Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to chronologically explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.
We had just wrapped up the first fourth of July of the new millennium, we were four years removed from Scream, three removed from I Know What You Did Last Summer and only a year removed from the found footage film that changed horror, The Blair Witch Project. Marvel’s merry mutants, the X-Men, hit the big screen and the U.K. was boosting Eminem back up into the top ten with his “Real Slim Shady” release. And we were about to get a long lasting franchise with Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie.
It had been a good while since spoofs had really hit the Hollywood bubble in any sort of big way. Mel Brooks had been quiet for years, with his last outing Dracula: Dead and Loving It tanking five years earlier and Naked Gun having its last entry a year before that. Mafia! hadn’t done as well as anyone had hoped and it seemed that movie audiences were headed back towards the raunch comedy antics of films like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary.
But then the comedy and horror worlds collided in a big way when risque humor and slasher antics, coupled with a few other genres, were intertwined and the world was introduced to Scary Movie.
In 1998, Spy Hard screenwriters Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer pitched and sold an idea for a satire of the recent slasher boom, tentatively titled Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween and Dimension picked it up. Elsewhere Marlon and Damon Wayans, alongside fellow “The Wayans Bros” scripters Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman, were writing Scary Movie and because of the similarities of the scripts, the WGA credited all six writers on the film even though Seltzer and Friedberg had no say over the final product.
Scary Movie is a surprisingly well done satire and spoof and a lot of the reason it holds up today is because of the Wayans’ at the helm. Keenen was largely known on set for encouraging the actors to fully commit and just go big, inspiring confidence in the young staff. He took a big shot on Anna Farris, an unknown at the time, casting her alongside other lesser-known actors Regina Hall, Jon Abrahams and Lochlyn Munro. Wayans buoyed the cast with big talent, including his brothers who had become staples in the comedy scene, and Shannon Elizabeth, who had starred in many of the teen comedies that they were riffing on in the film.
Part of why the movie still holds up is because of it sticking so close to its source material, not spreading itself too thin, and while taking jabs at other pop culture phenomena of the time (such as The Matrix and the infamous “Whassup” Budweiser commercial), it mostly follows through the stories of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The Wayans’ were fans of the genre but also found humor in them and crafted the script off the idea of leaning into the very teenage moments, such as boys just trying to have sex and high school life with drugs and booze.
Sure, not everything in Scary Movie from then lands today. Some homophobic humor rears its ugly head, but the movie did a lot in the way of pushing for Black cinema. The movie was a mega hit, making $49 million opening weekend against its $19 million dollar budget, going on to rake in over $250 million worldwide by the end of its run. It was the highest rated R movie opening of all time and broke the record for a movie directed by an African American director. It launched the careers of Farris and Hall, as well as spawning its own film franchise (many of which I will cover eventually in this column) and a slew of spin-offs.
There’s a reason Scary Movie is still talked about and that’s because even if it is outdated, it’s still pretty damn funny twenty years later.
