I might be wrong but this does not seem like they overtly spoofing anything but mostly creating their own B-movie universe. Most of all it seems to reference James Herbert film adaptation in particular a very bad version of Survivor with Robert Powell, horror writers that were even worse than Herbert writing books about giant crabs and such like and Hammer House of Horrors’ cheap production values.
Interesting points about Herbert (with whom I'm not familiar) and the Hammer movies.
I think you're right that this show goes beyond spoofing anything in particular. To my mind it succeeds in uniting several elements:
*the 40-year-old tradition of television spoofing television (a la Saturday Night Live) by inverting genre cliches (in this case not only horror, but hospital dramas and documentaries to boot)
*general fun with Bad Acting, Bad Writing, and Bad Production Values
*the comedy inherent in exposing self-important people's delusions of grandeur
*consistent and frequent use of some rather sophisticated wordplay ("She was like a candle in the wind: unreliable")
This show is HILARIOUS.
IMO, it's also spoofing Twin Peaks and Von Triers' The Kingdom mashed up with a bunch of other things.
shareI beleive tehre was a US re-make of Kingdom which is supposed to be undescribadely bad.
sharei starting watching "riget" tonight and the first thing that popped in my mind was "darkplace."
share There's a scene where I believe they're referring to an old Stephen King commerical. This was maybe 20 years ago, and it's King talking about a book of the month club thing, and he's walking down some steps with this bad purple light cast of the stairs. There was a scene somewhere like that in Darkplace except Darkplace had red light I think.
If it wasnt a parody of that particular crappy looking commerical I'd be suprised.
it seems like it's spoofing the twilight zone as well.
share[deleted]
Dark shadows, for sure.
Coming Soon... The December Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qj7fRpcXRI