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Life Holidays
Halloween
On Halloween,
people watching their favorite horror
movies can be heard shrieking with laughter...
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1940's:
Chills
and chuckles
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Halloween
Treats:
Spoofs of Horror Movies
Making
Light of the Dark Side
What's the
attraction of horror movies?
Americans
love a good scare, but a belly laugh during Halloween can be just
as fun. This is evident in the parodies or spoofs of horror flicks,
said Wes Gehring, a film professor at Ball State University.
"Sometimes
people only see a movie one way, such as just being a horror or
comedy movie," he said. "But, movie
genres together can work on multiple levels."
The first
popular parody of horror movies occurred shortly after World War
II when Universal Studios combined two of its best-loved franchises
of the 1930s and '40s - monsters and Abbott and Costello - to
create 1948's Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
In the 1950's,
horror films served mainly as nuclear-age parable, as "alien"
radiation infected humans (and insects), wreaking unexpected havoc.
Today, of
course, they're considered some of the funniest films ever made.
Gehring says
horror movies are continuously changing to meet the demands of
the audience or to find new ones. In the 1970s, films such as
Carrie
were about grossing out the audience.
Since that
time, parodies have taken center stage after several decades of
serious and lucrative horror flicks.
"It seems
that horror is the genre of choice for the younger generation,"
he says. "As
a genre gets old and worn out, parodies come to center stage,"
he said. "Each
time the horror movie genre changes, the parodies change."
Sure enough,
with the dawn of a new century the release of Scary
Movie in 2000 spun together practically every horror film
parody up to that time, and became a wildly popular pop hit that
enjoys a cult following to this day.
Top Ten
Horror Spoofs
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1. Scary Movie, 2000
2. Young Frankenstein, 1974
3. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948
4. Love at First Bite, 1979
5. Shaun of the Dead, 2004
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6. Pandemonium, 1982
7. Repossessed, 1990
8. An American Werewolf in London, 1981
9. Tremors, 1991
10. Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995
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More about
horror film spoofs around the Web:
The
Best Horror Movie Spoofs & Satires
Top
10 Scary Movie Comedies
also
see ->
Monsters
& Demons: A Short History of the Horror Film
Halloween
TV
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