It starts out about as normally as can be. A frail kid that can quickly be identified as the main character is talking to a pretty girl. Then we get the first comedic line from her when she blatantly says her mom doesn’t care about her dad’s “douche” car. Then we get more typical background scenes when me meet the hot babysitter through a typical bullying scene of that main character, Cole. The next time we stray pretty far from the zone of horror into the zone of comedy is when Cole is up late texting the pretty girl, Melanie, about what Cole’s attractive babysitter might be doing after dark. Melanie says orgy, and Cole doesn't even know what that is to respond. But Melanie convinces him to go watch and find out, and Cole ends up seeing much more than he should. Downstairs is an innocent game of Spin the Bottle, that quickly turns into a gruesome human sacrifice. But all the freaks babysitter Bee brought into the house do is laugh about how unevenly the blood is coming out of two gashes, which really overrides the gory scene. Cole is still watching what he thought was going to be a sex adventure from the top of the stairs, and when everyone realizes that he has seen too much, the rest of the movie turns into a mad dash to get rid of him.
Throughout all the chase scenes, many of the actions are so exaggerated I become tempted to call them “visual hyperboles”. A ricocheting bullet hits one of the cult’s members, Allison, directly in her right breast and she just loudly complains about that until she sits down in a chair to bleed out. Cole shoots a large firework at another member, Sonya, blowing her up to get her away from him. One of the bullies from the beginning of the movie returns to egg Cole’s house, and though he is chasing Cole, yet another member named Max stops and gives him advice on standing up for himself. Nothing is even remotely scary anymore.
The movie is far from horror now, but all the elements are still there. If all the comedic relief scenes were removed, we could watch a movie about a scared young boy who put so much trust into his babysitter (and best friend it seems), only to be hunted down. And that is terrifying, to watch someone so innocent and youthful fight for the right to stay alive. But every single silly line of dialogue and overscted scene that flips the tone completely around is intentional. The idea of satanic ritual circles is already well overdone in the horror genre, but not so much the idea of a satanic ritual circle that is actually a horror comedy about a naive boy’s friendship with his babysitter. It was completely intentional for the tone shift of this movie to make it stand out.
Having seen this film, I think I would agree with you that it is a horror parody film, but I am wondering more specifically about how you came to this conclusion. You give a play by play summary of the film above, but you didn't go into much detail on the horror roots of the film. Why would this even be labeled horror in the first place? I think of other master films of the subgenre such as Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, but there are distinct tropes that they are working against (or intentionally distorting) that makes them comical. Could you go into more detail on what moments in this film do that (if they do?)
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