Editorials
8 Films That Inspired Adam Egypt Mortimer’s ‘Daniel Isn’t Real’
Now in limited theaters and on VOD platforms everywhere is Adam Egypt Mortimer‘s must-see indie thriller Daniel Isn’t Real (review of the film), which Trace called “unique and terrifying” out of the SXSW World Premiere this past March.
In the film, a troubled college freshman (Miles Robbins) suffers a violent family trauma and resurrects his childhood imaginary friend (Patrick Schwarzenegger) to help him cope.
Bloody Disgusting caught up with Mortimer, who shares several movies that inspired his hallucinatory nightmare.
Jacob’s Ladder: “No movie better portrays the feeling of trauma than Jacob’s Ladder. It presents a recognizable feeling we all have in our more extreme moments when you wake up one day and the world is hell but somehow it is your hell. Any time in my life that something extraordinarily awful has happened I always think of Jacob’s Ladder. Adrian Lyne achieves the feeling of depersonalization that trauma creates while at the same time letting Robbins’ performance bring kinetic energy, life, and humor into the world so that there is always a contrast of feelings and a sense that we are never wallowing. Also, rad fucking demons, come on let’s be honest.”
Pink Floyd’s The Wall: “We tend to think of The Wall as a multimedia / musical project, but I love it as a movie. It’s the film that disturbed me the most as a kid and that feeling a being traumatized by a movie about trauma made a big impact on my approach to Daniel. Unlike some of the other movies that were inspirations, I didn’t watch or share The Wall in advance of shooting but I saw it on a big screen as soon as we wrapped and realized how much imagery from it had wormed its way into my brain and back out into my movie in the form of gnarly psychological meat worms. There’s a shot of Miles screaming into a cosmic brick wall that is an undeniable unconscious reference. The movie itself is structured around the inherent fascism of the self and visually presents the transformation from chaotic mania to controlled evil. There’s no question that you can watch Jacob’s Ladder and the Wall together as a brilliant double feature about past trauma and a living hell. In fact, they have the same production designer, Brian Morris, and his design in both films is a brilliant contribution to the vibe of darkness, decay, and energy.”
Bug: “Everything Friedkin does is my most important inspiration and Daniel clearly springs in many ways from The Exorcist. But Bug is my favorite Friedkin, as it is through his dynamic blocking and shooting strategies that he makes a movie of two or three people talking in a room relentlessly gripping. As an exploration of how one character’s mania can influence and absorb another character’s psyche, it is unparalleled — with the exception of Persona.”
Persona: “What you don’t realize before you see Persona for the first time is that it is punk as fuck. There’s so much energy, experimentalism, risk, dynamic visuals, and crazy choices in this 85-minute movie that you could study it forever and still find cool new things to rip off. The story of two characters in isolation going through love, hatred, insanity, transformation — is beautifully and shockingly filmed. This was one of the movies from which I ripped clips and made everyone in our crew watch. See if you can spot all the shots we put our own spin on.”
Raw: “One of the only movies from this decade that was a direct influence on Daniel, Julia Ducournau’s story about cannibal sisters in college crackles with life and truth while also presenting some truly gruesome and horrifying images. The choice of needle drops combined with the staging of the party sequences are some next level contemporary filmmaking.”
Watership Down: “This story about rabbit enduring their own apocalypse was the first movie that disturbed me when I watched it as a tiny child. The imagery of rabbits clawing their way through tunnels of blood, of the fascist rabbits who would tear off the ears of weaker dissidents, and of the black rabbit of death swimming through the sky — these would not ever leave my brain and kept me in nightmares for months. The combination of adorable animals and a severely brutal world is something that would haunt me forever. I can only ever hope to make something that has this level of traumatizing power.”
Requiem For A Dream: “A deepening spiral of very bad trouble that begins sweetly enough as a romance and becomes an almost unendurable descent into agony — Requiem is one of my favorites. This is another one that I shared with everyone involved and especially looked at it with Clark when we were discussing the soundtrack as a sonic experience that would thread relentlessly through the story, picking up in intensity and exposing the inner life of a mind breaking apart.”
Midnight Run: “This is my favorite movie of the 80s buddy crime comedy genre. The nonstop antagonism between Robert DeNiro and Charles Groden is one of the most captivating stories of male frenemyship. I don’t generally love these kinds of movies above all others but this particular one stuck with me ever since I saw it as a kid and I think there was some weird fragment of its DNA in Daniel.”
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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