Editorials
1989’s ‘Celia’ and the Horrors of Childhood Innocence [Shudder]
The loss of innocence is a recurring motif in horror and cinema at large. A more niche subset of that motif explores the frightening transition from childhood into adulthood through a child’s perspective. Like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Reflecting Skin, these movies feature young protagonists grappling with a grown-up world’s harsh realities through fantasy, leading to disastrous results. The horror seeps in from both sides, squeezing out the innocence in often shocking ways. Celia, now available to stream on Shudder and Tubi, belongs in that same conversation. Its eponymous character dangerously uses dark fantasy and imagination as an emotional shield as she’s forced to grow up in a tumultuous period.
Also known as Celia: Child of Terror, the film opens with Celia (Rebecca Smart) coming to Gran’s small annex next to her family home to wake her. Celia crawls into Gran’s bed and finds her dead, eyes still open. The night after Gran’s funeral, Celia wakes in the middle of the night to an inhuman shrieking and the claw of a creature appearing at her window. She cries for her granny, and mom Pat (Mary-Anne Fahey) comes in to comfort her. When Pat takes Celia into the backyard to reveal the screeching sound came from a possum, the young girl still envisions a monster lurking in the bushes. This brief introduction to Celia clarifies that Gran was her most trusted grown-up and friend and that Celia prefers her imaginative world over the real one, even when confronted with the truth.
Set in 1957, Celia chronicles the young girl’s life in rural Australia as she attends school, forges friendships, and covets a pet rabbit. All of it is framed through a child’s eyes. The context for the world she lives in and how that shapes her comes slowly. As the children play in the background, conversations among adults reveal tensions and fears that kids can’t understand, yet they’re affected by it anyway.
Celia’s peculiar and headstrong personality makes her a bit of an outcast among peers until the arrival of a new family next door. She bonds with the three kids, Meryl (Callie Gray), Karl (Adrian Mitchell), and Steve (Alexander Hutchinson), immediately. None of them understand why the locals seem afraid of parents Alice (Victoria Longley) and Evan Tanner (Martin Sharman), no matter how warm and level-headed they are. It soon becomes clear, though, that the adult Tanners have communist beliefs and hold informal meetings. Celia takes place at the tail end of the second Red Scare, a period marked by its intense and widespread fear that national or foreign communists were infiltrating society. Fear and paranoia naturally lead to tension and hostility.
Writer/Director Ann Turner offers insights and context clues at every step of the way. Outside of the more overt scenes that clue the viewer in on the turmoil surrounding Celia, the filmmaker layers in subtle clues, too. A sweeping look through Gran’s old apartment reveals a book collection of communist material. Since this belonged to the woman who held the most substantial sway over Celia, the implication is clear. No matter how hard Celia’s parents, Pat and Ray (Nicholas Eadie), try to minimize exposure and preserve their daughter’s innocence, the world finds its way in. That includes the background but vital rabbit plague sweeping the country, prompting the government to ban them as pets to preserve the economy. Rabbits, of course, are what Celia loves most.
Like most films of this ilk, Celia slowly builds toward tragedy that creates a point of no return. Celia clings steadfast to her fantasy world of monster Hobyahs, creatures from a children’s book, and imagines Gran still can come out and play. The more life throws complications her way, the more the young girl loses her ability to distinguish fact from fiction. That the child is an assertive one willing to take matters into her own hands, well, she more than earns her “child of terror” moniker.
Turner incorporates historical context in this period tale, offering an added layer of authenticity to the horrific. She approaches her central character with sympathy, too, never rendering Celia as evil but instead lost. The filmmaker toys with horror elements, particularly in the Hobyahs and the psychological; ultimately, however, it’s more of a horror adjacent coming-of-age story. Celia disturbs as much as it breaks your heart, offering another powerful feature to examine how scary childhood innocence can be.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.