Editorials
[Editorial] A Note on the Current State of Horror Television to All Our Twelve Year Readers
This essay is a [now belated] Christmas present written for all you young bastards out there. First off, I know many of you aren’t actually bastards. I use the term as a sign of fake-tough guy affection. Because deep down, we are all fake tough guys. That’s why we watch horror films.
But maybe some of you are too young to watch horror films. Stupid mom won’t let you and you don’t have a dad (again, I understand that you probably have a dad). I used to be in your boat. My mom wouldn’t let me watch any horror films until I was about fourteen years old. While most kids pretended to get lost in the video store so they could ogle the porn room, I spent my video story visits pretending to be lost so I could stare at VHS box art in the horror section, which admittedly had its fair share of boobs, as well.
I had a serious horror film itch, and there were only two methods by which I could scratch it. One was to stay the night with friends, since most of them lacked mothers as lame and draconian as mine. Unfortunately, this rarely worked out. Most of my friends had no interest in horror films or had already seen them before too many times. I saw Halloween 4 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 by this method, but that’s about it.
Fortunately there was method two: Television. Granted, this wasn’t good for horror films but it worked wonders for horror itself because mom couldn’t monitor everything I watched. Plus, she figured if it was on TV, it had to be suitable for children.
Both Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th had television shows. The USA network had great “Up All Night” programming. We had The Hitchhiker, a new Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks offered weird surreal nonsense when it wasn’t caught up in Soap Opera nonsense, even Stephen Spielberg’s Amazing Stories occasionally hosted genuine scares. And then there was the king of hidden TV horror: HBO’s Tales from the Crypt.
It seemed like a golden age of televised horror. But it wasn’t. Compared to what you guys have today, the horror solace I found was like a G-rated examination of the powers of friendship starring a bunch of big-eyed cartoon ponies. My point is, you really young horror fans need to take a moment to marvel at how good you have it.
Today if you’re hungry for horror you can turn on the television and watch The Walking Dead, a show that might suffer from two years of narrative stupidity (something you probably don’t care about when good violence is on the horizon) but it still represents a new high water mark for zombie makeup and gore. And as one of the highest rated shows on TV, you don’t even have to search that hard to find it. We live in a zombie-happy culture, and The Walking Dead is everywhere, teaching young horror fans all you need to know about human anatomy and the many ways it can be destroyed. Plus, it seems to be improving by the episode.
If you think your budding horror fandom might run a bit more kinky than that, current TV has you covered as well thanks to the truly mental American Horror Story, which outshines pretty much any 1980s VHS treasure my mom tried to protect me from as far as perversity goes. Aside from American Horror Story’s completely thorough, yet possibly affected stupidity, the show offers you a plastic mixture of Cronenberg and Verhoeven that has the potential to implant the more impressionable among you with really unique and interesting lifelong fetishes.
Even if you think you might like horror, but feel a bit wimpy about it, you can fall back on the middling masterpiece that is Supernatural. Currently in its 100th season, Supernatural is not as scary as it used to be, but you still get a good kill every once in a while. Plus it’s hilarious and will teach you all ever need to know about the bible. On this same note, if you’re not afraid of watching something a little dated: Buffy the Vampire the Slayer. Or, if you’re a boy (and I kind of didn’t write this paragraph for boys), Angel. Both shows are probably rerunning all over the place right this very moment.
Here’s my point. You kids have it better than we ever could have dreamed. And because of that, you’re going to grow up even more awesome than we are even in our own heads. If you want a prepubescent dose of horror, all you have to do is turn on the television and it’s there in high definition, most of it probably eons more gruesome than Freddy’s Dead. If your mom comes in the room, you need only change the channel. With this power, I do believe you are all going to make the horror world a better place. Please keep in mind, there are no television horror shows based around the found footage concept. So there’s no need to make that part of your takeover. Unless you know a way to make it awesome.
Editorials
‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie
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.
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 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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