Scary Movie 2 Film Analysis

Scary Movie 2 is a 2001 parody movie, and is the second movie in the Scary Movie franchise. The director for this movie was Keenen Ivory Wayans and the screenplay was written by eight people in total. Eric L. Gold produced the movie which was then distributed by Dimension Films. Scary Movie 2 contains some of the same characters who were in the previous movie but apart from these, there are no actors who are well-known in the movie; instead it uses smaller actors, some of these being Anna Faris as Cindy, Regina Hall as Brenda, Shawn Wayans as Ray and Marlon Wayans as Shorty – who all featured in the first movie of the franchise.

            I think that this movie follows some of the rules from Todorov’s narrative theory, but not necessarily in the order constructed by Todorov himself. The start of the movie doesn’t have any relevance to the storyline of Scary Movie 2 and instead is a parody of The Exorcist. The beginning to the storyline of the movie is a year on from the last Scary Movie, and the four characters from the previous movie – Cindy, Shorty, Brenda and Ray – are all at college and are trying to start a new life after the events that happened in the last movie and so this is the starting equilibrium for the movie. By having this is as the equilibrium, it means those audiences who didn’t watch the previous movie can become familiar with who the main characters of the movie are going to be and it also shows that something is going to happen with these characters because life is so normal for them at the time. The next stage is for an event to take place and in this case, the students Professor asks them to go on a trip to a haunted house, unbeknown to the students that they would be bait for the paranormal activity that takes place in the house. The teens eventually find out about their Professors plans after all the incidents that have taken place in the house and this is the next stage in Todorov’s theory where the event is recognised, and so from this the next stage has to be revealed and this is where there is an attempt to fix the problem or the event that has just taken place. The teens attempt to fix the event that has just taken place by equipping themselves with several technological devices that will injure the spectral enemies in the Hell House. Eventually the teens manage to lure Kane the ghost toward a device that destroys him all whilst destroying a skeleton, and a possessed Hanson. Two months later, there is a new equilibrium where the teens are all back in college, Cindy and Buddy are in a relationship and look after the parrot from the Hell House, however Cindy see’s Hanson again and the movie ends with Hanson getting run over and killed for good by Shorty. By leaving the movie without a real sense of a new equilibrium like Todorov’s theory says should happen, it makes the audience think there a movie could be made to follow this one.

            When watching a movie, the audience always have in mind the types of things that should be in the movie depending on the genre of it, for example a comedy movie is expected to have a lot of comedic moment otherwise it wouldn’t fit the genre, and sometimes two genre cross each other and this is what happens in this movie because they are some parody moment in it, as well as it being a horror and comedy. So for this movie to be successful, the movie had to marketed right and attract the right audience, this is made easier as it is a sequel and so the producers know what to put into the movie and so this makes the expectations a little less pressurising. For a movie of so many genres, the audience will expect aspects from all the genres to be in it – mainly comedy and horror – so the audience will expect it to have slight elements of horror but nothing to horrific because it will have the comedy factor to it and I think for this movie, it is more about the comedy side of things rather than the horror side. But because this is the second movie in the franchise, the audience will expect the ideas to have advanced from last time and I think they would expect the movie to be funnier and have new jokes in it.

            There are a few scenes in the movie that hold a small element of horror but most of the movie is based on the comedy genre and so a lot of the scenes hold elements of horror more than anything. Two scenes in the movie are parodies of other movies and these are; the start of the movie consists of a parody from The Exorcist and towards the end of the movie there is a scene where Cindy, Theo and Brenda fight a possessed Hanson and it turns into a parody scene from Charlie’s Angels. The scenes that hold an element of horror are when the skeleton chases Cindy, the ghosts who create incidents in the house and the housekeeper at Hell House is also weird looking and so is there to creep the audience out. These are some of the only horror elements that are in the movie. Most of the movie is built up on comedy and so the whole movie is based on jokes and taking something that shouldn’t necessarily be funny and making it humorous for the audience. Parody movies were a genre of movie that was often overlooked but it is now one of the most commonly profitable at the box office, and so by bringing this element to the movie, it means that the movie should become quite successful at the box office. And horror-comedies have also recently become more popular and so by bringing elements of this genre into the movie it means that there aren’t too many expectations as at the time of its release the genre wasn’t too popular.

            According to Propp’s Character Functions, the audience should be able to pick out a clear victim, villain, hero and many other characters. For this movie in particular the Professor seems like a normal character at the start of the movie and we get further into the storyline it becomes clear to the audience that this is not the case, and in fact the Professor could be seen as the villain for the movie. This is because he uses the students as bait for his project and he also hopes that he’ll get something from the college girls that he takes on the trip with him – the Professor eventually gets killed by a female ghost who lives in the mansion. The Professor has a helper who the audience can assume will also be villainous as they will think he helped in the plans that the Professor had but once the Professor is killed, it turns out that Dwight is willing to help the students try and escape the mansion whilst killing all the ghosts in the process and so he is the helper for the movie as he provides the students with the weapons they need to defend themselves with. Due to all the students being taken away to mansion for bait, it can be said that they are all victims in this movie but at the same time they all become hero’s because they manage to escape with help and they also manage to kill all the ghosts and stop the paranormal activity that goes on in the Hell House. Shorty continues to be a hero right until the end of the movie where Hanson is back to get Cindy but before he can do that Shorty runs him over and kills him for good. I think that this movie does conform to some of Propp’s ideas about character functions; some of them are just less obvious in the movie.

            There is a clear of opposition of Good vs. Evil in this movie and this shown through the way that the students are all on the good side and the Professor along with all the other things in the house such as the cat that attacks Cindy, the large weed plant, all the ghosts and even the toy clown that comes to life are on the evil side. We see the fight between these oppositions take place towards the end of the film in which the students manage to defeat the evil side and so it can be clearly seen that Strauss’ theory works in the case of the movie.

            In conclusion, this is a movie that conforms to many of the typical elements that are needed in it and is a prime example of a film that uses a narrative structure, the idea of binary opposites and character functions. I think that if the film hadn’t followed these conventions then it wouldn’t have been as successful therefore all these theories are an important piece to this movie. The typical aspects such as the comedy and the fact that it parodies other films is what mainly made the film so successful globally and this is why audiences have wanted more films from the Scary Movie franchise.