It’s been a long time since a really great parody came along, but some of the best comedies ever made have been spoofs. Airplane! is practically a remake of the corny disaster movie Zero Hour! and it’s hailed as a comedy masterpiece. Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a jab at Biblical epics that doubles as the ultimate satire of organized religion. Mel Brooks made a legendary career out of spot-on spoofs of everything from westerns to Star Wars to Hitchcockian thrillers.
In order to make a spoof work, filmmakers need to spoof something that’s actually worth spoofing. The Austin Powers movies lampooned the outdated tropes of the James Bond franchise in hysterical fashion. This is Spinal Tap’s take on rockumentaries was so authentic that some viewers thought it was about a real band. Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie is a fantastic spoof with plenty of fun riffs on horror classics, but what prevents it from being a truly great parody is its strange choice of target.
Compared to all the “Movie” movies that followed – Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie – Scary Movie is a Citizen Kane-level cinematic masterpiece. But the writers should’ve picked a different horror movie as their primary point of reference. While the backstory of a group of teenagers killing a man in a hit-and-run was taken from I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scary Movie’s story of a school being terrorized by a killer in a Ghostface mask is a clear reference to Wes Craven’s meta horror gem Scream. The title Scary Movie was actually taken from the original script that eventually evolved into Scream.
Parodying Scream doesn’t make a lot of sense, because Scream is already a satire of the horror genre. On the surface, it might seem like a run-of-the-mill slasher with elements of whodunit mixed in. There’s a masked killer, a string of teenage murder victims, and a badass final girl. But it’s a subversively self-aware take on the genre. All the characters are familiar with the kind of horror movie they’re in. In one scene, Jamie Kennedy even outlines the rules for surviving a horror movie based on the genre’s rigid tropes and conventions.
What made Scary Movie work was the Wayans brothers bringing their unique comic sensibility into the familiar context of horror cinema. The movie doesn’t necessarily have anything insightful to say about Scream itself; the Wayans brothers just used its story as a loose framework upon which to layer a bunch of absurdist gags. But Scream was the wrong movie to parody. They could’ve borrowed the structure of pretty much any other pre-2000 horror classic besides Scream. They could’ve told a story like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre about a road trip through the South being interrupted by a family of cannibals, or a story like The Evil Dead about a group of friends traveling to a cabin in the woods and unwittingly unleashing demonic spirits.
The self-aware edge of Scream revolutionized horror cinema. Parodying Scream is like parodying Deadpool. They’re both great examples of their own genres, but they also poke fun at those genres. Spoofing a spoof is redundant. Date Movie has a whole section that parodies Meet the Parents, but since all the jokes in Meet the Parents are already solid, all the makers of Date Movie did was copy those jokes verbatim, dialing down the subtlety and dialing up the scatology.
The best moments in Scary Movie are the scenes that spoof other movies besides Scream. It has jokes lampooning The Shining, Halloween, and The Sixth Sense, all of which would’ve made a better basis for a parody than Scream. There’s a hysterical reference to the infamous snot bubble from The Blair Witch Project. There are even a few fun nods to non-horror films, like the climactic fight scene referencing The Matrix or the twist reveal referencing The Usual Suspects.
The sequel to Scary Movie picked more sensible spoof targets. After the first one set out to satirize slashers by satirizing a much stronger satire of slashers, Scary Movie 2 tackled supernatural horror movies like Poltergeist, The Haunting, and The Exorcist. Unfortunately, the writing of the second Scary Movie was a lot weaker and lazier than the first one. They went all the way up to Scary Movie 5, but each one was worse than the last. It’s a shame we never got the best of both worlds with a well-written Scary Movie installment parodying a movie worth parodying.
Like Airplane! or Hot Shots! or Top Secret!, Scary Movie should’ve parodied a movie that takes itself too seriously and falls far short of its ambitions. Scream is the opposite of that: it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy in its own right that doesn’t take itself seriously at all, but it’s also a terrifying horror movie with a bunch of memorable scares and iconic images. Spoofing that was a fool’s errand.