Even those who haven’t seen the film can picture the opening: Dr. Phil and Shaquille O’Neal chained to the floor of a dirty bathroom with a dusty old TV stuck into the wall between them. A mysterious voice begins to welcome them to their present situation. Moments later, the TV turns on to give a body to the voice. The speaker is Jigsaw, the well-known mastermind of the Saw film series. Looking at the film Scary Movie 4 on the level of its own creation, one can see that the film is a remediation of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The original version of the novel has been remediated by a variety of films in the past 100 years. Some films, such as the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, are quite obviously remediated versions of the original novel. Others, however, such as Scary Movie 4, are not so obvious or straightforward. This 2006 film is a parody that incorporates various aspects of plot from a variety of other films, including The Grudge, The Village, the Saw series, and War of the Worlds.
While not obviously or exactly a story about the creation of some sort of being, this film remediates an extremely important element of Frankenstein, the actual creation of the novel by Mary Shelley. Just as Shelley refers to her novel in her 1831 introduction as her “hideous progeny,” this film, and indeed the others in its series, may be seen as a detestable creation by some, not in the least by those whose works the film parodies. The creation of both of these works (namely the novel Frankenstein and the film Scary Movie 4) is extremely similar in that both works use and adapt pieces of outside works in order to supplement and further their stories, both share similar plot structural elements, and both have common threads in character development.
Shelley’s novel is distinctly recognized as being an example of intertextuality in writing. Intertextuality is the quality of having other texts incorporated either explicitly or implicitly into the text or plot of the piece in question. Some of the more famous instances of this in the novel may be Shelley’s use of her husband’s poem “Mutability” or the apparent connections between the novel and the story of Genesis. However, these well-known intertextual pieces cannot, and should not, take away from the importance of other less-well-known texts that Shelley incorporates or of similarly well-known texts that she incorporates to a lesser degree. The film Scary Movie 4 is not merely a parody of four films from popular culture. Rather, it takes the implications of these major contributing stories, as well as those from the thirteen other officially spoofed scenes and events, and mixes them together to form the full impact that the film has on the viewers.
In one scene, for example, the President is informed of an alien attack while listening to a children’s story being read in an elementary school. This is a spoof about how President Bush went to hear children reading about pet goats on September 11, 2001. This scene in particular is an interesting one in terms of intertextuality because the door through which it leads the reader goes not to one distinct place, but rather to all of the news broadcasts and papers that documented this event in history. This scene creates an undertone of frustration and sadness within the viewer at being reminded of the horrible events of that day, as well as of the other public memories of our previous President.
Various aspects of the plot structure are also similar throughout these two stories. Scary Movie 4 is a perfect example of how producers can take a well-known piece of written work – in this case, a novel – and translate purely the textual structure, without the plot, to create a similarly structured work in a different medium. For example, in a way similar to Shelley’s Frankenstein, both begin with a scene that, after its initial presence within the story, becomes unimportant for a large portion of the following plot. In Frankenstein, this is a series of letters from the initial narrator to his sister. These letters set the stage for the remainder of the novel to share the woeful tale of the mysterious stranger, no other than Victor Frankenstein himself. In Scary Movie 4, this scene is one of Dr. Phil and Shaq chained as Jigsaw’s prisoners in a bathroom that is reminiscent of the corresponding scene in the Saw series.
Throughout the film, character development causes different characters to fall into different roles from Frankenstein at different points in the plot. As a result, while this does not allow the story of Frankenstein to be seen linearly through the plot of the film, it does allow for aspects of the characters to be seen in a more open-minded, fluid perspective. For example, there is one scene near the end of the film where the character Jigsaw is portrayed as both Frankenstein and as the creation simultaneously. On one hand, Jigsaw is a creator and an inventor. His creations are evil and malicious. On the other hand, however, Jigsaw is also like the Creation in that, through the way he is portrayed, he draws out feelings of sympathy from the audience because of the life he has been forced to lead due to circumstances beyond his control.
Intertextuality is so much more than simply mimicking parts of stories. Rather, it allows a film to expose an audience to a wide range of emotions and memories, and it furthermore allows these emotions and memories to be present to different viewers at different times. Some viewers may not experience all possible emotions every time they view the film, just as not all readers will go through every intertextual door in Frankenstein every time that they read the novel. In this way, as well as in the other ways that they are similar, it is clear how the creators of Scary Movie 4 used Shelley’s novel as inspiration for this remediated version of her creation.
Works Cited
Scary Movie 4. Dir. David Zucker. Miramax Films, 2006. Film.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Print.
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