Scared Stiff (1987)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) The more I learn about movie history, the more I develop mental shorthands—and one of those is the feeling I get once I combine “decade+genre.” For instance, 1930s comedy is far more fun than 1970s drama, but not all combinations are equally significant. One of the most potent ones is 1980s horror — once you strip away the slashers from the corpus, that decade’s horror has a very definite flavour, and they quite literally don’t make them like that any more. Scared Stiff, in most ways, is an utterly ordinary product of a genre that was reborn during the first decade of mass-market home video: It uses a generic premise (a small family moves into a house possessed by the spirit of its evil previous owner) as an excuse to throw in as many weird, gross or cliché sequences it can fit. Little of it makes sense even before the film tries a cheap, “was she crazy after all?” twist — in-between the racist slave-owner ancestor, ancient artifacts, computer graphics escaping in the real, numerous gore effects and such, the film goes wonderfully crazy in its home stretch. The production values are low, but not so low as to avoid numerous special effects and zigzagging events. (There’s even a car crash, albeit not a very well edited one.)  Yes, the result is a mess and not always an enjoyable one — it takes a long time for all the stops to be pulled. But in a way very characteristic of 1980s horror, Scared Stiff can be fun to watch, not for its horrific potential but for writer-director Richard Friedman just having fun with his budget and seeing what he could pull off during the shoot. That’s not quite a recommendation, but you already know if that’s the kind of thing you like.