‘Summer School’: The ’80s Teen Comedy That Proudly Celebrated Horror Fandom
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I’ll never forget my very first horror convention, which I attended over 10 years ago in Maryland. I remember instantly feeling at home when I walked into the Hunt Valley Inn for HorrorFind Weekend, as the hotel was swarming with people I immediately felt a strong bond with. It was clear that they were “my people,” and it was the first time I was actually able to physically interact with fans who loved the same things I loved; this was a pleasure that the internet forums I was part of at the time simply did not allow.
But before the internet was a thing, and prior to being aware that horror conventions even existed, I really had nobody to share my horror fandom with. I developed a love for monsters and madmen at a pretty young age, thanks in no small part to the Goosebumps books and Nightmare on Elm Street films, and there was a period of time where I was convinced that there simply weren’t others like me. If there were, they sure didn’t seem to be sitting beside me in school, while I daydreamed about Freddy turning people into roaches.
I suppose my first sense of the so-called “horror community” that I would eventually become part of came many years prior to that inaugural convention outing, and it came from a highly unexpected source. I remember being up late one night (sometime in the ’90s, I can be sure) and catching Carl Reiner’s Summer School on TV, a 1987 comedy about a super cool high school gym teacher (Mark Harmon) who gets in way over his head when he’s forced to teach a summer class to a bunch of misfits.
Those who have seen the movie surely know where I’m going with this, but two of those slacker students in the film are best friends Francis “Chainsaw” Gremp and Dave Frazier – played by Dean Cameron and Gary Riley. Though it’s fairly common to see nowadays in both movies and television shows, Summer School was/is incredibly special to me because it was the first time I ever actually saw my own horror fandom represented on screen.
We initially meet Chainsaw and Dave in an opening credits montage sequence, where they’re standing in front of their lockers and playing around with fake body parts. The insides of the lockers are decorated with images from Dawn of the Dead, The Fly, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, establishing right off the bat that Chainsaw and Dave share a defining character trait: they’re horror fans, loud and proud.
And it’s their love of horror that makes Summer School something of a horror movie itself.
In Summer School, a comedy by way of a slasher film, Chainsaw and Dave’s shared love of the genre actually becomes an integral part of the movie’s storyline. Practical effects aficionados and mega fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in particular, Chainsaw and Dave are almost always talking about horror movies, and at times the film directly channels the spirit of ’80s horror; slashers were super hot at the time, so I suppose it was only natural that blood and guts started spilling over into other genres.
Fun Fact: One of the film’s students is played by Shawnee Smith, who went on to play Amanda Young in the Saw franchise!
In one scene, the wacky duo stages a killer rabbit massacre during a field trip to the petting zoo, using fake blood and liquid latex to prank their classmates. But Summer School‘s horror influence is strongest in a sequence where Chainsaw and Dave trick a substitute teacher into thinking the entire class has been slaughtered. It’s easily the goriest scene in any ’80s comedy, feeling like it was ripped straight out of a high school slasher flick. The practical gore effects, which include a sliced throat, a ripped out tongue and a complete disemboweling, are better than the effects you’ll find in many horror movies of the time; naturally, Chainsaw and Dave, wielding chainsaws, eventually reveal themselves to be the “killers.”
At another point, Chainsaw and Dave even convince teacher Freddy Shoop to screen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the class; clips from the 1974 classic, featured in Summer School, were to be my very first introduction to the film. In another scene they pen a love letter to makeup effects artist Rick Baker, praising his work in An American Werewolf in London and noting that they admire him very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very much. Me too, Chainsaw and Dave. Me too.
Chainsaw and Dave are oddball outcasts in Summer School, not quite blending in with the other students, but there was something about seeing their love of horror represented on screen that made me feel, well, less like an outcast myself. And in the days before I realized how many people in this world appreciate gore effects and slasher maniacs, I got a lot of comfort out of watching their wacky antics. They were, after all, just like me.
More than anything, Summer School opened my eyes to the fact that there was an entire community of like-minded horror fans that I would someday – hopefully – be embraced and accepted by. It would be many years after the first of countless times I stayed up late at night watching Summer School, but that day eventually came. And thank god for that.
So thanks, Chainsaw and Dave. Thanks for being my horror pals until I found real ones.
I originally published a version of this article on Halloween Love, September 2015.
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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