Key Points
Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Michael Tiddes, the director of Scary Movie, take EW inside the making of the film’s wild pair of post-credits parodies.
“Short Hand,” a riff on Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, and “Brosferatu,” a send-up of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, were bumped to the end because they “threw the story off,” Marlon says.
But Tiddes, who’s worked with the Wayans for over a decade, notes how with these brothers, “Things fall away, but they don’t go away.”
This article contains spoilers for Scary Movie.
Scary Movie, the latest entry in the beloved horror parody franchise, is overloaded with riffs, digs, plays, and puns on modern cinema. Franchise co-creators and writers Shawn and Marlon Wayans, who have regained control of the franchise 25 years after their last go-around, didn’t limit the scope of their latest effort to the horror genre. Scary Movie parodies Ma alongside Michael, Weapons alongside Wicked. There were, in fact, so many targets to choose from that some of the best jokes had to be held for after the curtain call.
Case in point: the film’s two parodies that run during and after the credits: “Brosferatu,” a buddy-comedy riff on Robert Eggers’ foreboding Nosferatu; and “Short Hand,” a satirical spin on Osgood Perkins’ twisty Longlegs.
“I probably could’ve done six more scenes, or eight more scenes. We had so much stuff,” Marlon says during a conversation for Entertainment Weekly‘s Scary Movie cover. Michael Tiddes, the film’s director and a longtime Wayans collaborator, likens piecing the film’s many interlocking storylines, dozens of characters, and hundreds of jokes together to completing a puzzle, where “the challenge, of course, is creating the connective tissue that kind of makes it a whole movie.”
Here’s how they did it.
Bill Skarsgård in ‘Nosferatu’
Credit: Focus Features
“I think the Nosferatu scene, ‘Brosferatu,’ was a part of the movie, but we replaced ‘Brosferatu’ with Michael Jackson because it was just a way bigger movie,” Marlon shares. Scary Movie released in theaters on Friday, treating fans after a long hiatus to classically raunchy, Wayans-style send-ups of films like Get Out, Sinners, and M3GAN, all of which were glimpsed in teasers and trailers leading up to the premiere.
Though “Brosferatu” was held back for a surprise appearance during the roll of credits, the Wayans’ ingenious parody of the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which hits theaters in April, was teased in advance. Kenan Thompson stars in the self-contained sketch as Jermaine Jackson, trying and failing to mount his own hagiographic tribute piece.
Thompson was the Wayans’ first choice for the role. “We wanted to cross universes. The Wayans have always worked with our people, right?” Marlon asks, pointing to an artificial division between the Wayans’ sketch comedy series, In Living Color, and Thompson’s longtime home, Saturday Night Live. “We were like, ‘Why have two different institutional forces when we could pull from each other?” There’s something “lovable about Kenan” in particular, Marlon continues. “He has a silly little look. He always looks like he’s up to something. It’s like he’s in his own head, and he makes himself laugh first.”
Another reason to swap “Brosferatru” for “Jermaine” is that the latter “wasn’t horror and we were looking for something that wasn’t horror-related,” Shawn says. “So we picked Michael, but we still thought [‘Brosferatu’] was really funny. So we said, ‘Let’s put it as an Easter egg.’ And it was the same thing with the Chris Elliott scene with little Damon and Heidi.”
The very same Chris Elliott behind the gnarl-handed mansion keeper Hanson in Scary Movie 2, who returns to star in “Short Hand” alongside Damon Wayans Jr. (the son of Marlon and Shawn’s brother and My Wife and Kids star Damon Wayans) and Thompson’s SNL buddy Heidi Gardner.
The duo first appear in parodied versions of the Longlegs roles originated by Blair Underwood and Maika Monroe midway through Scary Movie, standing by as their fellow officers are sent off after a suspicious perp. He’s described as a dead ringer for Nicholas Cage’s ghastly villain in Longlegs, and there Elliott sits at a bus stop, looking as freakish as ever. But the officers descend upon an innocent Black man standing nearby instead.
That scene ends up serving as just a taste of what the Wayans cooked up, as “Short Hand” returns during the credits for a brutal play-by-play send-up of Longlegs‘ terrifying interrogation scene. Gardner fits in especially well as one of the new additions to the Wayans ensemble. “We just thought Heidi was hilarious,” Marlon says. “We were thinking about that character — it’s always about the character. And that character being psychic, but playing it dumb, but still being hilarious,” made her a perfect fit.
“We have these bonus scenes. We wanted to put those scenes in. They were really funny,” he continues. But in early cuts of the film, the Wayans had to face the fact that they “threw you too much off the story. So you have to make choices. We had to make the choice to put that at the end, when the story was done, and now you could just enjoy it as a sketch. [Heidi] and little Damon had this wonderful chemistry, and she’s just special.”
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Heidi Gardner and Damon Wayans Jr. in ‘Scary Movie’
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Eagle-eyed viewers may also notice that the “Short Hand” scenes are visually distinct from the rest of the film. That was by design. “What’s so fun about these movies, and the challenge, is finding an organic way to transition from one to the next, and then how do you bring it back? Bring it to the story and then bring it to the next joke?” Tiddes asks.
“I accomplished that in many, many different ways, from pacing to sound to changing the way I shot different scenes. When I was doing Longlegs, I used a lot of very wide-angle lenses,” the director of five prior Wayans features explains. But for a later fight scene that casts Anna Faris‘ Cindy Campbell in a John Wick-esque avenger role, “I was going towards anamorphics,” he says, referring to specialty lenses that compress images, allowing for wider aspect ratios without cropping.
Tiddes wanted each parody to “feel like its own movie,” but held one goal above all others: for the film to possess “momentum and energy. I wanted you to feel like you were on this ride, to feel like the jokes were coming at you, and you had no idea where they were coming from.”
The result is one of the most densely loaded parody films in years, one that requires a special caveat: don’t stop watching once the credits start to roll.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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