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[Editorial] Trailers for ‘The Prodigy’ and ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Made Both Seem Like Less Interesting Movies Than They Actually Are

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The main issue most of us have with movie trailers is that they show us *too much* – recently, I myself wrote up an article about Pet Sematary‘s second trailer and its insistence on spoiling an interesting little change to Stephen King’s story – but the truth is that trailers can sometimes have the exact opposite problem. When walking that tightrope of trying to show enough without showing too much, sometimes studios just plain don’t show enough.

Over the weekend, many horror fans took to social media to complain that Happy Death Day 2U‘s trailers misrepresented the film as a straight up slasher-horror movie, when in actuality it was more of a sci-fi/comedy… with a sidelined slasher element. Personally speaking, I’m confused about the fact that anyone ever expected a sequel to Happy Death Day, itself a very comedic take on the slasher sub-genre, to be a full-on horror movie, but I digress. If there was any problem with the film’s marketing campaign, I’d argue the issue was that the trailers actually made Happy Death Day 2U seem far less interesting than it turned out to be.

Mind you, there are no doubt many, many movie-goers who prefer to know next to nothing about new movies before they see them, but the reality is, general audiences are only going to pay to see new movies when they’re bit by a particular hook being marketed. The first Happy Death Day, centered on a college girl who’s stuck in a time loop and has to relive the day of her death over and over again until she finds her murderer, had a killer hook, so it was no big surprise that it was such a hit at the box office. Back in 2017, the film’s domestic opening weekend take totaled $26,039,025, ensuring a sequel wasn’t far behind.

But Happy Death Day 2U, well, it didn’t fare quite as well. The film made just shy of $10 million in its traditional opening weekend – the current Wednesday-Monday estimate, however, brings the total up to around $15 million – which is far below the roughly $30 million estimate that projections had suggested heading into the weekend. Granted, its $9 million budget ensures that Happy Death Day 2U will be profitable regardless, but one has to wonder why the sequel to such a hit movie under-performed to such an extent.

My best guess? If you go back and watch Happy Death Day 2U‘s trailers, they mostly suggest that the sequel is the exact same movie as its predecessor. And while the two movies do indeed feel cut from much the same cloth, what the marketing did not divulge is that Happy Death Day 2U’s storyline is a bit more of a deviation than it probably seemed to be.

In Christopher Landon’s sequel, Tree doesn’t merely get stuck back in the same time loop for a second time, but rather, she’s actually transported to a whole new dimension entirely. In this alternate universe, things are different than they were/are in the first film’s universe, and the main storyline in the film centers on Tree’s struggle to decide whether she wants to live in Universe A or Universe B. Confusing things, Tree’s mom is still alive in Universe B.

Now that’s an interesting hook, and I can’t help but wonder aloud if maybe, just maybe, “spoiling” that hook would’ve gotten more people interested in seeing Happy Death Day 2U this past weekend. And I have to imagine that the reason many fans of the first film didn’t plunk down the money for a ticket is because the trailers convinced them that the sequel was basically going to do little more than rehash what they had already seen back in 2017.

(In many ways, it kind of does, so maybe the problem is the film itself, not its marketing.)

Another recent horror movie that perhaps suffered from this same marketing issue was Orion’s The Prodigy, which made just $5,853,061 during its opening weekend. The marketing was heavily built around the question “What’s wrong with Miles?” and it wasn’t unless/until we paid to see it that we found out. But what’s strange about The Prodigy is that the answer to that question isn’t actually even a reveal in the movie. It’s outright stated in the opening scene.

We find out *immediately* at the start of The Prodigy, before we even meet Miles, that his body was inhabited at birth by the soul of a sadistic serial killer, which would seem to be a second or even final act twist but is actually presented within the film as an opening act story beat. The film’s marketing, rather than divulging this hook, instead made us think The Prodigy was just another creepy kid horror movie, and I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around the decision to be so secretive about what is actually the film’s first scene.

With a marketing campaign that played up The Prodigy’s compelling “past life regression” storyline, would more people have purchased a ticket to see it? Can we chalk up the film’s under-performance at the box office to an unnecessarily vague marketing campaign?

One thing I can say for sure is that I certainly don’t envy anyone in charge of marketing movies for studios, as it’s very difficult to strike the perfect balance and get people interested in seeing a movie while at the same time retaining secrets best discovered inside of a theater rather than on the computer at home. And no matter what, let’s be real here, most of us (myself included) are going to complain either way. All I’m suggesting is that when a movie has a killer hook going for it, maybe it’s not a bad idea for the trailers to spoil it.

But I’m just thinking aloud here. Feel free to chime in below with your own thoughts.

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

Editorials

‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie

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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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