Sharkandos, Zombie Tidal Waves, and Verisimilitude

Last week, my partner showed me the trailer for the next film from Ian Ziering and the guys who did all those Sharknado films, a little flick they’ve dubbed ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to take a look:

As fans of large chunks of the Sharknado franchise, we’re naturally excited about this film. It looks decidedly B-Grade and terrible, but at least 50% of the time this combination of actor and director have taken a terrible concept and made it into something far more interesting. They pushed the ambition of the film and played things straight, delivered above and beyond what was expected of them.

The other 50% of the time–I’m looking at you, Sharknado 4–they blew it by playing things for laugh.

I did a write up of what made a really good Sharknado films in my newsletter after we rewatched the series last year. It ran a little something like this:

I am known, among my friends, for complaining loudly about the fact that Sharknado 4 is the worst of the franchise because it finally gets silly. Peter, they tell me, it’s a series about shark-infested tornado, it’s already quite silly.
 
It is. That’s part of what people love about the series: it’s terribly silly, terribly goofy, and altogether unrealistic. It’s also why I point people towards Sharknado one through four in order to study how silly concepts can be made to work as a narrative (and, weirdly, become a cultural phenomenon).
 
The key thing to look for, in the first few instalments of the franchise, are the way they handle internal consistence and establish the rules of the milieu. Once you accept that sharkando’s are possible, everything in the films make sense: people are killed by flying sharks and they are grieved; sharkando’s get worse in silly ways, but they are treated as threats with dire consequences; madcap, absurd solutions are offered, but they are merely a natural escalation of things that have worked before. More importantly, those solutions make  sense in the broader genre of the monster movie and natural disaster movies, playing with tropes we already know and love.
 
This means, as a reviewer, you can suspend your disbelief while acknowledging the absurdity. Things are silly, but because the characters in the film respond to sharknado’s like they’re a serious thing, there is an internal chain of cause and effect that makes sense and escalates the sense of threat.
 
Sharknado 4 is the part of the franchise where they lose that, leaning harder on pastiche. Characters die, but they are not grieved and thus their deaths hold no emotional weight. The internal consistency of the film is broken in order to make way for parodies of other films, which means the characters are increasingly aware of the fact they’re in a fictional construct, even if they don’t acknowledge it as such.
 
The character’s no longer feel the threat because they are fictional constructs, which means the threat is no longer means something.

You can get away with incredibly silly concepts, so long as they’re taken seriously by the characters. It’s largely how I write fiction about killer mimes that float about on balloons, or cities laid waste by kaiju only half the world can see. The line between slapstick, absurd, and horror is largely one of internal integrity and the way character’s respond to what’s happening in the narrative.

Notes from the Brain Jar, 13 July 2018

I think about this kind of thing a lot because starting a goofy-but-serious horror franchise is on my bucket list of things to do with Brain Jar Press. It’s one of those projects that’s a long way out of my comfort zone as a writer, but the idea of taking an absolutely moronic idea and playing it as straight as I can appeals to me on all kinds of levels.

Of course, figuring out the kind of goofball combinations that result in title like Sharknado or Zombie Tidal Wave is an art all of its own.