If you wrote a script about this year’s catastrophes—a global pandemic, murder hornet invasion in Washington and California, Oregon’s wildfire devastation—no one would believe it.
But if you turn those unprecedented events into a hair-raising remake of the iconic slasher flick Scream, now you have people’s attention. That’s what sports journalist and TV host Rachel Bonnetta did with a long-form video posted to her social media accounts today.
The project, which promotes Vote.org but has no official link to the nonpartisan group, aims to mobilize voters by latching onto one of the most famous opening sequences in Hollywood horror film history. It doesn’t matter that the scene—originally starring Drew Barrymore, Jiffy Pop, a landline and a butcher knife—has been satirized and mythologized countless times before.
In this version, Bonnetta dons a blonde wig and answers a call from a stranger who poses the fateful question: “Do you like scary movies?” She says she does, citing Snakes on a Plane as her favorite.
The creepy disembodied voice (actor Andy Kim) then describes his standout choice, called 2020, which features a litany of apocalyptic and unprecedented happenings like a highly contagious virus that wipes out 1 million people worldwide, an attack on the U.S. Postal Service and public protests against police brutality.
Eventually, the guy talks all night, bringing up tangential issues like TikTok’s sale and Carole Baskin’s guilt (or innocence?) while Bonnetta falls asleep. She startles awake in time to hear him describe the “scariest part” of the story: “On Nov. 3, 2020, Donald Trump is re—”
She interrupts his election spoiler with a piercing scream, over a closing line that leaves no doubt about the producers’ political leanings: “2020 is scary enough. Vote.org.”
The video, directed by Mina Park and clocking in at about two and a half minutes, has logged more than 11,000 views in its first few hours on Twitter and Instagram.
Bonnetta, host of Lock It In on Fox Sports 1 and the Hall of Shame podcast on Crooked Media, said she and her friend Park have been making Halloween-themed videos for the past several years. The idea for the 2020 iteration came to her in a medically-induced fog when she had gallbladder surgery recently.
“I’m Canadian, so I can’t vote,” Bonnetta told Adweek. “I was feeling a sense of urgency to at least do something.”
She wrote the script “in about five minutes” and started plotting when and how to film. She asked her boyfriend to hold some lights and shot it with Park in her home in one evening.
“This year has been the scariest in all our lives, especially mine,” she said. “The twist at the end speaks to the crap that we’re going through right now.”
