Editorials
‘The Bye Bye Man’ Director Stacy Title Reveals Her Favorite Boogeyman
This morning we shared the exciting news that we have a special guest editor for the week: Stacy Title, the director of The Bye Bye Man, opening this Friday the 13th. Distributor STX reached out to us about allowing Title to share stories and inspirations behind her haunter, and we thought it would be a fun way to introduce her to you guys. In her first editorial, Title shares her favorite boogeyman…
“My Favorite Boogeyman”
There’s a pantheon I dream The Bye Bye Man can join. That big group in the sky and hell of Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, the Candyman and the Devil. The great boogeymen. That said, the boogeyman that scared me the most growing up was no man. She was Victoria, played by the divine Barbara Steele in Silent Scream.
It was 1979. I was 15. As per normal, my friend Shari and I parked our bikes at the Plainview Theater and persuaded someone to buy us tickets for the R-rated horror movie we were dying to see. And there began my love and hate of being terrified.
This is a difficult to find 1970’s slasher. That was clearly devised and came hard and fast upon the success of Halloween. I just recently found out that they fully reshot The Silent Scream, adding the fabulous rogues Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schreiber! As stellar police detectives! You’ll crave more of these two who only interact briefly with the young leads in one scene. And the director, Denny Harris, never made anything else.
Our main character Scotty is a young woman played by the delightful Rebecca Balding. Scotty is late to arrive at her new college UC Santa Barbara to register and is told by a sour University Dean that since she’s late, there’s no more housing on campus and she will now have to check out a list of area residents who rent out bedrooms. Too bad for young Scotty because she picks the house with a secret. Of course, there are three other students living there, more bodies to kill. This sounds like a B-movie. Which it is. But it has many delights most owing to a brilliant Barbara Steele.
As Steele knocks off the co-eds, we finally see her and learn her tragic backstory. It’s chilling when she shushes one corpse she has dressed doll-like in a wedding gown or when she vigorously stabs another. In one scene, the other family members collude by holding a co-ed down, and it is downright awful. Why does Victoria scare me so much? Is it because she is a fully realized psychopath? Because there’s a piece of me deep down that relates to her rage? I’m not sure. Victoria connects to classic boogeymen in that, she is waiting in the shadows for you, in that she wields a sharp weapon to kill you, in that she is relentless and prodigious and gleeful in her homicide. In the end of Silent Scream our fabulous reshoot detectives come to the rescue. OMG I loved this movie…it scared the piss out of me.
But the story continues for young Stacy Title. After the movie was over Shari and I went to the House of Pancakes where that big, old IHOP gold pot of coffee was beckoning on the table. I sucked it down. I had, until this night, limited experience with coffee…so the effect was like taking a powerful amphetamine. I was BUZZING. We were also jazzed and hyped up about the movie. I rode home very fast. Miraculously, I fell asleep. And then at 3 a.m. I woke up. Victoria was in my closet. Staring at me. I saw her there, with her knife! I was paralyzed. I am not sure how long I stayed there, looking at her evil face that was ready to kill me, but finally I leaped out of bed and ran upstairs to wake my parents. My Dad was ripshit. Accused me of being on drugs. He was right. Caffeine and Barbara Steele.
-Stacy Title
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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