The original Scary Movie film made fun of several iconic films, both of the horror variety and otherwise, with hilarious consequences.
Summary
- Scary Movie parodies a wide range of films, including horror, drama, and action genres.
- The opening installment of Scary Movie, for example, is a Scream parody, featuring a similar mask, plot, and characters. It also mocks Scream's lack of plot.
- The Matrix, Halloween, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, The Shining, and The Exorcist are among the other films parodied in Scary Movie.
The Scary Movie franchise has made fun of some iconic films, and its opening 2000 installment kicked things with dozens of parodies in that regard. The franchise was developed by brothers Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Marlon Wayans, with the former directing the opening installment and the latter pair starring in it. The cast also included Anna Faris, Jon Abrahams, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, Kurt Fuller, and Regina Hall.
Scary Movie doesn't care which genres it sends up. The best horror movies are the obvious targets, but dramas and action flicks are also fair game. The parody movie was a roaring triumph due to its addictive mocking humor, and it grossed a whopping $278 million worldwide from its modest $19 million budget. Its success has resulted in a franchise of sometimes terrible, sometimes good comedy movies that now boasts five films, with the most recent coming in 2013. Its initial choices of movies to make fun of played a big part in that.
12 Scream (1996)
Above all else, Scary Movie is a Scream parody. The killer's mask is a blatant imitation of that belonging to Ghostface, the plot is all about the mystery of who's behind the mask, the characters are all based on Scream's major players - Cindy Campbell is Sidney Prescott, Doofy Gilmore is Dewey Riley, Gail Hailstorm is Gale Weathers, and so forth - and Cindy Campbell suggests the characters' lives are just like the lives of those in Scream, saying "same dialogue and everything!" There's even one exchange of dialogue literally mocking Scream when Bobby Prinze asks, "Did Scream have a plot?" and Ray Wilkins replies, "No!"
Every "Scary Movie" In The Franchise Ranked
The franchise first took shots at Scream and slashers in general before moving on to other films, but which is the best Scary Movie in the series?11 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
After Scream, the main target of Scary Movie's mockery is I Know What You Did Last Summer. In one scene, Cindy Campbell and her pals run someone over on the road at night and proceed to throw him off a pier even though he's very much alive (humorously, more obviously so than in I Know What You Last Summer). During the killer's spree, Cindy and her friends suspect their hit-and-run victim may be the revenge-fuelled culprit, just like in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Another reference to it comes when Cindy suggests she'd be portrayed by "Jennifer Love Huge-T*ts" in a horror film about her life.
10 The Matrix (1999)
The action in The Matrix is some of the finest and most innovative in cinema history, so it was almost inevitable that Scary Movie would make fun of it. In the movie's climactic fight scene, when Cindy Campbell goes one-on-one with the killer, she utilizes several moves used by Neo and company in the epic sci-fi romp, and the scene uses the film's visual tricks from its iconic fight sequences - albeit in less impressive fashion. It could also be said that 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is parodied in the scene. However, undoubtedly, The Matrix employed the effects first, making it the more obvious target of Scary Movie's mockery.
9 Halloween (1978)
The iconic slasher movie Halloween ends with Michael Myers being shot six times by Dr. Sam Loomis, which makes him stumble through an open door and fall from an upstairs balcony to what viewers presume is his death. Myers is initially seen lying in the garden below. However, when Loomis looks to the ground from above, Myers has vanished, having somehow survived the onslaught of bullets to his torso. The scene is parodied in Scary Movie when Cindy Campbell launches the killer through a window and assumes he's dead. When she goes to make sure, she sees he's actually disappeared.
8 The Sixth Sense (1999)
The psychological horror The Sixth Sense has many scary scenes. The most memorable and most quoted is when Haley Joel Osment's Cole Sear reveals his secret to Bruce Willis' Malcolm Crowe with the iconic line "I see dead people." The scene is parodied in Scary Movie in a fairly simplistic fashion. Shorty Meeks gets high with his friends and tells them he can see dead people while curled up under a blanket, just like Cole was. It results in a raucous reaction from the group and the exclamation that the stuff they're smoking must be exceptionally potent for that to be the case.
7 The Usual Suspects (1995)
The Usual Suspects has one of the best twist endings in movie history. Kevin Spacey's physically disabled conman Roger "Verbal" Kint is revealed to be the mysterious (and non-disabled) crimelord Keyser Söze. In Scary Movie, the scene is parodied when the killer is revealed to be Doofy Gilmore - albeit in a considerably less intelligent fashion. Upon realizing that's the case, Cindy Campbell drops her coffee cup, just as Dave Kujan did when he realized Kint was Söze. Doofy is then seen shrugging off his fake limp, getting into a car, and disappearing, as Spacey's character did in The Usual Suspects.
6 The Shining (1980)
There are lots of creepy scenes in The Shining, none more so than the one in which young Danny Torrance, played by Danny Lloyd, carries a large knife and repeatedly utters the word "redrum" while writing it on his mother's bedroom door (which is quickly revealed to be "murder" written backward). Danny's words are briefly mimicked in a Scary Movie scene when Shannon Elizabeth's Buffy Gilmore finds herself alone in the girl's locker room at her school. She hears the word "redrum" being whispered before the killer emerges from behind a pillar, stabs her in the torso, and decapitates her with a meat cleaver.
5 The Exorcist (1973)
The Exorcist still tops the list of the best exorcism movies ever made and is one of the most often mimicked and parodied films, period. Scary Movie manages to restrain itself in that regard but still pokes fun at it with a funny and rather vulgar reference. Bobby Prinze tells Cindy Campbell that he was watching The Exorcist and says it reminded him of her. It prompts Cindy to ask if that's because she once vomited green slime and pleasured herself with a crucifix at a keg party, which references two of the things Linda Blair's Regan MacNeil did while possessed in the horror classic.
4 Election (1999)
Perhaps the most obscure film Scary Movie makes fun of, Election, is a black comedy based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta. It's about an overachieving student, Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon, who runs for student president and is disliked by her teacher, Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick. In Scary Movie, Andrea Nemeth's minor character Heather is a parody of Tracy. She is seen handing out election fliers, being as equally annoyingly plucky as Tracy in the process, and her teacher clearly hates her as much as Mr. McAllister hates Tracy in Election.
3 American Pie (1999)
In the coming-of-age teen comedy America Pie, Jason Biggs' Jim Levenstein endures two premature accidents in his very first bedroom encounter with Shannon Elizabeth's Nadia. Scary Movie parodies the scene when Cindy Campbell and Bobby Prinze head to the former's bed to have sex for the first time. Bobby suffers a similar fate as Jim, but the force of his release is such that he blasts Cindy into the ceiling. Cindy also asks Bobby to say her name, as Alyson Hannigan's Michelle Flaherty did with Jim when they first went to bed together.
2 Kazaam (1996)
If ever a movie was worthy of a comic parody, the fantasy comedy Kazaam is that movie. Starring Shaquille O'Neal as the eponymous 5,000-year-old genie, it's a mindless, unimaginative mess of a film. Scary Movie doesn't even bother to actually parody it; it just outright mocks it with a single line of dialogue. Carmen Electra's Drew Decker tells the killer it's her favorite scary movie. When the killer says it's not a scary movie, Drew replies, "Well, you haven't seen Shaq act." That line should burn, but Shaq received $7 million for his role in the movie, so he's probably not too worried about it.
1 The Blair Witch Project (1999)
One of the most haunting images from The Blair Witch Project is the crying eyes of Heather Donahue as she speaks into the camera, utterly terrified, from her tent as mysterious activity occurs outside in the blackness of the forest. That scene is parodied hilariously in Scary Movie when Gail Hailstorm gets chased into the woods at the ominously named "Lover's Lookout" by the killer. She turns to the camera to tearfully record what she believes will be her last words. However, Gail doesn't just cry as a river of thick, green snot pours from her nostrils, grossing out everyone watching.
The Blair Witch Project is the final movie to be truly targeted by Scary Movie's mockery. However, other movies referenced include Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Amistad, Schindler’s List, Boogie Nights, Big Momma’s House, The Fugitive, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Thelma & Louise, and Jackie Chan's movies in general. Simply put, no film is safe from the parodying humor of Scary Movie.
