Editorials
[Special Feature] 11 Things Horror Movies Have Taught Me!
I recently realized something about myself that actually scares me a little bit. I don’t know if it’s because I watch too many movies — which I’m positive I do — or perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention in school so my mind is so desperate for knowledge that it’s actively seeking out information from unreliable sources, but a startling majority of what I know is stuff I’ve “learned” from movies. To me, an impromptu dance number can spring up at literally any second, you can be knocked unconscious and wake up several hours later without any trauma to your brain, and should you narrowly escape a massive explosion, all you have to do is get up and shrug it off.
So there’s a very good chance that no less than 80% of what I know is information I gleaned from films, but add to this my near obsessive love for horror films, and it’s a safe bet that roughly half of my accumulated life knowledge was taught to me by the likes of Freddy, Jason, Michael, and friends. Also, Freddy, Jason, Michael, and friends is a fantastic name for a horror sitcom. Head past the break so I can share my knowledge with you. Come on, it’ll be a learning experience for us all.
11. Do Your Research Before Buying A House
As seen in: Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, The Grudge (Ju-On)
I’m the type of guy that if I were buying a house I wouldn’t necessarily remember to ask if any murder-suicides had happened on the premises or if any rapey demons had already rented out the attic. You’d think asking about the plumbing, pipes — those could be the same thing, I don’t know — electricity and… flooring (?) would suffice, but these days it really isn’t. Do your research, people. Go to your local library and use one of those machines that have every newspaper ever printed, and you’ll be able to dig up every dirty detail about your home’s history, and if you’re lucky you might even uncover a dark secret the town would rather you didn’t know about.
10. Children Are Evil
As seen in: Pet Sematary, Orphan, The Ring (Ringu), The Shining, Village of the Damned
Now, you might be saying to yourself, Duh, Adam, of course all children are creatures that must be destroyed before they kill us all, to which I’ll reply, you sir or madam are so very correct. They’re all evil, I have no doubt about it, but they’re also everywhere. Seriously people, slow down. If humanity keeps reproducing at this pace there’s no way in hell we’re going to be able to fend off the hordes of children when they finally do decide to enslave everyone sixteen and older.
9. Ghosts Aren’t Cool
As seen in: Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Poltergeist, Grave Encounters
I have a bizarre, perhaps even borderline obsessive fascination with cemeteries. That might sound a little strange to a majority of you, but to the two or three who share my fondness for the unusual, just know that I’m sending you a virtual fist bump right now. I spent my 21st birthday in a necropolis, completely toasted I might add — that’s how bad it is. I’m the type of person who would drop literally everything to join one of those ghost hunting troops that I’m pretty sure have made it onto every television network by now. With that said, if the recent slew of ghostly-themed films has taught me anything, it’s that ghosts aren’t something to be studied; they’re something to be feared, and, if possible, sent straight to deepest festering pits of hell.
8. Never Go Ass to Mouth
As seen in: The Human Centipede
This might also fall under the No Shit category, but when you’re drunk and feeling frisky, weird sexual experiments are bound to happen. I only just watched The Human Centipede 2 a few days ago, and once the credits started rolling I couldn’t shake the feeling that I really needed a shower. After watching that stout, buggy-eyed man crudely staple the mouths of several screaming strangers to the shivering asses of the person in front of them, I felt like I could cross that off my list of weird shit I may or may not do in my life.
7. Being A Virgin Is A Good Thing
As seen in: Practically every horror movie with horny teens
There’s a downside to living a life of junk food, gaming marathons, and horror movie nights, and that’s the lack of sex people who live this life receive. Thankfully, according to all the horror movies I’ve seen, being a sex-depraved virgin is actually a good thing, because it increases your chances of living a longer life of celibacy. For those of you who don’t know what it feels like to play Call of Duty for eight hours straight while consuming nothing but Cheetos and Mountain Dew, you’re already screwed because you, well, screwed. What you need to do is hump everything that moves, because you’re going to die, so you might as well enjoy yourself.
6. Face Blindness Is A Thing
As seen in: Faces in the Crowd
My memory is awful. Like, immediately after meeting someone I’ve already forgotten their face, name, story, the clothing they wore, everything. For some reason, roughly 3-5 seconds after I’ve met someone my mind completely erases them, like they never existed.. It’s weird. Thanks to Milla Jovovich, I now have an excuse for why I can’t remember anyone, and that’s face blindness, or Prosopagnosia, a condition that just saved me from a ton of potential awkward situations when someone walks up to me, expecting me to remember them only to have their hopes dashed when they recognize my confused gaze.
5. Exorcisms Can Be Boring
As seen in: The Rite, The Devil Inside
When I think of exorcisms, I imagine Regan crawling down the stairs backward, or spewing green pea soup like she just watched a man staple mouths to asses for ten minutes. What doesn’t come to mind is all the mundane filler that can be found in some recent exorcism films. If the recent slew of boring-as-hell exorcism flicks is any indication, there’s a chance that not all exorcisms are film worthy events.
4. Tires Are Terrifying
As seen in: Rubber
Now I have to add tires to my growing list of things that make me want to curl up and die, right up there with hospitals and the sound vacuum cleaners make. The scariest thing about Rubber, a French horror-comedy flick that asked the important question: What if a tire could fucking kill people? The answer is a resounding yes, so long as said tire has superpowers or is attached to a car.
3. …But Not As Terrifying As Clowns
As seen in: It, that creepy clown doll from Poltergeist, Captain Spaulding in House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects
I don’t think I need to expand too much on this, because this just a fact: clowns are the most terrifying things on the planet. Forget spiders, war, and politicians, because clowns are always terrifying, and always hungry for your innocent soul. Now, you could argue that some freakish clown/politician/spider hybrid would be scarier, but that’s just silly. That could never exist, right? Right?
2. It Actually Is Important To Wash Your Hands
As seen in: Contagion (Before you start commenting on how this isn’t a horror movie, I’m going to beat you to it by saying you’re certifiably insane if you don’t think this is a terrifying film)
Admit it, you don’t always wash your hands after using the restroom. Maybe you were in a hurry, or you forgot, or something distracted you on your way from the stall to the bathroom door. Sometimes you just forget, right? You fell into my trap — I got you to admit you don’t wash your hands! You disgust me.
Oh, and wash your hands or you and everyone you love will die.
1. Have A Camera On You At All Times
As seen in: Grave Encounters, Apollo 18, Atrocious, Paranormal Activity 3, [REC]/Quarantine, Trollhunter
Some people watch flicks like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project for entertainment, but I use them as research. Like it or not, the found footage subgenre is huge. Oren Peli’s a trillionaire after he decided to start filming the ghosts that haunted his apartment (also, none of that last sentence is true), so when scary, unexplainable things start happening to me I’m going to make sure I’m adequately prepared for it. If I hear even the slightest of noises I always have a camera team ready to film the source from no less than five different angles. I suggest you do the same.
Toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting
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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