Forget 'Scary Movie,' This Is the Best Horror Film Parody and You Can Watch It for Free

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In 2000, during the prime of the slasher boom from the Scream trilogy, the Wayans brothers made Scary Movie, which is often regarded as the best horror parody of all time. It led to a franchise, with each new entry poking fun at whatever was popular in the genre at the time. However, despite how popular they all were, they all pale in comparison to a little film from 1981 called Student Bodies. This horror parody lovingly mocks slashers, and it's surprising just how effectively it has all the tropes nailed down for a subgenre that was just starting to explode. 1981 gave us Halloween II, Friday the 13th Part 2, The Burning, and The Prowler among many others, and Student Bodies had them all figured out immediately. A cast of no names produced a parody that all horror fans need to see.

'Student Bodies' Captures the Feel of an '80s Slasher

Don't feel bad if you're a horror fan and you've never seen Student Bodies. Even in 1981, it didn't make much of a splash, earning only $5 million at the box office despite the backing of Paramount Pictures. It's a shame, as it truly was admittedly and proudly trying to cash in on the slasher fad that was taking over the decade. The opening crawl for the trailer spells it out, saying, "This motion picture is based on an actual incident. Last year 26 horror films were released... None of them lost money."

The first scene is a complete rip-off and it knows it, as we open on the POV of a killer watching a dark house at night. On-screen, we're told that it's "Halloween," which then changes to "Friday the 13th," before settling on "Jamie Lee Curtis' birthday." 30 seconds in and we've already had send-ups of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the amount of horror movies Curtis was making. We then go into the house, where a young woman is all alone. After hearing a noise, she looks outside, then forgets to lock the door. That's such a trope of horror movies that the film even points at the lock with an arrow and "Unlocked" superimposed on the screen. This silliness is the setup for everything that's to come.

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Our killer is called "The Breather," a reference to how killers like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and others always breathe so hard, but this guy's breath is exaggerated to the point that it sounds like he's about to die from an asthma attack. He repeatedly prank calls his first victim and breathes heavily into the phone (even the score of the film plays through the receiver) like he's the madman in Black Christmas. This poor girl is a goner, as when she goes upstairs, our killer looks over a whole host of possible weapons laid out before him. Somehow, this house has a gun, knife, axe, rope, and rat poison all laid out, but among those deadly weapons is a box of paperclips. That's what The Breather goes with.

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Student Bodies is filled with a lot of silly gags that would make Leslie Nielsen proud. In the first half they work, but they start to pile on so much that the second half begins to lose steam. Still, we have a whodunit mystery as we try to find out who the killer is. Could it be the perverted janitor, Malvert (a comedian called The Stick), the wood shop teacher, Mr. Dumpkin (Joe Flood), who is obsessed with making horsehead bookends, or someone else?

'Student Bodies' Finds a Clever Way To Earn an R-Rating

The body count is shown on screen in 'Student Bodies'

One of the biggest tropes of early '80s slashers is that they all seemed to be filled with teenagers having sex, at least one full-frontal nude scene, and f-bombs galore. Student Bodies has none of this. The closest we get to any gore is that when a victim is killed, a body count number flashes on the screen, letting us know that this is all that matters in most slashers. Still, if you want to be a cool, successful horror movie, you have to be rated R, so halfway through, the film stops and cuts to a man behind a desk wearing a suit. It's acknowledged that since Student Bodies is lacking in objectionable content, the man says, "The producers have asked me to say, 'Fuck you.'" Boom, R rating achieved.

Although there is no actual sex or nudity, Student Bodies still has plenty of crude jokes (some pretty bad) and takes its time to examine the sexual repression of final girls, this time with the lead character of Toby Badger (Kristen Riter). Toby is sexually repressed but is looked at differently by everyone when she later dresses provocatively. Toby is so turned off by sex that it will also play into the finale. Student Bodies might be a silly horror parody, but it still has something to say.