Rick & Morty’s first season 5 trailer reveals that the series will be bringing back one major mainstay of the earlier seasons, horror movie parodies. Debuting back in 2013, Rick & Morty is an anarchic animated comedy from Adult Swim that satirizes sci-fi tropes and sitcom conventions alike in the goofy, gory adventures of the titular amoral super-genius and his likable, dim-witted grandson.
Over its four seasons, Rick & Morty has grown from being a madcap, mile-a-minute sci-fi satire that parodied Jurassic Park and Fantastic Voyage in one twenty-minute (Christmas) episode into a more thoughtful, though no less crude, character comedy. Although still zany and surreal, seasons 3 and 4 of Rick & Morty have endeavored to offer a more character-based brand of comedy, with the later episodes of the series devoting more screen time to the internal lives of the Smith family.
Although season 3 and 4 of Rick & Morty remain well-loved by fans of the series, the season 5 trailer promises the return of the show’s classic horror parodies, a detail that will delight viewers who prefer the show’s sillier side. The first season of Rick & Morty spoofed a lot of ’80s horror classics with its more anarchic and less character-focused brand of satire, devoting entire episodes to parodying Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street with Scary Terry, the body horror hits of David Cronenberg, and Stephen King’s Needful Things. The Hellraiser parodies featured prominently in the season 5 trailer for Rick & Morty promise a return to this territory, which is promising news since Rick & Morty remains one of few shows violent enough to effectively spoof these gory franchises while also being light-hearted enough to keep the spoofs more funny than gratuitously gruesome.
In comparison to the frequent horror parodies of Rick & Morty season 1, the show’s second season started to feature fewer spoofs and the remaining parodies tended to focus on more recent works like the ’90s series The Langoliers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as well as the Purge series. By season 3, an Attack On Titan spoof was the total of the season’s horror parodies, and that series is far from purely horror. Season 4 featured an underrated Prometheus spoof, but that mostly focused on more ambitious, often poignant stories like “The Vat of Acid Episode”, “The Old Man And The Seat”, and the season finale “Start Mort: The Rickturn of the Jedi.”
These outings were great for character development, but unfortunately, this more ambitious sort of storytelling meant that these installments weren’t as heavy on madcap laughs, something that the show’s return to genre parodies promises. While Rick & Morty has by now proven that the series can balance gruesome genre parodies and more emotionally resonant stories, the first two seasons were tilted toward the former while the last two seasons have leaned toward the latter. As proven by the trailer’s promised Hellraiser spoof, Rick & Morty season 5 can hopefully strike a balance between the sillier, gorier spoofs of earlier seasons and the more serious character-driven stories of seasons 3 and 4.
