Okay, I admit… I’m a fan of horror fiction and movies. I enjoy the genre, and I know it pretty well (to the point where I overhead a brief conversation between two co-workers and could tell, based on one single sentence, which movie they were talking about and which version). And when I worked at the video store, I took the opportunity to catch up on a lot of classic horror movies that I’d never had a chance to see before.

I’ve read a lot of horror novels, too. I like Stephen King a lot, as well as Clive Barker (Dean Koontz and Bentley Little are okay, but I will rarely bother finishing one of their books if I can’t do so in one sitting). I have a very active imagination, and I can envision what I read very well. My imagination has always been like that; in fact, my parents would not let me read a single Stephen King novel until I was 18 because they were afraid that I would scare myself too badly. I admit, though, that I cheated a sneaked a copy of The Dead Zone when I was 16 years old — and it had pretty much the effect my parents had predicted.

So last night a friend of mine and his wife went out to the movies. She took herself to see Pokemon 2000 while my friend and I went and saw Scary Movie.

God help me, I thought it was funny.

Granted, I had to turn off my good taste in order to enjoy it at all, but once I did, I found myself enjoying it and even laughing at the sickest jokes, in the same sort of way that I like watching South Park from time to time.

Scary Movie is unbelievably offensive in many ways. Some of the jokes are blatantly racist, some are outright homophobic, and some are unbelievably degrading to women. It’s not what I really had hoped for in a good parody of the horror genre (Young Frankenstein is probably the best for that sort of thing), though I thought it poked some good fun at the Scream trilogy and the I Know What You Did Last Summery films. And it had no plot, no honest character development, and no real point — but, then, neither did many of the other films that it parodied, including The Blair Witch Project.

Of course, it made jabs at a number of films that were well-done and well-made; the end, for example, spoofed both Dark City (well, I thought that was a good film, at least) and The Usual Suspects. And because The Sixth Sense is part of the recent revival of the horror genre, Scary Movie poked fun at that one, as well. Unfortunately, while many of the spoofs and jabs were pretty funny, the jabs at some of the others were just kind of dumb.

All in all, yes, I enjoyed Scary Movie. I’ll probably never see it again, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends (and I wouldn’t rate it more than a 1 on any scale), but, yes, I laughed. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my good taste just fell away completely, or if I’m just a lot sicker than I thought I was. I found myself asking myself these questions all throughout the movie, and thinking things like, "Oh my God, how can I ever respect myself now? How will anyone else respect me? That woman’s being beheaded, and here I am laughing about it!"

In the end, though, I gave up on trying to justify myself and decided to simply enjoy the film.

After the film was over, the three of us went to the International House of Pancakes for a late dinner and a game of Fluxx. I was still thinking about the movie when I got home, and felt an overwhelming need to take a long hot shower. I did so, and then I popped in The Sixth Sense just to reassure myself that yes, I could still enjoy a quality horror film. Seeing Scary Movie was cathartic, in a way; but still, seeing a film of good quality was sort of a cleansing experience.