Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.
We were riding out the last few weeks of summer 2005, and mid-September saw both the songs “Gold Digger” by Kanye West and “Don’t Cha” by The Pussycat Dolls flood the radio waves and become major musical staples. While the film Stay starred a pre-hyped Ryan Gosling and mid-hype Ewan McGregor, as well as the always excellent Naomi Watts, the week of the 16th also saw the release of a little slasher film that leaned heavily on the internet obsessed masses. That’s right, Cry Wolf (stylized as Cry_Wolf) quietly snuck in and cleaned up at the box office.
We all know the 2000s was a wild era that we’ll never be able to replicate and one of the most bonkers things that came out of it was the cross-promotional efforts put forward by numerous strangely interested parties. One of these gloriously bizarre concoctions was the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival. Yes, you read that right; Chrysler, as in the car company. Teamed up with Universal, the automobile manufacturer decided to give a first time filmmaker a million dollars towards their debut effort in a contest that saw thousands of entries. The task was quite simple, really: film a short that spotlighted a PT Cruiser.
I’m not even making this up. The car that is the punchline of decades worth of ridicule was the main participant of these shorts that young visionaries were creating, all in the hope of even having a shot at being able to fund a feature length film. USC graduates Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman, the director and screenwriter respectively, pieced together the short The Tower of Babble, which was just the first leg of a long race to get Cry Wolf made. The Tower of Babble got them accepted into the festival which in turn then challenged them to compete against the nine other semi-finalists in an “extreme filmmaking” contest. During this round, creatives had to cast, shoot, edit and premiere a film in 10 days that would debut at Cannes. Total. Insanity.
Jeff Wadlow’s second short, Manual Labor, landed him a spot as one of the five finalists that then participated in a summer long boot camp with mentors. Grouped up with Charlie Lyons and Suzann Ellis of Bring It On fame, Wadlow and Bauman were originally going to adapt a play. When the playwright dropped the rights in the eleventh hour, Wadlow came up with the idea of a ‘professional liars club’ and the duo quickly cobbled together the necessary early pitch for the slasher inspired horror. The team wrote the entire script in two weeks, as well as filming a five minute treatment as part of the pitch, with Topher Grace and Estella Warren starring. Pitched as a send up of The Boy Who Cried Wolf with Craven teen scream sensibilities, Wadlow and Bauman eventually won the contest after presenting the pitch at the Toronto Film Festival.
The film itself is about a group of teenagers, mostly rich and bored, who spend their spare time playing a lying game of deduction and coercion (we would largely relate it to the now popular Werewolf or Mafia games). Owen is a transfer student with a problematic past who gets swept into the game while pursuing Dodger, a queen bee of sorts. When Owen and Dodger decide to take the game to the next level, creating a new game based around a real life murder and a fictional killer named ‘The Wolf,’ the two use instant messaging to quickly connect the entire school into their macabre web of lies.
Diving deep into the production of this film is fascinating. The crew hit a number of massive snags along the way yet still produced what is ultimately a pretty slick and well done murder-mystery piece that is heavily inspired by both the meta-horror upstarts from the Scream era as well as the much more grounded slasher revival that was starting with films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. After being told to switch the setting out of L.A. and away from twentysomethings, the creators settled at a boarding school in Virginia. They had to push shoots back numerous times due to storms and power outages, heavy security was required because of Bon Jovi being on set, and they once even had to set up shop in a Kinkos due to weather conditions. And money. They kept running out of money. This is why the heavy use of Apple products and AOL (we’ll come back to that) are so prominent in the film; they had to create partnerships with these companies to allow for some more room when it came to budget.
Cry Wolf stars a young cast on the precipice of breaking into larger roles. Our main character Owen, the mischievous but gold hearted newbie, is played by Julian Morris, who would go on to become a central character in ABC Family mystery Pretty Little Liars (as well as the Sorority Row remake), while his love interest and genius level puppeteer Dodger is portrayed by Lindy Booth, who had just come out of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and would later venture back into the fantasy genre fare in The Librarians. The teen drama love doesn’t stop there as Jared Padalecki from CW’s Supernatural and Paul James from ABC Family classic Greek are supporting characters. Veteran everyman Gary Cole and rock legend himself Jon Bon Jovi round out the adult roles in this teen centric thriller.
Cry Wolf feels so 2000s in all the best and worst ways. Using AIM instant messaging as a central plot device, the movie is also chock full of spiky hair, crushed velvet booty shorts and, of course, PT Cruisers. The movie feels extra spooky because of its east coast Autumn setting, so we’re treated to brownstone buildings amongst the brown and yellow leaves of Fall; hell, we even get a Halloween dance scene. It is a clever little whodunnit, even if the central conceit is dated and silly, but the killer is a particularly daunting figure and the execution of the kills have a fun premise running through them. Being the mid-2000s, however, the film is also bogged down with homophobia and some outdated terminology that will make you cringe when watching.
The movie would eventually release with a tie-in to an actual mobile game, partnered with AOL and their legendary messenger program, a lofty and ambitious partnership that few remember but still is a joy to think about. Cry Wolf isn’t groundbreaking in any way but it is a lot of fun. Mixing in a glossy young cast with a creepy murder-mystery makes for a good time and the entire aesthetic of the boarding school in fall really helps kick the movie up another notch as a particularly pleasing slasher flick. Think of the movie as the 2000s version of April Fool’s Day, just updated with early high speed internet antics and blossoming young television stars, and you’ve got yourself another enjoyable slashic from the aughts.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3663423/cry-wolf-early-2000s-teen-slasher-best-worst-ways-aughta-know/
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