With ‘Fackham Hall’ on HBO Max and a new ‘Scary Movie’ coming to theaters, has a new age of spoofs begun?

This week, the trailer for Scary Movie 6 – revealed to be titled, in perfect 2020s-reboot fashion, just plain old Scary Movie – threatened to overshadow a blockbuster debut for Scream 7, surprising audiences by debuting in theaters in front of the slasher sequel before turning up online a few days later. The movie comes out in June, which means within the space of a year we’ll have seen a new Naked Gun, a new Scary Movie, plus the English period-piece spoof Fackham Hall, which is arriving on HBO Max following a brief theatrical run last year. So are spoof movies – comedies whose primary goal is to parody other movie, usually by amalgamating genre clichés or sometimes highly specific plots, and often filled out with sight gags, non sequiturs, and cartoony slapstick you might have once seen in MAD Magazine – well and truly back?

Ironically, the genre’s previous peak also coincided with its creative nadir. After the blockbuster success of the Scary Movie series in the early 2000s, there was a glut of movies in its wake, unseen since the post-Hot Shots! wave of the early-to-mid 1990s. It should have been a golden era for spoofs; if only anyone had figured out how to make them! Though the team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker had more or less mastered the art back in 1980 with Airplane!, their movies apart became increasingly dopey – dumb-dumb rather than smart-dumb – and the post-Scary Movie crop (including the middling but amusing Scary Movie 3, from one of the Zucker brothers directly) was significantly worse. In short order, the genre became dominated by the names that bring a chill to the spines of comedy snobs: Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the fabled “two of the six writers of Scary Movie,” as multiple movie posters pointed out.

Friedberg and Seltzer didn’t actually work with the Wayans Brothers to develop Scary Movie; they had a separate project called Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween – so, essentially nicking the Wayans’ titling process for the earlier “urban movie” spoof Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. The projects were ultimately mashed together, though it’s unclear if much was actually used from the Friedberg/Seltzer script, given that the Wayans and their collaborators actually made the movie in question.

Regardless, that film’s success was enough to get Friedberg and Seltzer their own cottage industry, which begat the increasingly dire likes of Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and so forth. These proto-YouTube repositories for bad comedy sketches, barely linked together by green screen and elementary-school-level running gags, do share some DNA with Scary Movie, in that the latter’s blockbuster success established more of a pure revue style of spoof, where characters largely inexplicably bounce from recreated scene to recreated scene, treating random bits and pieces of recent horror movies as equally iconic. Airplane! borrows the plot of an old B-movie called Zero Hour, and takes various subplots from various Airport movies (along with left-field nods to movies like Saturday Night Fever). Hot Shots! goes so far as to essentially remake Top Gun with jokes. But Scary Movie and the Friedberg-Seltzer offshoots don’t always seem to understand spoof beyond the idea that it involves recognition. Quoting scenes from Scream and then having someone get hit in the face, or “doing” the scene from Meet the Parents where a cat uses a toilet only more absurd isn’t even really spoofing. It’s just ripping off those movies, and making a goony face while you’re doing it.

That’s where Fackham Hall shines, or, depending on your point of view, clears a low bar: It seems to genuinely understand the difference between YouTube-level pastiche and actual parody. It helps that the movie has a highly specific target. Rather than just “horror movies,” which will put the new Scary Movie in the weird position of attempting to spoof the already-self-aware slasher comedy of Scream sequels alongside the more serious-minded likes of The Babadook alongside the more ambitious and genre-mixing Sinners or Weapons, etc., Fackham uses the framework of Downton Abbey and its own influence Gosford Park to spoof British period dramas. A narrower target than “whatever horror movies,” but an excellent choice, because while those movies may have some prim comic relief, they require a certain baseline of seriousness, which director Jim O’Hanlon and his five-man screenwriting team can then puncture.

Fackham has some spoof-movie-style sidebars that the new Naked Gun is disciplined enough to avoid: For a time it becomes a murder mystery so it can zing the Kenneth Branagh-directed Poirot movies, for example. (The 2025 Naked Gun, meanwhile, takes those opportunities to develop its own absurdities; hence the tangent about a snowman that comes to life, not a spoof of Jack Frost so much as just Akiva Schaefer going Lonely Island-style nuts.) But it doesn’t randomly throw in some guys dressed as Mario and Luigi or something just because that movie was a big hit a couple of years ago. It sticks to goofing on Downton Abbey and its ilk, with a story legible enough to follow even if you haven’t memorized that series (or, in my case, seen more than fragments and trailers).  

Fair to point out, too, that I did not find Fackham Hall laugh-out-loud funny. It’s more amusing than hilarious; there’s nothing quite as inspired as the gravelly seriousness with which Liam Neeson and Danny Huston approach their Naked Gun roles. But the movie understands something that future spoofs would do well to learn: That it’s not worth chucking the whole movie into nonsenseland just to get a big, cheap laugh of recognition. That shamelessness is also what a lot of people love about the Scary Movie series, and spoofs in general; fans aren’t going to get nitpicky about the original sin of Scary Movie “spoofing” a slasher series that has plenty of its own self-referential genre parody going on. But as with a lot of comedy, it sure is helpful if the people making it can keep a straight face.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
Stream Fackham Hall on HBO Max