Editorials
Happy 35th Anniversary to ‘The Burning!’
35 years ago, Tony Maylam’s not-so-classic slasher film The Burning was unleashed upon the world. Released exactly one year after Sean S. Cunningham’s blockbuster Friday the 13th and just one week after Friday the 13th Part 2, The Burning took in a measly $707,770 at the box office (and that includes the box office returns for the re-release in November of 1982). With a reported budget of $1.5 million, it was considered a flop. Audiences just weren’t that interested in The Burning when they could flock to the established Friday the 13th franchise (well, soon-to-be franchise anyway). In recent years, The Burning has gained a cult following and a reexamination from critics. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any way, The Burning is still a respectable genre effort with a likable cast and top-notch make-up effects from the master himself: Tom Savini.
The Burning is technically Miramax’s first movie. Co-written by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein, the film was also produced by Harvey Weinstein in his first gig as a film producer. Harvey was desperate to get into the movie business at the time, so after seeing the success of low budget horror films (slashers, specifically) he began brainstorming ideas for a similarly-budgeted film. He remembered the Cropsey legend from campfire tales he heard at summer camp when he was born and The Burning (and Cropsy, sans Cropsey’s “e”) was born.
The script was written in six weeks and Tony Maylam was brought on as director. Since the film was set in the summer time and Weinstein wanted to get the film released before the slasher craze ended, The Burning was rushed into production. While many may see it as a ripoff of Friday the 13th, the film actually started production (meaning a treatment written by Weinstein) a whole year before that film was even released. It just had the misfortune of coming out a year later. Who’s to say what would have happened if The Burning had been released first. Maybe Cropsy would have been an even bigger slasher giant than Jason Voorhees himself.
The film is also famous for being the first on-screen appearances for now-famous actors Holly Hunter and Jason Alexander. Alexander has the most to do in the film as lovable camper Dave and Hunter gets maybe two lines of dialogue as random camper Sophie, but it’s still fun to watch her. Fisher Stevens has the most fun as the goofy Woodstock before getting killed in the outstanding raft massacre set piece.
Speaking of the raft massacre, one can’t discuss The Burning without mentioning it’s top-notch make-up effects from Tom Savini. Interestingly enough, he turned down working on Friday the 13th Part 2 because he didn’t buy the logic that Jason would be the villain in the film. Thinking that the script for The Burning was superior, Savini chose to lend his talents to that film. He even lent his legs to the film (his legs are the ones getting burned in the opening sequence that gives the film its namesake). The Burning is filled with great kills (in the latter half of the film anyway, but more on that in a bit), but the pièce de résistance comes in the form of the film’s raft sequence, in which Cropsy dispatches a group of campers in the middle of the lake (though it takes a laughably long time for them to make it to the raft after they see it).
Not surprisingly, the film suffered many cuts in order to avoid an X rating from the MPAA. Many of the kills are even more graphic versions of similar kills in Friday the 13th (Karen’s death is a bloodier version of Annie’s death and Cropsy’s death is a much more graphic version of Marcie’s death), showing that Savini was willing to improve upon his previous efforts.
Unlike many slasher films of the time, The Burning takes a good while to get going. It isn’t until the 49-minute mark when the first camper (poor, nude Karen) meets her demise. And before that the only death was a prostitute that Cropsy picked up after his release from the hospital. While this may seem like slasher sacrilege, it actually works in favor of the film. There’s only one or two truly unlikable characters in the film (Glazer and arguably Todd), but the rest of the cast is filled with likable characters. While it would be a stretch to say it’s “fun” to spend time with these characters, their likability at least makes The Burning’s slow beginning bearable. Plus, it’s really sad to see Karen bite it. She didn’t even get to have sex!
The Burning also boasts a lot of effective jump scares. I admit that even though I had seen the film before, there were several moments that had me jumping off my couch (Glazer’s death being the most memorable example). Of course this is mostly thanks to Rick Wakeman’s (of the band Yes) creepy score, but it’s still incredibly effective even by today’s standards.
What are your thoughts on The Burning? Do you think it’s an under-appreciated film? Or do you think it’s just another run-of-the-mill copycat of films like Halloween and Friday the 13th? Let us know in the comments below and share your thoughts and memories of the film.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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