Scream Ripoffs: The Slashers of the Late 90s to 2001

For the longest time neckbeards hated Wes Craven's 1996 kino Scream and the brief cycle of ripoffs it inspired. It wasn't gritty enough, they said. For the zoomers in the audience, gritty was the most overused word of the 2000s and gave us nothing but a decade of dogshit edgy flicks and shows filled with desaturated colour, shaky cam, torture "porn" and implausible plotting, and not filled at all with wit, inventiveness, character, charm or anything of that nature. The fact that 2000s pop culture was dominated by Saw, Zack Snyder and Rob-Zombie-as-a-""""film""""maker while Scream has aged like wine is reason enough to always ignore neckbeards. Pop punk is great too, fuck you.

And don't you FUCKING forget it.

The Scream series, of course, starred a revolving door of likely or unlikely suspects as the killer, "Ghostface", who would prank call his victims before attacking them with a hunting knife. Despite actually being different people each time out, Ghostface became the last great horror icon to this day, unless you count the Blair Witch who is not technically in the movie.

This goofy shit don't count/never happened.

The series also maintained a high standard of screenwriting and actually told a story with continuing protagonists, a beginning, a middle and an end (and a belated postscript in 2010 no one saw). It balanced horror and humour better than anything before or since, brought soaring production values we'll never see again because of the success of Paranormal Activity and its budget of $5, and remains perhaps the definitive document on the late 90s, a period when planet Earth peaked right up until 9/11 and the total collapse of everything good in the world that's been taking place since.

This is the Rose McGowan they took from us.

Less distinguished, however, are the small number of ripoffs that defined the face of horror for those sweet few years. Overly reviled as plastic, disposable trash featuring B-list TV stars, no sub-sub-genre had ever been the target of such disproportionate invective. Comparing yesteryear's disposable entertainment to literally anything released this year, however, casts these misunderstood films in a kinder, better light. Although none of them really warrant a full article outside of the Scream series, here's a quick rundown on a now-niche cycle of films deserving of a little more respect than they've received.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The exclamation mark makes me laugh every time. It's like a threatening note from your mom.

I Know What You Did Last Summer shares a lot with the Screams, notably Kevin Williamson's then-hip sensibility, TV stars of the period, and a poster featuring the main cast looking kind of shifty and moody, but in an achingly pretty, photoshoot sort of way.

Sure, it's a cliché, but you remember this poster for a 1998 film.

There's not a lot to say about these amiable flicks, except for how beautiful and innocent the world of the mid to late 90s was. Jennifer Love Hewitt glides so photogenically through life you could quite happily watch her do mundane things and forget time was passing and not even worry about the killer. I wish I went to high school in one of these movies: everyone was beautiful and 25 years old, and you got killed by a hook-wielding fisherman before you made it to the 2000s.

The fact the killer smells like fish from half a mile away never seems to stop him sneaking up on people.

The scene where bae meets the albino chick is also pretty great.

"Drop the act. You killed Max, and took my jacket" - actual dialogue

Special mention must be made of these dudes who apparently wear fish-themed headwear to their 4th of July festivities.

Urban Legend

>ywn minor in a filler course on urban folklore taught by freddy krueger at a creepy new england college

Probably the best of the post-Scream cycle, Urban Legend is also the one with the best gimmick, which makes the lack of a proper sequel all the more disappointing (2002's Urban Legends: Final Cut is an unfunny parody of the original, the Freddy's Dead of Urban Legend flicks, and 3 is even worse). In this one the killer wears a parka and murders people using MOs cribbed from popular urban legends. What's most surprising is that most of them don't seem forced, but are worked naturally into the progression of the plot. I would have loved to see a string of sequels in which more and more tenuous reaches were made to connect kills to obscurer and ever more retarded urban legends, like the parka killer flushing a baby alligator 20 years ago in flashback and feeding someone to the fully grown one in the present. That would have been stupid as shit, but entertainingly so.

I also want to see the killer try to swing that axe inside a mini.

Sadly the parka killer (easily the best in the cycle after Ghostface) never made it past the first one, but Urban Legend still stands as a fun knockoff, like the Speed to Scream's Die Hard. Cast includes Jared Leto, Tara Reid and D-Girl from The Sopranos.

MOM'S GONNA FREAK

Tara Reid was the original Bowsette.

D-Girl is a weak and kind of unlikeable Final Girl but that's OK because the protagonists in actual urban legends often are, if they're filled in at all. Normally I like a protagonist I can root for but it's not a problem here, and the killer reveal is one of the better ones I've seen, surpassed only by those of Scream and the otherwise crappy 80s flick Happy Birthday To Me, which is worth watching solely for its final sequence.

In North Park, Kenny kills you.

I don't know why urban legends were such a hot topic for horror filmmakers in the 90s, but at some point Parka should have crossed paths with Candyman and the hook-handed Fisherman from Summer. Better yet, the original killer could come back in a new sequel taking cues from online creepypastas. It would probably be gay but I'd go see it, if they got the right people back.

Cherry Falls

Did a 2000 slasher flick give us the final solution to the much hyped incel terror wave?

Top of the list of movies that should have been better than they were, Cherry Falls has the excellent gimmick that the killer attacks only virgins, which should have led to a mass panic in which nervous teens try to get laid urgently, with each embarrassing failure bringing the spectre of death that bit closer. It should have been the perfect formula for suspense and satire, and Britanny Murphy should have been the perfect Final Girl. Instead, however, it sucked and was quickly forgotten, but the possibility of the cult classic it might have become is still intriguing.

This fuck's method of eating pringles or whatever is a Clerksian highlight.

The late lamented Murphy plays the virginal daughter of the small town police chief. Not unlike D-Girl, she's actually a pretty obnoxious Final Girl, but on this blog we love Murph Murph so we'll let it slide. She's basically an emo/scene girl so we can surmise getting the D would save her life both literally and in a more thematic way, which would be a smarter subtext than the actual one in the movie. The big problem with Cherry Falls is its awkward straddling of American Pie style frat douche humour and moody scene thot stylisation.

Is it edgy industrial album cover core...

Evil Dead style gag comedy...

...or whispy haired dreampop artfaggotry? You decide (because the director couldn't).

I can at least give the filmmakers some credit for trying to mix artsiness with an utterly artless script, but it's like oil and water, and has only been tried one more time, in the objectively superior remake of 70s C-movie Town That Dreaded Sundown. I'd check that one out as it's at least consistent with its dreamy visuals and less confused with its sophomoric social commentary, though its killer reveal is about equally lame. Will the perfect 90s-college-alternative-chick-angst-slasherkino ever be made? Probably not, but the experiment remains compelling enough to squat like a gargoyle in the memory.

RIP based Murph Murph :(

Valentine

Any flick with a sufficiently cleavagey chase scene can never score below 2 stars.

Scraping the bottom of the ripoff barrel, Valentine is a bold synthesis of glossy slasher flick and unfunny "relatable" comedy chick flick set on a day already taken by My Bloody Valentine and featuring a fairly creepily masked killer doing a bit of a Myers impression.

"Remember this shot from a better movie?" - director

Sadly he doesn't use the bow again, which would have been kind of fun. The movie also suffers from too many obvious red herring characters, a couple of extremely filler kills and its attempts at humour that are obviously pitched at a rom com audience that don't watch horror movies.

"OMG she washes her hair in the toilet JUST LIKE ME" - w*men

Despite being the weakest in the cycle, Valentine is very watchable due to its photogenic cast of affably hateable Stacies including Marley Shelton, Denise Richards and Katherine Heigl, making it Supreme Gentleman kino.

Daily reminder H*llywood denied us this thicc qt because she was too much of a drag to work with, but closed ranks for creepy Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey for decades.

I miss the period from Starship Troopers to The World Is Not Enough in which Denise Richards' eyebrows ruled cinema. In hindsight, it was the last golden age of civilisation.

Honourable mention: Final Destination

Is Final Destination part of the cycle? Is it a slasher movie? I say yes for three reasons: it has that glossy post-Scream aesthetic, the cast are featured prominently on the poster looking shifty, and the characters are killed off one by one. It differs from the others in the list because the killer (Death) is supernatural, but no one says A Nightmare on Elm Street isn't a slasher, except Silvio. Final Destination features a character named Clear Rivers, which is one of those names only movie characters would ever have, and which for some reason I love.

"Hi, I am Clear Rivers" - this character

I won't say too much about Final Destination here because I might do a piece on the series later, but it's worth a mention in the context of post-Screamcore. Technically there were others but they're not worth mentioning beyond a single line. Lover's Lane was a fun Summer ripoff featuring a pre-Scary Movie Anna Faris and Cut was an unfunny meta comedy notable only for a thicc latterday Molly Ringwald.

So for the 30 year old boomers who remember the time before the dark age when even a crappy knockoff movie could be relied upon to provide the various simple joys of an attractive cast, a colour palette that looks like something on Earth, and axe murders, these flicks deserve a small place in your sad hearts. Imagine being a zoomer and growing up on Paranormal Activity, Saw 119, and A24.

Sweet Dreams: Wes Craven's New Nightmare!!!

RIP based spoopy movie man.

You could be forgiven for tuning out (of life) after Freddy's Dead, and audiences at the time did (the first part), leaving Wes Craven's return to the series he created to underperform at the box office. That's a pity, because against all reasonable expectations the seventh Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the best in the series and a perfect way to wrap things up and go out on a high. Faced with the reality of a series that had devoured itself in an orgy of stupidity, Wes Craven did the only sensible thing you can do: he stepped outside the series.

I for one welcome our new dream demon overlords.

New Nightmare posits the first six films as just that: movies, entertainment that exists in the pop culture of the "real world" in which it's set. Wes Craven is a real person who makes films, Robert Englund is a real actor who plays Freddy Krueger, and Heather Langenkamp is a real actress, wife and mother who is called upon to play Nancy and stop Freddy one last time, but for real this time.

This prop seems to be inspired by a scene in 5. Despite Craven's ambivalence toward the other sequels, New Nightmare is full of these little nods.

Freddy Vs Godzilla still in development hell.

One thing that stands out about this approach is that Craven doesn't go for the cheap and obvious gag of having Freddy slaughter the hacks who made Freddy's Dead. Although that would have been satisfying, it would have been fix fic, and run the risk of verging on Chris Chan tier revenge fantasy bullshit. Instead, the focus is squarely on Heather as protagonist, with the Freddy-demon released from the prison of the film series returned to his roots as a mostly-straight-faced villain. The idea is simply floated that he slipped the bonds of his confinement in the story world because the suits ran the series into the ground, and that's all you need.

Together again.

Heather's husband is named Chase and works as an effects technician on horror movies. Her son is played by the kid from Pet Sematary. She does the chat show circuit and deals with autistic fans, creepy phone calls, and a nurse who thinks she's going crazy and is a bad influence on her son on account of her movie roles. Craven has fun sending up the culture and the perennial moral panic over scary art, but never quite tips over into soapboxing.

Freed from the 80s, she actually has great hair.

Heather humours her spergy driver.

Me on the left.

One night Chase falls asleep at the wheel and is killed by Freddy, leaving Heather alone to protect her son and kill the dream demon once and for all.

"Cut to the Chase FX" - kino foreshadowing.

New Nightmare feels more naturalistic compared to the previous instalments. There's less stylised lighting and surreal imagery, and in some ways that's a shame, but it helps separate the "real world" from the "movie world". Real-life events such as Langenkamp's stalker and a contemporaneous earthquake are rolled into the script too, making the fake-real-world even a little realer. Freddy gets a redesign too, which was probably necessary to distinguish him from the cartoon character he had become by Freddy's Dead. They even recast Freddy with...himself:

Freddy Krueger is a successful actor and you're a NEET.

It doesn't seem like high praise to say this one gets it right, but given everything that's happened in this series, you couldn't expect a better conclusion. It was seven films, a TV show, a game and various comics, novelisations and merchandising that veered erratically from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again, packed with effects, jumps, deaths, one-liners, waifus, retardation, darkness, surreality, brilliance and catharsis. Freddy Vs Jason and the r*make would follow, but thematically, New Nightmare was the perfect ending.

Absolutely cathartic.

The final scene even suggests a sort of looping back to the beginning, an infinite recursion as of a classic story being endlessly retold. Based Nancy always keeping Freddy down in the boiler room so we can all sleep soundly in our beds.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors!!!

Spoilers below.

Dream Warriors is to A Nightmare on Elm Street as Aliens is to Alien, except both are better because Ridley Scott is a fart-huffing turbofedora and James Cameron is a meathead douchebag who whacks it to blue catgirls and mechs in about equal measure. But while Alien was carried by ELP album artist H.R. Geiger, Aliens had superior bantz and much better effects, and didn't have that awful hard cut between the puppet robot head and Bilbo which pisses me off every time I've watched Alien (twice).

They dropped "Part" from the title, probably because "Part 2" wasn't part 2 of anything.

So what I really mean is that, while Freddy's Revenge veered off into the insane, Dream Warriors is a proper sequel that expands on the impressive foundations laid by the original, going bigger and more action-packed while bringing back and further developing characters from the original. This one set the template the next three would try to match, usually with far diminished returns, but it was also a perfect time capsule of 1986, and, if nothing else, the subsequent sequels kept up that tradition beautifully.

Freddy: The Hair Years.

The kino opens (and closes) to the strains of Dokken, who are the Beethoven of hair metal bands.  Our /mu/ patrician Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is trying to stay awake by blasting "Into the Fire" and making a house out of Popsicle sticks, but she's thwarted by her mom, drifts off to sleep and is soon in the land of dreams. Freddy shows up and chases her, and cuts her wrist, so when she wakes up screaming it looks like she tried to kill herself.

Me after watching five minutes of Freddy's Dead.

This is interesting because in the first film Freddy arranged the murders so that Rod looked like he killed Tina, and then hanged himself in his cell, and now it looks like he's back to sort of covering his tracks by making his murders look like suicides. Coincidentally or otherwise, Kristen is committed to the same mental institution where other Freddy victims are holed up. Doctor Neil Gordon is baffled by their condition, until Nancy Thompson, Final Girl of part 1, shows up with her brand of expertise.

Incidentally, Nancy >>> Laurie Strode.

Nancy's on the hypnocil, an experimental drug that suppresses dreams, which suggests that Freddy continued to pursue her after the end of the original, but Kristen manages to pull her into her own dream, tipping Nancy off that these kids can develop their will into "powers" to fight back in the dream world. This makes some sense and is consistent with the idea of "taking back control" of the dream introduced in the original. It also ties into two of the great mid-80s motifs of the film: the Breakfast Club misfits banding together in the face of adversity and the Dungeons and Dragons-style party of adventurers approaching the unknown. On the other hand, some of the powers and costumes are pretty gay such as this Harry Potter looking NERD:

"I am the wizard master!" - Urkel "Screech" Poindexter, before getting killed.

Never mind that though. For every idea that sputters and dies on the vine, there's something great to make up for it, whether it's Kincaid's top tier trash talk, Freddy's Harryhausen-style stop-motion animated skeleton, the return of based John Saxon as Donald Thompson (Nancy's father), or best girl, fellow Dokken fan and junkiefu Taryn White (Jennifer Rubin), who, as she explains, is "beautiful...and bad":

>tfw no 11/10 punk rock gf with two feet tall mohawk and glitter on her chest

This one also introduces the idea of creative, personalised kills, such as puppet-making loner Philip who is killed in the best way maybe ever conceived in a horror movie: Freddy rips his veins or tendons out of his feet and wrists and uses them to walk him off a ledge like a marionette. Like everything else in Dream Warriors, they get the fine balance between creativity, darkness and goofiness just about right - a feat never again to be successfully completed. It's like Tim Burton's Batman kinos before Joel Schumacher took the wheel and plowed the franchise straight off a cliff.

He'll feel that in the morning.

Yet another way Dream Warriors creeps right up to the precipice is in its handling of backstory, something everyone thinks they want but no one ever likes when they get it. Dream Warriors reveals just the right amount by introducing Freddy's childhood nickname: The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, earned when he was conceived by the gang rape of a nun in an old wing of the mental hospital when she was locked in with the lunatics. This was exactly enough backstory (and, most importantly, creepy enough) to last Freddy forever. We didn't need any more, and no more of it was good past this point.

This sounds like something they'd say on Memri TV.

So everything about Dream Warriors works while exhausting the possibilities for further sequels by pushing it to its absolute limit. The one-liners and gag deaths are great, but just a tiny nudge would make them terrible and excessive. It even blows its wad by killing off Nancy herself, arguably the best Final Girl in slasher history, an audacious decision which lends the ending a significance and weight that, once again, can never be repeated. So this is what it looks like when a series reaches its natural and logical endpoint, pulling out all the stops and giving us a little bit of everything, and just about getting away with it.

And then they made three more.

Deadly Blessing!

Deadly Blessing stars Ernest Borgnine as an Amish-style cult leader and has a scene where a spider falls into Sharon Stone's mouth. This alone makes it better than everything you've watched all year, especially if you're the sort of person who looks forward to Jar Jar Abrams' Star Wars and Zack Snyder's Batman Meets Superman: Dawn of Just Ass.

Say ahh.

The movie opens with a bunch of quintessential Amish imagery and spends the rest of its running time trying to convince everybody that they're not Amish, but "Hittites". The Hittites apparently make the Amish look like pussies, which is a strange thing to say because the Amish are pussies; it's their way of life.

"U wot m8? I'll fuckin' have ya, ya Amish knob!" - Hittite Ernest Borgnine

Since this is a movie of the late, great Wes Craven, someone immediately starts hacking up the cast. Is it the normie family that live beside the Hittite community, and may be in danger of being edged out? Is it Michael Berryman? Naturally Michael Berryman is in this movie because it is awesome. Could it be the Final Girl, or the old lady, or Ernest Borgnine himself? Or is it an evil spirit called...the Incubus???

Michael Berryman is outside your window right now.

There are so many possible suspects and motives, which intertwine with the main slasher plot in all kinds of ways. There's even a forbidden love story between an Amish Hittite boy and a normalfag woman, a full four years before Harrison Ford movie Witness. Did Witness rip off Deadly Blessing? I think you know the answer.

For never was a story of more woe/Than this of English, and her Hittite, Joe.

Yet for all those myriad joys, the best part of the movie concerns Sharon Stone's battle with a barn door that keeps closing on her, finally locking her in the barn where she comically falls face-first into a succession of spider webs, and then a spider falls in her mouth.

"Derp" - Sharon Stone

Actually, I changed my mind, the best part is when Ernest Borgnine fucking beats this kid with a cane for going into "The Forbidden Barn!" Why do you have a forbidden barn, asshole? What a stupid thing to build.

"Spare the rod, spoil the child" - anonymous; good parenting

Wes Craven actually grew up in a sort of cult-like environment. One of the interesting things about him is that he wasn't allowed to watch movies as a kid. Good job, guys. You really put him off that. Maybe the movies were his forbidden barn. Maybe deep thoughts.

Definitely watch Deadly Blessing, it's great.