Horror as a genre is kind of built on, if not outright parody, then copying. Halloween led to Friday the 13th, The Blair Witch Project spawns the found-footage genre and every movie since Scream is arguably a post-modern horror movie. Horror evolves by giving audiences new twists on familiar formulas and the joy comes in both knowing what’s coming and being surprised by the unexpected. Scare Package, a new horror-comedy anthology now streaming on Shudder, parodies the genre’s tropes in seven distinct segments—each with a different creative team.
The first segment, “Cold Open,” is a promising start. It follows Mike (Jon Michael Simpson) a perpetual side character who is sick of playing the nameless real estate agent who sells the haunted house to the lead couple in the first act or the man behind the scenes sent to twist the old road sign that will lead a car full of teenagers toward instead of away from the abandoned asylum. It’s a fun concept and one writer-director Emily Hagins executes to hilariously cartoonish effect as Mike’s decision to break from the script leads to some very unintended consequences. Unfortunately, it may also be the film’s peak.
The following segment, “Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium,” set in a video store, acts as the films framing device. Though the following scenes set in the store are meant as little more than justification for why the audience sees each new segment, the characters and plotting co-writers Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns employ grate more often than they amuse. Chad (Jeremy King) is eccentric in a way that feels obnoxious and over-written and every odd moment between him and new employee Hawn (Hawn Tran) or creepy, obsessive customer Sam (Byron Brown) feels forced and self-conscious, begging the audience to find it funny. In that respect, even the worst segments are a welcome respite from the tedium at Chad’s.
Perhaps the best is “The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV – The Final Kill” (directed by Anthony Cousins and co-written by him and John Karukoski), which cleverly sends up the invincible villains and goofy plot twists of the Halloween franchise especially in a way that’s both funny and thoughtful. Most, though, are merely fine, like “M.I.S.T.,E.R”, which stars actor Noah Segan (who also directed and co-wrote with Frank Garcia-Hejl) as a seemingly emasculated husband who joins a men’s empowerment group. It seems like a knockoff of 2019’s The Art of Self-Defense, but morphs into something else in the final minutes and the late appearance of Greener Grass star Jocelyn Deboer hints at an even better movie that could have been. Indeed, some of the segments feel frustratingly short, leaving potential left untapped.
However, that feeling is the largely the exception and the worst segments feel like they can’t end quickly enough, for instance, “One Time in the Woods”, written and directed by Chris McInroy. An almost purely comedic interlude about a camping trip that goes awry, it’s basically a showcase for make-up and practical effects work that quickly grows tedious yet goes on and on. The film itself follows a similar trajectory, slowly becoming less fun as it drags on through its unjustified hour and 46-minute runtime. Though the film blessedly switches to one long, final story in its last third (also written by Koontz and Burns and directed by the former), that segment is also not particularly groundbreaking, name-checking tropes without really subverting or examining them in interesting ways. Instead, it gives the audience a somewhat obscure cameo as if that were a substitute for better writing.
Scare Package is meant for horror fans, but even the most tolerant among them won’t find much to enjoy here. While some of the segments work better than others, even the best peak at mildly amusing and the group as a whole is simply mediocre. Certainly, an anthology film that sends up horror tropes is a fun idea, but horror itself is already so self-aware that the insights here never dig below the surface or feel like repeats of something we’ve heard before. Rather, horror fans looking for light horror comedy will have to look elsewhere.
