American horror films of the 1980s gleefully slashed every which way through the decade, exhaustively exploring the story formula made successful in 1978 by John Carpenter’s Halloween. Whether you are a horror fan or not, you are likely familiar with the basic slasher plot: a terrible backstory is revealed to a group of young people in one way or another. This provides to the audience the obligatory foreshadowing so they can make sense of the violence that follows. The young people are then picked off one by one, brutally murdered by the killer who has returned to exact vengeance for past wrong. Typically, one female person survives and defeats the monster, but not without twist or hint of a potential sequel. The ‘80s saw cinematic spree murderers at summer camps, schools, sleepover parties, vacation getaways, trains, and at the celebration of every holiday that comes to mind. Even dreams weren’t safe. These killers claimed their victims with every weapon imaginable, from traditional knives or hatchets to impractical power drills. The creativity in these films (and what might set one apart from the other) lies mostly in the manner in which the death scenes play out; and are primarily limited by the framework in which the formula is set. With the assistance of make-up and imaginative practical effects, the sky was the limit. But by the end of the decade, horror film makers had hacked the new sub-genre to overly familiar bloody ribbons, and its rigor mortis was beginning to set in.

But something else significant was happening with horror in the 1980s. Theater audiences were just as likely to laugh as they were to scream, as an explosion of horror comedies overtook the genre. There had been an overlap of horror and comedy for a long time, but early on, they were mostly vehicles for popular comedians, like Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein or Scared Stiff with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. These movies feel like they are essentially comedies with a spooky filter. In the ‘80s, however, something changed. No one went to see Evil Dead 2 and told their friends they were going to catch a comedy. With the familiar formula of the slasher getting pretty much wrung dry amidst the ever-growing popularity of horror comedy, it proved to be the perfect platform for comedy to do what comedy loves best: make fun of itself. The dawn of the ‘90s ushered in the meta horror narrative, coming to beautiful fruition in 1996 with Wes Craven’s Scream. But it wasn’t without precedent that Neve Campbell got to reference horror cliches and then later, within the same movie, play out those very cliches in a fight for her own life. Before Scream, in 1991, disguised as a run-of-the-mill cash grabbing slasher, a mostly forgotten horror comedy was released: Popcorn.

The premise unfolds like this: A fledgling college film department, in an attempt to generate interest from the student body, votes to organize an all-night horror movie marathon in an abandoned theater. The heroine has been plagued with nightmares and when the group discovers an old snuff film that took place in that very theater, she feels a tie between the content of that film and her bad dreams. The director of the mysterious film was said to have died in a fire while trapped in the theater, but his body was never found… Unbeknownst to our fun-loving film gang, an ominous stranger has infiltrated their movie marathon with murder in mind.

On the surface, Popcorn is what the average filmgoer would come to expect from a slasher. The gimmick of having a movie killer on the prowl in a movie theater while an audience is watching a movie is cute. It might remind the real-life viewer that they are in an audience watching a movie with a killer stalking people in an audience watching a movie. But that is not what makes Popcorn so much fun. It’s the movies within the movie that steal the show.

Popcorn is credited with two directors. One that directed the frame plot, and one that directed the marathon movies that were made originally for this film. Each one is a stand-alone spoof of a different type of classic horror movie. There is the giant creature feature of the 1950s represented in “Mosquito!” the tragic experiment gone wrong with moody black and white cinematography in “The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man,” the Japanese horror of the 1960s in “The Stench,” and of course, the experimental snuff film “Possessor” that harbingers the spree killings to come. In the larger plot, each of these effectively captures the mood of the films to which they are paying homage, but not without a tongue firmly set in cheek. The viewer senses something familiar in the obviously new while it playfully and lovingly pokes fun at itself.

The tribute to the beloved B-flick of yore does not end with screening the film parodies themselves, but extends to the curated presentation of the movies in the abandoned theater. The film students arrange for experiential stunts to take place during each movie, an obvious nod to the director William Castle, the king of the theatrical gimmick. For the original run of one of his films, House on Haunted Hill starring Vincent Price, he rigged a giant skeleton with flashing red eyes to fly out over the audience during the climax of the movie. In another, The Tingler, he outfitted different seats in the theater to receive a slight shock when the monster of the movie escaped into the theater when the screen goes dark. Both examples are directly referenced in Popcorn.

Popcorn, as a whole, is a little bit of a mess, as can be expected from any film that changed its director half-way through production, but it stands as a valiant effort to do something new and creative with a formula as worn out as the slasher had become by that time. It attempts to join a conversation with the history of horror while playing out a baby meta narrative 5 years before Scream. Popcorn is heating up, awaiting its rediscovery, to burst from the casing of its contemporary critique, and to be tasted once again, this time with the buttery retrospective flavor craved by the hungry, camp-loving, modern audience.

The Many Flavors of 1991’s Popcorn