Scared (2002)
- Andrew Smith
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
"The only thing more terrifying than watching a scary movie... is making a one."
Plot
A group of young filmmakers start shooting their first independent slasher film but soon find out that life is imitating art a little too much when cast and crew start to turn up dead on set. Someone is taking their love of slasher films a little too far.
Review
Coming a couple of years after Scream 2 and Scream 3 had already done the ‘slasher film within a slasher film’ lark and done it fairly well, Scared is left picking up whatever pieces are left to try and assemble together some form of original teen horror…and fails badly. The alternate title, Cut Throat, seems to have been more of a suggestion to the audience than an exercise in renaming. Scared features a whole batch of ideas which have just been rehashed and rehashed and rehashed and rehashed….you get the idea. When one of the characters says that their film, Death Blade, “is the next Scream” then you know where all of the inspiration for this comes from. It even references I Know What You Did Last Summer just to be on the safe side and cover the big hitting 90s slasher bases. It’s satirising the satirised and that is an incredibly dangerous, precarious game to play when all they’re really doing is name-dropping the vastly superior films they’re ripping off. They’re essentially making a photocopy of a photocopy and they’re losing the resolution of the original in doing so. Satirising Scream only worked when it was done in full spoof mode like Scary Movie (and even then, that was debatable). When it’s meant to be a serious slasher like Scared, there’s no hope of this approach working at all. Simply acknowledging that Scream existed would magically imbue their own script with that same level of wit is not the way to write quality horror.
One of the first things you’ll notice about Scared is how polished it looks. The industry standard for this tier of filmmaking at the time in the Noughties was cheap digital video - Mini DV cameras were everywhere and working in Blockbuster at the time, you could see it in every low-budget horror release. But this team somehow shot the movie on 35-millimetre film, on a lot at Sony Studios, which is just an astronomically expensive decision. But this doesn't just happen by accident either and you must look at director Keith Walley's background to understand how this ever got green-lit. He wasn't just some kid with a camcorder – he had genuine industry clout from producing higher profile cult classic genre films such as Society in 1989 and Bride of Re-Animator in 1990 (there’s even a poster for the film hanging in the background of one scene). Walley understood the business, had connections, and clearly used that pedigree to charm investors into paying for premium production values. If you're trying to make a film on a tight budget, why insist on 35-millimetre film? I mean, if digital video is a fraction of the cost, why wouldn't you just shoot on cheap video and take all that saved money to hire better actors or build cooler practical effects? A gorgeous shot doesn't matter at all if the audience is fundamentally bored by what the camera's looking at and sadly, with Scared, that is the case.
The film-within-a-film plot is beginning to grind on me a little as it just gives writers an excuse to throw in a load of false scares or smarmy dialogue to prove that they’ve seen their fair share of horror films. You know what is going to happen: there’s going to be plenty of “is it the film we’re watching or is it the film they’re watching?” moments thrown around as red herrings. Someone dies – oh wait that’s just the character they’re playing in the film-within-a-film. Someone dies – oh wait now that’s actually them dead for real. Rinse and repeat. Having to second guess takes the fun out of the film and it becomes an exhausting loop. If you pull the rug out from under the audience too many times, they just stop walking on the floor altogether. You cannot care about the stakes if you are constantly having to decipher what layer of reality you are currently watching. Besides which, why do you want to emotionally invest in these characters that are so happy pretending to kill each other? There are a load of unsympathetic characters that we're meant to root for and cheer on when the killer is around. I get that this is an early 2000 slasher and the whole point is to have a bunch of deeply annoying, obnoxious characters that you secretly want to see get taken out by the killer. But even in the absolute trashiest, most formulaic slasher film, you need at least one sympathetic character or one genuinely compelling relationship for the audience to latch onto. Without that anchor, you are just watching meat puppets yell at each other - a cast of grating, completely unlikable characters screaming for ninety minutes. You won’t recognise anyone starring in this and you’ll instantly forget everyone starring in this too. Some acting isn’t too bad but on the most, it is like the first day at drama class. I’m not sure whether there were issues with the audio as everyone sounds flat and monotone, as if they had to re-record audio in the studio once shooting was finished and dub over afterwards.
The slash side of proceedings is pretty bog standard too. We get some routine half-lit stalk scenes which lack any sense of tension or suspense. Most of the kill scenes take place off-screen anyway so we’re robbed of any truly decent make-up effects or gory set pieces. At least the killer wears a decent scarecrow mask, just like the getup from ‘Death Blade’ - but at no point does anyone suspect that the killer might be linked to the film by virtue of his costume. I’d guess this is where the decision to shoot on 35-millimetre film really came back to bite Whalley in the ass as he’s clearly run out of budget to do anything worthwhile on camera. A film like Scared panders to a very small demographic of horror fans and when you start skimping and saving on the blood and depriving the audience of something they expect to see, then you’re really sell them short.
There is one scene where the script does at least show some cleverness and this is when the director, producer and writer are having their little talk early on about one of the scenes they’re filming. There's also a genuinely smart joke where one character tells another not to run away in a straight line, pointing out that killers wearing rubber masks have terrible peripheral vision. It fits the self-aware tone perfectly and shows that there was some spark of cleverness in the writing room at some point. But the script never manages to make this a regular thing and the rest of the dialogue is as inept as the delivery. Its kind of funny watching these no-named actors really going for gold in their performances when I’m sure all of about a dozen people have ever had the misfortune of watching Scared. Going from the number of external reviews and user comments on IMDB, I’m in the small minority of unfortunates. Just to add salt to the wound, the script tacks on a contrite but obligatory twist finale when the killer is revealed, despite invalidating a lot of other previous plot points in the process. The number of possible suspects that the killer could be gradually dwindles down throughout the film anyway. If you’re going to kill off most of the cast before the finale, why bother keeping everything so secret?
Final Verdict
There’s nothing in Scared that you won’t have seen done better in any of the Scream films. It’s just your usual dumb teen horror which thinks it’s a cut above the rest by being clever and using the film-within-a-film plot to no effect. Devoid of scares, decent kills or suspense and atmosphere, you really do wonder why some people bother to invest their own time into making something so ordinarily pointless. This looks like it was supposed to get a cinematic release but with the unfortunate timing of Valentine bombing in the cinema, it seemed that the post-Scream slasher boom was finished and this was relegated to the video stores. It’s unlikely that, despite Whalley’s industry connections, any major distributors would have wanted to touch this, especially if they sat down to watch it first!
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Scared Also Known As: Cut Throat Director(s): Keith Walley Writer(s): John Fitten Goldsmith III, Luciano Saber, Keith Walley Actor(s): Luciano Saber, Kate Norby, Cory Almeida, Raquel Baldwin, Paityn James, Doug Cole, J. Robin Miller, Brad Lockerman Duration: 90 mins |  |
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