A Haunted House (2013) and the Difficulty of Parodying Found Footage

Twice this year I’ve chosen a movie for the Sunday “Bad” Movie that was a spoof of Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, as well as other movies.  The first movie that fit the description was 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It was a movie that I didn’t like.  Would the second spoof of these movies fare any better?  Not really.

The second movie to attempt taking comedy from Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside that I watched was A Haunted House.  Just like the first movie I watched spoofing the same films, A Haunted House fails to find a way to truly bring out the comedy in the subject matter.

Something that Marlon Wayans, star of A Haunted House, said about the movie was that it was going to be what black people would do if put in the same situations that white people are put into in all of the found footage movies.  I can sort of see what he meant by that.  The problem is that most of it still ended up being the exact same.  The only two differences were that the characters said “I ain’t doing what those white people do in those movies” and then did it anyway, and Marlon Wayans screaming really, really loudly.  It wasn’t as groundbreaking as Wayans made it out to be.

In all truth, it’s hard to be groundbreaking when you are making a parody movie.  The idea of a parody keeps you confined to a specific story.  It takes a great filmmaker to raise the material above that and make a parody more than an attempted comedic take on a certain movie.  A parody cannot simply survive on aping memorable moments from popular films.  It needs to bring something more to the table.  There needs to be a solid story, and the characters need to be more than just tools to move the very loose plot forward.

There have been too many times that I’ve gone into a spoof and been very unsatisfied with what I’ve seen.  The filmmakers have simply decided that their method of jokes is to throw any piece of pop culture at the viewer and hope that the viewer laughs out of recognition.  This does not make for an entertaining and satisfying experience while watching a movie.  There needs to be a better narrative in order to keep the viewer invested in what is happening on screen.

That is the one thing that makes A Haunted House better than a movie like 30 Nights.  The people crafting the movie kept the story simple and didn’t fill it with references to a million other things that people know about.  The movie was stronger for it.  The jokes were still terribly unfunny, don’t get me wrong.  That being the case, I can still respect this movie a little bit more for actually trying to be more than just a machine of references.

A Haunted House simply has the problem of riffing off of tough material.  The nature of found footage tends to make things feel a little more real than a typical movie.  Between that and the camera work, it becomes infinitely more difficult to pull the humor from the material.  Like I said before, the right filmmaker could find a way to mine humor out of the subject matter, but it would need to be a perfect storm.  These recent attempts at parodying found footage flicks have not yet found the right angle to come from and have instead left a bad taste in the mouths of the viewers.

I know this whole post has seems like a lot of rambling that didn’t quite flow together to make a great essay or anything, but I hope it has gotten some people to think about ways to find humor in found footage.  I would like to see a parody of this whole sub-genre of film that makes me laugh.  Someone out there should be able to do it.  It’s only a matter of time.

There are a few notes that I would like to make right now:

• Here is the 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo post.  It features Damien Bray, who was also in A Haunted House.
• Here is a post I wrote for The Devil Inside, a movie parodied in A Haunted House.
• Nick Swardson was nominated for a Razzie for his work in A Haunted House.
• If you have any suggestions about what I should watch, leave a comment, or tell me on Twitter.  I’ve got a list of suggested movies ready to be watched.