Confessions for Daria 2:  The Curse of the Misery Chick (Part 2 of the script)

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(As a side note, Barry played Pigeon Man in Daria (the movie). Yes, we do look like Trey Anastasio.)
 

Aaron Solomon (ben Saul Joseph Adelman's confession:

I, Aaron Solomon Adelman, do hereby confess to having been one of the two people masterminding this cruel parody of what would happen if Hollywood tried to make a movie based on Daria (the animated series) and then somehow decided to make a sequel.

Stu was right: if someone makes a terrible movie, then there has to be a terrible sequel. Jurassic Park begat The Lost World and an upcoming sequel. Leprechaun spawned four sequels. Halloween had six sequels, Friday the Thirteenth had eight, and I lost count on how many nightmares there were on Elm Street. Bad sequels have already popped up for bad movie adaptations of TV shows; witness The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and Mission Impossible 2. And so before Barry and I finished Daria (the movie), we knew there would be a Daria 2.

We had already tackled the genre Barry refers to as "teen crap", and since it was natural for the Fashion Club to seek their revenge in a sequel, we decided that Daria 2 would be a horror film, which turned out to be a good choice for parody since the entire genre is filled with cliches and unbelievably bad writing. This was noted in Scream and its sequels; it at least had the courage to note the problems with horror movies. (It's a pity Kevin Williamson and company did not have the courage to make the characters actually break out of the clichés.) And so not only did Scream et seq. become source material for us, but so did Friday the Thirteenth et seq., A Nightmare on Elm Street et seq., Halloween et seq., Child's Play et seq., Wishmaster, The Puppetmaster, The Craft, I Know What You Did Last Summer et seq., The Stuff, and many others. Smiley draws on the much of the poorly thought-out features of fantastic serial killers: the rubber mask, the near-invisibility until he is about to strike, the killing of people only peripherally connected to the real target, spectacular homicides intended to get attention, and especially the indestructibility. If we did anything wrong with Smiley, it is that we gave him/her too strong a motive: revenge. The reactions of everyone else to Smiley were likewise plagiarized and exaggerated.
I also took the liberty of throwing in a liberal dose of The X-Files, even though it is usually classified as science-fiction. There is a good deal of the stupidity in horror movies present in The X-Files, largely the incredible irrationality and mysticism concentrated in the character of Fox Mulder. This was funneled directly into the character of Brian Danielson, who bungles along on the assumption than everything which happens is due to some supernatural/paranormal serial killer, not quitting even at the end, when he gives a speech which betrays absolutely no understanding of the nature of evil whatsoever.

On a positive note, I am pleased to announce that a cinematic remake of an old TV show has finally been done that's actually good: Charlie's Angels. (Barry saw it first, and his review was so glowing that I just had to see it for myself, it was so unexpected. When I went to the movie theater, I actually told the ticket seller, "I can't believe I'm doing this, but one for Charlie's Angels, please.) Instead of merely trying to "modernize" the old show, those who made the film deliberately parodied bad but high-profile movies. Given a contrived alleged crime (which makes no sense) and contrived obstacles (which would be counterproductive in real life) to overcome, the characters meander from one contrived situation to another. Rather than do anything simply and intelligently, all the characters--from the Angels to the bad guys to the comic relief--do everything (with the possible exception of tying their shoe laces) with as much flare, violence, showing off of skin, and hi-tech equipment as they can find excuses to use, all the while maintaining absurd levels of secrecy and incongruously socializing with members of the opposite sex. Because this film does not take itself seriously (as The Matrix and Mission: Impossible, which this film heavily borrows from, try to do) the overall effect is hilarious rather than pathetic. This is exactly the sort of thing Barry and I had in mind for Daria 3: Fashion Never Dies. Avoiding overlap is going to be a serious problem.

I would like to thank Rey Fox for letting us use the title "The Curse of the Misery Chick", Kara Wild and Ben Breeck for their beta-reading, Ben Breeck for his review, and Kara Wild, Michelle Klein-Häss, and the latter's husband for giving permission to use a picture of them.  I give my sincere apologies to fanfic authors for not borrowing much from them this time around, with the obvious exception of getting Daria and Jane together.
 

Confession of the other author:

All laugh.
 

NAME: BARRY ESHKOL ADELMAN (AKA BIFF COOLDUDE)

FAVORITE SCARY MOVIE: CUBE

HONORABLE MENTION: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, PARENTS, SLEEPY HOLLOW

HILARIOUS MENTION: ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES, ARMY OF DARKNESS, IDLE HANDS, RE-ANIMATOR, THE STUFF, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, IT'S ALIVE

DISHONORABLE MENTION: EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE, EVENT HORIZON, HELLRAISER, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, PET SEMATARY, PHANTASM, VOODOO ACADEMY
 

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
 

When I first heard about Scary Movie, I wondered if we had been beaten to the punch in parodying horror films. We had, of course, chosen the horror genre as the subject for Daria 2 for the important reason that it was a genre specifically worthy for such treatment on account of it being grossly cliched, predictable, and chronically ridiculous. (Jennifer Love Hewitt, of course, got a big career push from her appearance in I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which her breasts had a starring roll.) Was all our effort to be in vain? For better or worse (and I often think it is for worse), Scary Movie was not as good a parody as it should have been. While it had many good moments (I especially liked the teens wondering out loud why there was no evidence left behind from a killing while the killer is in plain view mopping up the blood and dragging the body away), much of the humor was only tangentially related to the problems of horror films. It was very often funny, but as a spoof of the horror genre it did poorly.

As mentioned before, the horror genre as a whole is grossly cliched, predictable, and ridiculous. The situation is so bad that general "rules" can be drawn up and attentive viewers can usually pick out who will be alive at the end of the film with unusually good accuracy. While watching films in preparation for this work, Aaron and I had such an easy time at predicting who would live or die that it was disturbing. Over the past year, while actually trying to write some scripts that I hope will be made into actual films (as of this writing, we have a script for a horror/comedy film finished, copyrighted, and registered; hopefully in the near future the code-name Project Overlord will overshadow the code-name ID4 if we can ever get an agent), I've read a few books on script-writing and gained some insight on how this may have arisen. A common approach towards screen-writing is essentially an intuitive one. One develops characters and dialogue by letting them come to you, writing down bits that pop into one's head, doing the free-association writing thing, thus allowing things to reveal themselves. Analysis (as in explicitly reasoning about one is doing) and being critical are seen as bad things. In all fairness, I would like to point out that different authors advocate different approaches, and some do advocate the use of both critical and analytical approaches to a certain extent. But if an intuitive approach is really the prominent method without the analytical and critical elements, this is a recipe for disaster. Script-writers, understandably, often seem to watch plenty of movies. Like any other events people experience, people learn from watching films, and when they experience certain things under similar conditions, they come to expect or anticipate them. From this the reasoning should be clear: Used by itself, one would expect an intuitive-only approach to script-writing to be prone to produce regurgitations of previously done material. In "dramas" (the catch-all category for anything that doesn't fit any other genre) and certain kinds of comedies one at least can draw from real-life experiences as well as movies one has seen as a basis for intuition as the kinds of relevant events are similar. (Most of us do go to work, have friendships, fight with authority figures and spouses, and do other types of "drama"-relevant events.) The same cannot be said for horror. Fortunately for the writers and unfortunately for the movie-going public, most writers do not have the kinds of terrifying experiences seen in horror films. I haven't read much about the lives of horror filmmakers, but I seriously doubt many screenwriters have been chased by armed psychopaths wearing rubber masks, let alone demons, ghosts, or replications of people grown from alien seed pods. Is it any wonder that horror writers, who may have only learned the intuitive approach, are, perhaps unwittingly, are simply recycling the only source of horrific experiences they have? (I suspect this is part of the appeal of The Blair Witch Project, because the experiences in much of the film are ones many people can relate to.)

This round's guests of dishonor, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson, are no exception to this. They were chosen for this time around for creating one of the more influential horror movies of recent years, Scream. Now, to be honest, Scream is one of my favorite horror films (enough so that, should I be able to break into filmmaking, I would like to make Scream 4). But while I did enjoy it, that doesn't mean I didn't find problems with it nor with Craven and Williamson. Now, I definitely do not put these people in the same class as the Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman. (It is truly hard to find someone who is that bad who has made such a public disgrace of oneself.) Wes Craven especially has made some films which are genuinely scary or at least fall into the "good-bad" category. The resulting film they made together is often funny, creepy, and highly watchable, and the Ghost Face costume, as far as I can tell, seems to be one of the scariest horror-film outfits ever. The life-imitating-art premise and self-referential humor has seeped into other horror films (Urban Legend, Williamson's Own The Faculty, Bride of Chucky, etc.), and, I suspect, other genres (I strongly suspect the excellent Galaxy Quest, called by someone the best Star Trek film ever made, and Unbreakable). At the same time, though, I have to admit the film's serious limitations. The dialogue is often improbable (cf. Dawson's Creek), the crimes involved are unlikely, and the film tends to fall back into the cliches rather than break out of them. Given the quality of Williamson's other writings (Teaching Mrs. Tingle, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, Dawson's Creek), I strongly suspect he kludged together the plots of Halloween and Basic Instinct and used it as an excuse for the characters to talk about all the horror movies he had seen. As one of Williamson's teens might say, the final product may have been more fortuitous than premeditated. (The kind of premise found in Scream can be traced back at least as far as Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote, one can wonder if this had any influence. Williamson has obviously some background in classic literature as evidenced by Scream 2.) The kind of premise in Scream is a good one, and it is unfortunate that the movie and its two sequels have not fully exploited its possibilities.

Although other references snuck their way in (including a bizarre confluence of American Pie, The Neverending Story, Truth or Dare, and I Spit on Your Grave), we managed to largely keep this work focused on lampooning horror movies much more clearly, I feel, than did Scary Movie. For this "movie" we tried to be more systematic in our efforts, and towards this end we rented a lot of horror films, looking for trends and other absurdities to lampoon. The task was a bit harder than expected since a large number of films may fall in or out of the category depending on the whims of the individual video rental place or retailer. Some items also end up in science fiction (anything with aliens, monsters, or robots) while others end up in thrillers to varying degrees (The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Jaws, and even I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream). Some items I am still not entirely clear why they fall into one category or the other. Basic Instinct, although usually classified as a thriller, is at least horror-like, enough so that I think Williamson was influenced by it while writing Scream (it has the unidentified slasher on the loose, the elaborate setup that would take a lot of planning, people trying to solve the mystery, homicidal psychopaths, real-life crimes mirroring fictional ones, and at one point the killer wearing a costume during an attack, as well as comedic elements peppered throughout the entire thing). At other times, certain films are counted as "horror" even though they are really violent comedies and not the least bit scary. These often tend to be the later installments in a series (Bride of Chucky, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday) or attempts to find the most preposterous bad guy possible (Jack Frost, where the killer is a snow man, The Stuff, where the killer is a desert product, Idle Hands, where the killer is the hand of a couch potato, the entire Leprechaun series, where the killer is Warwick Davis in peppermint stockings, the self-explanatory Killer Condom, etc.). And then there are films which can be extremely creepy or even terrifying even though they are not classified as horror at all, such as eXistenZ or the more recent Requiem for a Dream. I hope all the people at movie-rental places we patronized are as appreciative of our efforts as are those reading this. Anyone who can pick out where all the references in this thing came from, we'll send you a lollipop or something.

The one thing that was really unclear when writing this was exactly how faithful Williamson would be to the original movie in the series. Would he stay faithful to what had come before, or would he go off in his own direction? (Cf. Batman under Tim Burton versus Batman under Schumacher and Goldsman.) Certainly going from original written work to script, faithfulness was not a priority (cf. I Know What You Did Last Summer and the novel by Lois Duncan it was based on), but the movie situation was not as clear. The only clue was Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, which was allegedly ghostwritten by Williamson according to some sources, a film which certainly looks like other writing he's done. The film does seem more-or-less faithful to other films in the series, though no references are made to other films after Halloween II and Laurie Strode seems unaware of any of Michael Myers's adventures since his (apparent, not actual) death in that film. A reasonable guess seemed that he would be largely faithful to the first film. Based on his teen drama Dawson's Creek, we also explored some of the relationships a bit and extended the relevant themes (mostly threw in some corny drama and got Daria and Jane in bed together) as well as put in some babbling where dialogue should be.

A year has passed, and though we have seen some good films come out in that time, many bad ones have come out as well. Joel Schumacher has continued to make films, including 8 mm (about the investigation of whether a snuff film is real) and a comedy about a transvestite. (Do we see a trend in his work?) At least some people have gotten the points we have been trying to make. I would especially like to laud some praise on X-Men, which gave the bad guys some real motivation which wasn't totally stupid, did not go overboard with the costumes, and even had some hints towards character development. We hope this will be a trend. Sadly, this is not always the case, and if the rumors about the upcoming Spiderman movie are true, that one will totally suck. The evil is still out there. We must still be ever vigilant against the threat of crappy cinema, for that remains the price of having the good ones made.