a piano, the comedy has mostly aged well. The usual jokes that tend to date a film’s ideology exist, but that is why it is important to judge a film based on the era in which it was made, rather than the current era we live in. Having recently watched the latest Scary Movie, it’s clear what grew with the franchise and what was comfortably left behind in 2000.