Waaassssssuuuuupppppppppppppp!!
In July 2000, a $19 million parody film outgrossed most of the slasher movies it was mocking, and in doing so, quietly ended the very genre it fed off. The late-90s teen horror boom, which included Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer had built its appeal on self-aware, meta-textual cleverness, characters who knew the rules of horror movies and still couldn't escape them. Scary Movie took that self-awareness and pushed it past the breaking point, turning Drew Barrymore's iconic Scream cold open into something closer to a Looney Tunes sketch.
This episode traces how Shawn, and Marlon Wayans, along with their brother Keenen Ivory Wayans, took a script originally titled Last Summer I Screamed Because Halloween Fell on Friday the 13th, developed by writing collaborators Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman as a more traditional slasher spoof, and reworked it into something rowdier, cruder, and more racially and sexually explicit than anything the genre's white-coded parody tradition (like Airplane! and The Naked Gun) had attempted before.
But there was also a rival script, written at the same time, by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, titled Scream if I Know What You Did Last Halloween...
What are you waiting for, huh? What are you waiting for?!
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