The Horror of Dirty Underwear

This week’s Loading Time concerns our annual Halloween special, which this year parodies the Parnormal Activities movies. Kind of. It’s more like a fake-out, really. I like to think this is what the Paranormal Activity movies would look like if they took place in a boring, alternate universe where the conflicts are minor but the staining is major.

Initially, after seeing the final cut of the video I was concerned by how silly and scatological the punchline turned out to be, afraid that it wouldn’t appeal to our viewers. You may surprised that I, the writer of last week’s fetish-fueled awkwardfest, worry about these things, but I do. Regardless, I was very pleased to see the parody is apparent enough to carry the script. It’s also worth noting that very few people expected us to make a pair of ethereal, soiled underpants the punchline to an entire video, but there you have it – LRR: not above a “crundies” joke.

Trivia:

• As we mention in this Loading Time, several funny exchanges were cut from the final video. After the Bee Movie joke, we cut a few lines where the ghost and the homeowners discussed the relative quality of several poorly received children’s movies. The jokes were good, but they dragged out the video without advancing its plot. A single tear was shed.
• Jer and Tally’s apartment is a new location for LRR. Although we could have shot the video at the apartment Graham, Kathleen and Alex share, we felt it might have been confusing for people to see two unrelated videos using the same location, airing back-to-back. It’s also why we cast Kate and Jer, rather than Paul and Kathleen, just to mix it up. Graham was always going to be the ghost.
• One original ending for the video had the homeowners calling a knockoff ghost removal firm called Ghost Touchers, and turning into a parody of lame, televised ghost “hunting”. However, we cut that idea because we never got around to figuring out what those characters would actually do, aside from making the special effects more difficult.
• The underwear were Graham’s, but he wasn’t using them anymore. They were, however, freshly laundered.