Editorials
‘Lisa’ Is a Mother’s Worst Fear Come True [Formative Fears]
Formative Fears is a column that explores how horror scared us from an early age, or how the genre contextualizes youthful phobias and trauma. From memories of things that went bump in the night, to adolescent anxieties made real through the use of monsters and mayhem, this series expresses what it felt like to be a frightened child – and what still scares us well into adulthood.
As a teenager, everything feels like the end of the world. A bad grade, an unrequited crush, becoming the subject of the latest school gossip – the laundry list of adolescent apocalypses goes on. For fourteen-year-old Lisa Holland (Staci Keanan) in Gary Sherman’s 1990 movie of the same name, her mother won’t let her date yet. Her wish to step out and do what all teens are doing results in a game of cat and mouse with a handsome, older stranger. Little does Lisa know, the man she dreams about is every woman’s worst nightmare.
At the heart of Lisa’s melancholy is the desire to make her own choices. Anyone who has ever argued with a parent about a similar matter fully understands where she’s coming from, even if they don’t agree with her methods. For Lisa doesn’t strictly fantasize about what she wants; she obsesses over it until it’s almost pathological. Lisa’s relationship with her mother Katherine (Cheryl Ladd) is good, but she hides her fixation with boys like it’s shameful. Given how dating is a touchy subject in their home, Lisa can’t be blamed for her secrecy. The teen keeps a journal of every new crush, and she sometimes follows them, as well. It’s a curious reversal of the stalker situation often seen in this type of movie. Regardless of who’s doing the pursuing, Lisa isn’t safe.
When her best friend Wendy (Tanya Fenmore) is asked out by a boy, Lisa asks her mother if she can go on a double date. Katherine is unwavering about her “no dating until sixteen” rule; she tells Lisa she’s not ready and needs more time to learn about herself. Lisa, on the other hand, suspects her mother’s inflexibility is due to the fact she got pregnant when she was young. The conversation goes in circles and Katherine quashes all further discussion. This is of course after her daughter ran into D.W. Moffat’s character Richard on the street. Lisa is instantly enamored with the stranger, not realizing who he really is. At the beginning of the movie, a random woman is murdered in her own home by no other than Richard, a.k.a. the Candlelight Killer as he’s dubbed by the news. To Lisa, though, all she sees is an alluring man who compliments her by mistaking her for a sixteen-year-old.
During their brief encounter, Lisa stealthily catches Richard’s license plate number so she can call the DMV and get a hold of his name and phone number; this is something she’s done on more than one occasion. She repeatedly calls Richard up, her voice disguised, and seduces him from the safety of her bedroom. The Candlelight Killer, whose modus operandi includes telephones, isn’t used to being on the other end of stalking. His intrigue grows with each call from Lisa, unsure of who she is and whether or not she’ll be his next victim. This era of moviemaking was an opportune time for phone games in horror because Caller ID, while already invented before this film came out, hadn’t caught on yet with the general public. Movies like Lisa and Fred Walton’s adjacent 1988 remake of I Saw What You Did each subvert the trope of murderers using telephones as weapons. In these cases, teenage girls undermine a long-established plot device in the genre and strike fear into men’s hearts. The change of roles doesn’t last long, though.
The events of the movie will haunt Lisa for the rest of her life, but they only add to Katherine’s own traumas – ones that existed long before Richard. Katherine had Lisa at a young age, hence her qualms about her daughter dating before she’s “ready.” When Lisa sneaks off with Wendy’s family’s cabin after a big blowup with her mother, she disgorges the truth about her family during dinner with the Marks. Wendy’s father (Jeffrey Tambor) opens a can of worms as soon as he asks about Lisa’s grandparents; she emotionally replies they’re not in contact because they wanted Katherine to “get rid” of her since the father was out of the picture. It’s this exact moment where Lisa realizes the error of her ways and just how poorly she’s been treating her mother. It’s true Katherine could have tried to compromise with her daughter, or at least not made dating out to be so negative and world-altering; she goes so far as to hide her boyfriend from Lisa much to his chagrin. Even so, it’s understandable why Katherine is so scared of losing Lisa. She ran away from home and severed ties with her own parents so she could keep and raise her child. And as Lisa puts it, she and her mother are all they’ve “ever had for family.”
Lisa’s turnaround coincides with Richard learning his mystery caller’s identity, or so who he thinks she is based on a misguided note Lisa left for him at his restaurant. Mistaking Lisa for Katherine, Richard stalks the mother as her daughter is away. Enthused by the prospect of her and Lisa patching things up after their argument, Katherine assumes the sounds coming from her bathroom are Lisa when in fact it’s Richard laying his trap. And as per usual, he leaves an ominous message on the answering machine before he attacks – “I’m in your apartment, and I’m going to kill you.” Upon arriving home, Lisa is confronted by Richard who grants her deepest wish; to be seen as a woman like all the women he’s killed. It’s all part of a chilling prelude to a suspenseful conclusion.
The harrowing reunion at the end of Lisa demonstrates the Hollands’ unbreakable mother-daughter bond. It’s the antithesis of maternal horror where matriarchs are the source of a character’s dread. Rather than being the cause of her daughter’s problems or exacerbating them, Katherine does everything in her power to help Lisa. There are countless instances in cinema where a mother or motherly figure will blame her child for her spiritual decline or agedness. On the contrary, Katherine sees her daughter as not only someone worth fighting for, but also her life’s greatest accomplishment.
With co-writer Karen Clark‘s insight, Sherman taps into the teenage girl’s mind and weaves a story so bizarre yet so approachable. The director best known for adult horror movies like Death Line, Dead & Buried, and Poltergeist III may have made Lisa for a younger target demographic including his then-fourteen-year-old daughter, but there is something very special about the film that affects viewers of all ages.
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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