Movies Scary Movies
Chiquita Mcnicholas
One of my earliest childhood memories involves the horror section of a video store and what might have been my very first experience with anxiety. As I stood in front of hundreds of ghoulish-looking horror titles, I felt sick to my stomach, slick with cold sweat and trembling with fear. Suddenly, I was irrationally certain I was about to die.
To this day, I remain a huge horror fan. A part of me believes that my enjoyment of the genre helps me to deal with my anxiety. But I recently began to wonder if this coping mechanism was particular to me, or if it was more universal than that, and I began to ask the big question: Can watching horror movies really help to alleviate symptoms of GAD?
During this time I continued to meditate daily, monitor my anxiety symptoms, and studied my heart rate before, during, and after watching the films. To ensure the experiment was as effective as possible I chose five films that have genuinely terrified me in recent years. I chose a few movies that feature specific triggers for my anxiety, such as social violence, claustrophobic environments, and individuals experiencing fatal allergic reactions. Here's how it went.
As an asthmatic with a nut allergy, the film features an especially challenging scene that triggers some major anxiety and causes me some mental and physical discomfort. While viewing this scene (and for several minutes following it), I actually experience some shortness of breath and feel physically restless.
I experienced intense nausea during several scenes as well as other physical symptoms of GAD, such as pins and needles and heart palpitations. As a result, the film left me feeling distinctly unsettled and even heightened my anxiety symptoms after I shut off the television, to the point where I experienced trouble sleeping.
The movie neither heightened nor alleviated my anxiety, but it did give me a strange sense of confidence and achievement afterward. I managed to make it through a movie that primarily revolves around one of my main anxiety triggers without experiencing a single symptom.
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Welcome to the best horror movies of 2024, ranking every dark and dreary delight coming out this year by Tomatometer! We start the list with Certified Fresh films (these movies have maintained a high Tomatometer score after enough critics reviews), followed by the pulp-pounding Fresh movies (these are rated at least 60%), and then concluding with the morbidly Rotten.
May saw a few pairs, like low-performing major studio releases Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1, and then two critically-acclaimed audience-splitters: I Saw the TV Glow and In A Violent Nature.
New horror movies for 2024 on the horizon include They Follow (sequel to It Follows, with Maika Monroe and writer/director David Robert Mitchell returning), Terrifier 3 (Art the Clown expands his spree into Christmas), Nosferatu (from director Robert Eggers), Alien: Romulus (due in August), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (September), Return to Silent Hill (original director Christophe Gans returns as well), The Conjuring: Last Rites (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprise their Warren roles).
Scary Movie is a 2000 American slasher parody film directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and written by Marlon and Shawn Wayans (who both also star), alongside Buddy Johnson, Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Starring Jon Abrahams, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, Anna Faris, Kurt Fuller, Regina Hall, Lochlyn Munro, Cheri Oteri, and Dave Sheridan, it follows a group of teenagers who accidentally hit a man with their car, dump his body in a lake, and swear to secrecy. A year later, someone wearing a Ghostface mask and robe begins hunting them one by one.
Dimension Films released Scary Movie in the United States on July 7, 2000. The film grossed $278 million worldwide on a $19 million budget.[3] The film is the first installment in the Scary Movie film series, as well as being the highest-grossing film in the series. The film received mixed reviews from critics, with the film's humor dividing critics. It later spawned four sequels, starting with 2001's Scary Movie 2.
On Halloween night, Drew Decker receives a threatening phone call while home alone. Chased outside by somebody dressed as Ghostface, she is stripped to her bra and panties before being stabbed in the breast, removing one of her silicone implants. Her father hits her with his vehicle while driving distracted, and she looks at her murderer just before she is fatally stabbed.
Cindy Campbell meets up with her boyfriend Bobby Prinze and her friends, Brenda Meeks, Ray Wilkins, Greg Phillippe, Buffy Gilmore, and Brenda's stoner brother Shorty. News teams, including hack reporter Gail Hailstorm, converge on the school because of Drew's murder. Gail seduces Buffy's intellectually disabled brother, Special Officer Doofy, to elicit information from him.
While in class, Cindy notices the killer watching her from outside before receiving an ominous note and realizes Drew was murdered exactly one year after she and her friends accidentally killed a man. After football practice, Greg finds a photo of his small penis on his locker saying "I KNOW" on it. Believing Ray took it, he nearly fights him.
Cindy tells her friends about the note, attempting to convince them to tell the police, but Greg beats her instead, fearing imprisonment for the murder of the previous year. At Buffy's beauty pageant that evening, the killer murders Greg in plain view, while the audience mistakes her pleas for help as part of her dramatic reading. Buffy eventually wins the pageant and forgets Greg.
The killer attacks Cindy while home alone but retreats when she contacts the police. Bobby arrives and is arrested after a cellphone, knife, and gloves fall out of his pocket. As Cindy spends the night at Buffy and Doofy's, she receives a call from the killer.
The following day, Bobby is released from jail. Buffy is beheaded by the killer with a cleaver. That night, Gail and her cameraman Kenny go to a makeout spot to get a murder on camera. After they film the killer murdering teenager Heather, he chases them into the woods and murders Kenny. Gail later gives a snot-filled apology to Kenny's family, a parody of a scene from The Blair Witch Project.
Later that night, Ray and Brenda go to the movies to see Shakespeare in Love, where he is stabbed through his ear in a bathroom stall through a glory hole. The killer chases Brenda, but angry movie patrons, weary of her talking during the film and her obnoxious behavior, stab her to death to silence her, as revenge for spoiling several films.
Meanwhile, Cindy has a house party, hoping for safety in numbers. One of her friends, obese Tina, is killed while getting beer from the garage. During the party, Cindy and Bobby go upstairs and have sex. The killer gets stoned with Shorty and his friends in the basement, but kills all but Shorty. After the pair has sex, the killer stabs Bobby and disappears. Cindy gets a gun from a drawer and Bobby follows. Shorty comes up from the basement warning about the killer, but Bobby shoots him. Ray arrives on the scene, still alive.
Bobby and Ray confront Cindy in the kitchen, announcing they will only kill her and her father, and that they are merely copying the real killer. Bobby admits to being gay, while Ray denies it. The plan backfires when Ray stabs Bobby repeatedly out of anger because his favorite show, The Wayans Bros., has been canceled after five seasons without getting a final episode. The killer abruptly arrives and stabs him, so Cindy kicks him out a window, employing moves from The Matrix. However, the killer vanishes before the police arrive, to Cindy's dismay.
At the police station, Cindy and the sheriff discover the killer was Doofy and not David Keegan, the man whom Cindy and her friends accidentally killed a year earlier. He was faking his disability and has escaped with Gail Hailstorm after removing his disguise, similarly to the ending of The Usual Suspects. Finding his discarded backpack with his Ghostface mask and knife in the street, Cindy begins screaming but is run over by a car as the sheriff walks away.
The screenplay was developed by Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans with Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman, writers for the sitcom The Wayans Bros.[4]At the same time, Miramax was developing a spoof of Scream scripted by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Due to a WGA decision, all six writers were credited, despite Friedberg and Seltzer not actually working on the filmed script.[5]
Anna Faris had graduated from the University of Washington and planned to travel to London, but decided instead to go to Los Angeles and after meeting with some managers; she then auditioned for the film and booked her first acting job.[6][4] Keenen had rejected many other actresses, and was willing to take the chance on Faris despite her lack of experience because of her instinctual performance. He said: "She had this natural innocence and was funny.[7] Jenny McCarthy and Melissa Joan Hart auditioned for the part of Drew Decker, before Carmen Electra was cast.[4]
Much of the humor of Scary Movie relies upon specific references to other contemporary films. Roger Ebert remarked in his review that "to get your money's worth, you need to be familiar with the various teenage horror franchises."[8] The two films on which the script is most heavily based are Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (both written by Kevin Williamson), using the general narrative arcs of both films, and featuring comedic recreations of key scenes.[9] The backstory in which the teenagers are responsible for accidentally killing a man following a beauty pageant recalls the same plot point in I Know What You Did Last Summer.[8] Major references to Scream include the identity of Ghostface and the murder of Drew Decker in the opening scene, a reference to the opening scene of Scream in which the same thing occurs to the character of Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore.[8] Additionally, the characters of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer are mirrored in the film, and the title "Scary Movie" was originally the working title for the project that would eventually become Scream.[9] At one point the title of this film was going to be "Scream If You Still Know What I Did Last Halloween".[10] Although the Ghostface mask and costume was a replica, the original costume in the Scream series was used when Cindy notices the killer outside of the school.
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