ARBOR DAY

ARBOR DAY
MAD #227, December 1981
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Jack Davis

Most youth horror movies followed a similar pattern, almost always taking place on a holiday. The pattern for the modern slasher film started with Black Christmas and Texas Chainsaw Massacre but went into overdrive with imitations that were some sort of combination of I Spit on Your Grave and Halloween which spawned several sequels, and followed suit with Friday the 13th, Hell Night, April Fool's Day, Happy Birthday to Me, Silent Night Deadly Night, many of which had franchises of their own. They begat Nightmare On Elm Street, the Chucky series, etc.


Arbor Day was not a parody of any movie in particular, just the genre as a whole, what Siskel and Ebert often called “dead teenager” movies.

Looking at most of those films in retrospect, they're pretty tame. I think the blood and gore and T & A was more shocking to the staff of the magazine than the actual audience. It was a big shock for adults at the time because up to that point an 'R' rating applied to things that were mature in nature rather than just dirty.

Guys my age tell me they were turned on by the panels from this article in particular when they were kids. In fact, when I announced this blog guys told me to look out for drawings that they remember from Mad that made them horny when they were ten to twelve. Married men in their forties and fifties asked me to keep an eye out for provocative drawings of teenage girls. Think about that for a moment.

Meanwhile, There's an incompetent sheriff constantly being informed of pranks and they can't figure out what we know. And a psychiatrist who comes to town informing them a killer is on the loose.

The girls go out into the woods and invite their boyfriends, who get detained.

The killer brings the corpses back home to his mother (Mother's Day) which she makes into food (Motel Hell) which the sheriff and psychiatrist unknowingly eat. Even though they know the pizzeria is run by the killer's mother, they don't think to ask her about him.

The killer goes after the girls and one of them finally gets him.

Everything's back to normal now, and the plot is wrapped up with the girl wrapping up the whole plot in the last minute of the movie.

Coincidentally, there was a movie called Groundhog Day that wasn't horror at all, but a romantic comedy in the 90s also parodied by Mad which we'll get to eventually.

The genre had numerous film parodies such as Wacko, Pandemonium, and Saturday the 14th. The best was Student Bodies, written and directed by early Woody Allen collaborator Mickey Rose.