Scare Package Review (Film, 2020)

content warning: gore, violence against women, racism (microaggressions, like calling an Asian character “Pikachu” or questioning if his name is really his name)

Anthology horror is making a bit of a surprise comeback. I have to imagine it deals with the rise of digital distribution, the same way the big wave in the 1960s/70s was connected to double features, drive-ins, and grindhouses. It’s not that they’re an easy style of film to make. They’re easy to match up. When you tell multiple short horror stories connected by a theme or framing device, you’ll have enough variation in subject, tone, and style to give most horror fans something they’ll enjoy.

Scare Package is a bit of a different beast. The stories are connected by the idea of film itself. The cold open sets up the film as a meta horror, with a man dissatisfied with his career as a cold opener character in a horror film. His job is to flip the street sign or plant the cursed object in the remote mansion. Eventually, we wind up in a video rental store where a new employee is being trained on everything he needs to know about the rental business. These lessons are taught through terrible b-movie parodies that...really aren’t that far off from the real thing.

Scare Package is gory and campy in equal measure. The blood flows fast and freely in that over the top Troma style. There’s nothing realistic about the gore, but it is well done and convincing for this style of horror.

Horror/comedy is one of the hardest genres to get right. Scare Package features eight different short films. It opens with “Cold Open” to set the silly, self-referential tone, then transitions into “Rad Chad’s Horror Emporiums” as the framing device. The other six shorts are parodies of specific styles of horror. The consistent element is just being ridiculous. If a character transforms into a monster, it’s an amalgamation of every monster transformation cliché imaginable. If a character is misogynistic, it’s a greatest hits of the worst ideas from anonymous Internet echo chambers. Nothing is done halfway and no choices are accidental.

Scare Package features a lot of big swings that aren’t going to hit the same for everyone. That’s not a bad thing. I’d rather see an anthology horror film with a consistent tonal identity than one that tries too hard to please everyone. Here’s another way to think about it. Which sounds like a more cohesive concept: a compilation of Twilight Zone episodes? Or one episode each of Twilight Zone, one Freddy’s Nightmares, one X-Files, and one Doctor Who connected by an episode of Goosebumps? Scare Package is a compilation of ultra-gory American Dad Halloween specials produced for Adult Swim as one-off marketing specials.

The greatest strength of Scare Package is a clear knowledge of where the horror genre has been. There are nods to the greatest hits of horror, including Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and It, but also sight gags and transitions calling out things like “Post Modern Feminist Slasher Revenge Body Horror.” That’s not really a thing (in my dreams, maybe), but it is a quick and easy segue to create context for a short in one my favorite styles of contemporary horror. The transitions into the stories aren’t always that clear, but the stories themselves hit on everything from creature features to possession.

Scare Package is the Scary Movie-style, over the top parody for horror fans who’ve seen everything. The jokes are broad, the characters cartoonish sketches of horror archetypes, and the different shorts just the most ridiculous, insular concepts you could imagine. It’s not a particularly scary horror film, but not all horror films are meant to be super scary.

Actually, scratch that. I imagine this film could be quite scary for someone who hasn’t seen all these references before. It is weird fiction built on the memories of those strange films you used to come across in the video rental store. I know they transitioned to being available on the second or third page of recommendations on Netflix or Hulu, but there’s an element of the experience missing when hunting this kind of film down online.

You used to have to judge a film by its cover, first getting drawn by the cover art, then checking the paragraph of text on the back to determine if you were really interested or not. If you were lucky, you might catch a short trailer or clip on a 12 to 16 inch screen hanging on a slight angle from the ceiling throughout the store. If you were really lucky (like me), you had a nice indie store where the owners were experts in the kind of film you wanted to see. And yes, my friendly local video store was run by a wonderful Goth couple who taught elementary school aged me the ABCs of straight to video horror.

Scare Package captures that kind of feeling of uncertainty and excitement. The shorts in Scare Package are very well produced and clearly made by fans of the genre. They hit the beats right with a clear enough understanding of why the scenes work. The result is weird, arguably absurd texts designed specifically for a horror fan. It might not be as easy film to access for a wide audience, but it worked for me.

Scare Package is currently streaming on Shudder.

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