Parody is the Sincerest Form of Flattery in These Horror Spoof Remakes
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but what about parody? There are plenty of what are now termed “reference movies” that don’t really show any love to their source material. A lot of that can be attributed to the buckshot quality of the comedy: shooting wide with a ton of small jokes rather than focusing on building to a comedic payoff. Going for a lot of little jokes can dilute the cohesion of a parody, making it seem removed from whatever pop culture source material is taking the joke. Specifically for horror, spoofs work better when the movie (or movies) in reference is respected. Otherwise, the jokes stay fairly surface level, and the reason the original was noteworthy and/or scary gets lost. Put simply, for your spoof to be successful, you have to have a degree of adoration for the lampooned.
For an absolute master class in the theory of ‘parody equals love,’ look no further than Charles Busch’s Psycho Beach Party (2000). Much like Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety, Psycho Beach Party is a send-up of Hitchcock but blended with the 1960’s California-centric surf movies. Florence Forest a.k.a. Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose) is a SoCal girl who just wants to hang out at the beach and learn to surf. She also displays multiple personalities when confronted with spinning circles, and thinks she might be responsible for a string of murders plaguing her laidback hometown. When she’s herself she’s as pure as driven snow, but when she slips into one of her blackouts, she can emerge as someone else entirely.
Starting as a stage play with creator/director Charles Busch starring as Chicklet, this production has always had its feet firmly in the swamp of camp–and it loves every second of it. The replication of the sixties beach movie style is spot on; the thriller horror moments are tightly crafted if endearingly silly. Chicklet as a character is a mix between the overly cheerful ‘60s girls, like Gidget, and the tortured haunted-by-their-past femme-fatale Hitchcockian types–Tippi Hedren’s Marnie comes to mind. There are very few jokes that aim outside the genres being spoofed, and because of this, the film maintains a fantastically cohesive look with a distinctively unique feel. This is what the digestion of influences looks like; it’s like seeing a new skin over old, familiar bones.
Like Psycho Beach Party, the 1981 horror-medy (come-rror?) Saturday the 14th builds its own weird atmosphere while nodding towards its sources. Despite the name, this movie has no connection to Friday the 13th–there’s no camp, no drowned kids in a lake, no mother hellbent on revenge. What it does have is a family moving into a creepy old house, a book of evil, and Jeffrey Tambour. The horror, the horror! The plot is not particularly complicated: two vampires (Tambour and Nancy Lee Andrews) are trying to get into an old house where a book of magic is hidden, but the house has been willed to the Hyatts (Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss) who move in with their two kids (Kari Michaelsen and Kevin Brando). Billy, their youngest, promptly finds the book and starts unleashing monsters while the vampires keep sneaking into the house to get the book back.
The real magic in Saturday the 14th is the skewering of cliches we still see in scary movies today: the parents who are oblivious to really obvious supernatural events, the undefeatable monsters taken down in about five minutes in the third act, and the willingness of people to live in a house that no human would set foot in without rubber gloves and a mask. It also takes time to add details that make it a much richer film than just a haunted house parody. For instance, the TV set plays nothing but The Twilight Zone (which seems like heaven to me but whatever) and throughout the movie, we get to hear snippets of fake episodes that sound like they could be part of The Scary Door collection on Futurama. While there are subtle references to specific films, most of Saturday the 14th is unique, but still poking fun at a genre and the tropes we see within that genre. It’s a closer cousin to something like Shawn of the Dead than it is any of the Scary Movies.
But that’s not to say there’s no room for buckshot, absurdist comedy in the world of horror spoofs. Silence of the Hams (1994) (aka Il Silenzio dei Prosciutti), is an over-the-top movie that parodies a whole lot of spooky stuff. As a 1990’s production, there are several Bill and Hillary Clinton impersonators and a few pretty dated references that might still make some people laugh. Which is my way of admitting that I am one of those people. Silence… or Silenzio... follows FBI agent Joe Dee Foster (god help me for how hard I laughed at that) played by the ever-foxy Billy Zane who has to work with imprisoned serial killer Dr. Animal Cannibal Pizza (Dom Deluise) to catch a murderer responsible for 120 deaths. If that sentence didn’t tell you the tone of this movie then I don’t know what will.
Silenzio… is considerably goofier than the previous two films. It’s more in the vein of Airplane and Naked Gun, and quite possibly a precursor to the more obvious type of reference movies. The scenes between Zane and Deluise alone are worth the price of admission (she says after watching it for free on Youtube), and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in gags. As the movie progresses, the parody slides from Silence of the Lambs to Psycho but in a connected, tied-together way. It doesn’t have the sharp eye for detail like Psycho Beach Party, or the clever ambiance of Saturday the 14th, but it does have some stupid jokes that will make you laugh really hard despite yourself, and that ain’t not bad.
Spoofing horror works two-fold: it both shows appreciation and takes the teeth out of what scares us. Hannibal Lecter becomes considerably less threatening after seeing Deluis banter with Zane about how to pronounce his name; haunted houses don’t chill the blood when the monsters in them pull faces at kids while their parents scold them. The first step in making a good horror parody, though, is admitting the original affected you enough that you want to (perhaps need to) see the material in a different light. Imitation is most certainly flattery but the sincerest form when it comes to scary stuff will always be a solid lampoon.
