Editorials
The Evolution of Found Footage: A History of Screenlife Horror
Epistolary storytelling has been immersing readers in fiction since the very dawn of literature. Using simulated letters, diaries and other documents to craft complex tales with shifting points of view, the format inevitably ended up attracting inventive filmmakers who realized that it could be adapted into a cinematic tool to instill terror. From The McPherson Tape to The Blair Witch Project, Found Footage movies have kept the epistolary tradition alive through their use of faux home video and other diegetic media.
However, with over four decades of Found Footage experiments out there, the genre has seen quite a bit of innovation. Personally, I think one of the most interesting off-shoots of Found Footage is the ongoing trend of Screenlife films, where the entire narrative is told within the confines of digital screens. While this curious format has only recently become popular in mainstream media, it’s actually older than most people seem to realize, and that’s why I’d like to take a look back at the surprising history of Screenlife horror.
Since these movies obviously rely on digital technology to tell their stories, Screenlife was a relatively rare gimmick before the days of high-definition digital photos and online webcams. Before the 2000s, depictions of digital screens were usually relegated to brief inserts in traditional media, often with unintentionally humorous results since filmmakers weren’t accustomed to dealing with computer graphics.
That being said, 1997 saw the release of Chris Marker’s French mockumentary Level Five, which told the story of a grieving widow attempting to finish her late husband’s videogame project, with the filmmakers heavily incorporating digital imagery into the movie. It wasn’t exactly a Screenlife film, with the digital elements only complementing the documentary experience, but this experimental picture was a sign of things to come.
Nostalgic scares incoming!
In 2000, audiences were presented with the first feature-length Screenlife movie in Pierre-Paul Renders’ eerily prescient Thomas Was in Love, which told the story of an agoraphobic man who lives out his solitary love-life through webcams and virtual sex. While this French indie darling was mostly a futuristic romance, it wasn’t long until genre filmmakers were using its ideas as a jumping off point to produce digital scares.
Released in 2002, Michael Costanza’s The Collingswood Story was the first scary movie to take webcam-based narratives seriously, using shifting points of view to spin a supernatural yarn concerning sinister mediums and long-distance relationships. While it wasn’t exactly a ground-breaking experience, this primitive predecessor of minimalist horror classics like Paranormal Activity stood out through its use of lo-fi video and simulated desktops, eventually earning a cult following as the first true Screenlife horror flick.
After that, the format would only really kick off during the 2010s, due in no small part to the rising popularity of social media and more advanced consumer-grade tech. Movies like the controversial Megan Is Missing (a cautionary tale which explores the perverted dark side of online interactions) and even Bloody Disgusting’s own V/H/S (which features a memorable Screenlife segment directed by Joe Swanberg) would begin to tap into society’s growing obsession with what had once been a niche stereotypically reserved for tech geeks.
Of course, there’s no discussing Screenlife horror without bring up Russian-Kazakh filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov. Known for helming Night Watch and Wanted, this innovative director-turned-producer is a recurring champion of the Screenlife format and rose to horror notoriety after producing 2014’s incredibly successful Unfriended. Directed by Levan Gabriadze, the film tells the story of a group of teenagers who fall victim to a vengeful spirit while chatting online, with the flick’s visuals making heavy use of real computer software. While Unfriended was filmed on a meager $1 million budget, the film’s $62.9 million box-office return suggested that Screenlife movies were more than just a passing fad, so it’s no surprise that a sequel was soon greenlit (as well as a series of cinematic copycats).
Unfriended: Dark Web hit theaters in 2018, replacing the supernatural scares of its predecessor with more believable online threats like stalkers and hackers. It may not have achieved the same financial success as the original, but the film still made impressive use of desktop visuals to tell a legitimately chilling story despite sharing more than a few similarities with 2013’s underseen gem The Den.
Livestream chats can be pretty scary!
Naturally, the Unfriended franchise was only one of several Screenlife projects produced by Bekmambetov. The same year as Dark Web, the filmmaker would also produce Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, which helped to popularize the format beyond traditional horror circles. An easily digestible thriller that uses social media to unravel a compelling mystery, Searching is currently one of the most successful Screenlife movies ever made, outperforming its predecessors and leading Bekmambetov to sign a five-picture deal with Universal regarding a series of unspecified Screenlife projects.
Beyond studio-backed blockbusters, the late 2010s also saw quite a few indie Screenlife pioneers. Filmmakers like Hannah Macpherson (who directed 2016’s Sickhouse, which is meant to be watched as a giant Snapchat video) and Michelle Iannantuono (creator of the Livescream franchise, which expertly combines online streamer culture with internet creepypastas) make a solid case for the format as a versatile tool that allows low-budget filmmakers to play around with visual storytelling without alienating genre fans. Even when these cinematic experiments don’t completely work, it’s hard to deny the creative charms of unorthodox movies like Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows, which reach outside the box when attempting to craft a new breed of tech-based thrillers.
More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a significant boost in Screenlife releases, with studios becoming desperate for readily available horror content that could easily be distributed on streaming platforms. From Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree (an underrated satire of modern-day rideshares and streamer culture) to Rob Savage’s Host, which became the Pandemic’s first viral hit and spawned a spiritual successor in the form of this year’s Dashcam, there’s plenty of Screenlife horror to go around these days.
Reaching millions of viewers without the aid of massive marketing campaigns, these peculiar films serve as engaging snapshots of a moment in time, telling appropriately modern stories about the terrors of a screen-obsessed world. And with movies like Bekmambetov’s recent Profile (not to mention his bizarre Shakespeare adaptation R#J) proving that there are still novel thrills to be had in visual storytelling, I can’t wait to see where filmmakers take Screenlife horror next!
Shudder’s ‘Host’
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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