Why are so many movies based on unstable people knowing what you did last summer?

I was glad to see that Sorority Row had finally opened in theatres, because it would mean a sharp decline in the number of times I had to watch the trailer during commercial breaks. Over the weekend while I was bored and sick, I spent some time looking up the spoilers for the movie mostly just to see who the killer was and if they changed the plot from the original version (yes, brilliance of this caliber was a remake). There was nothing particularly shocking or interesting about it all – the plot was basically a cookie cutter of teen slasher flicks from the 90’s:

• A group of friends do something terrible by accident
• The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake (which is always a body) is clearly the most logical thing to do
• The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
• Just when they think they’ve gotten away with it, they start receiving messages from the dead person threatening to tell people what they did
• Almost everyone ends up dead in complicated and gory ways
• It’s not the dead person after all; they’re dead
• Oh here is a convoluted reason that the killer – who is loosely connected to the dead person in the first place – slaughtered the group in the name of crazy unstable man justice instead of, you know, doing almost anything else

DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Seriously, are there really that many groups of friends who accidentally kill someone and decide to keep the secret instead of telling authorities? Would they not know by now that this is just a really bad idea and will inevitably end with a fish hook in the back of the skull? Maybe I was just a really boring teenager, but my horrible scandals would have gone a lot differently:

• I borrow my mom’s car to take a group of friends to the beach
• There’s no drugs or alcohol or teenage sex romping, just animated discussions about comic books and Super Big Gulps
• I’m busy laughing at a terrible joke when I back the car into a cement post, denting the bumper
• The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake is clearly the most logical thing to do – we pop the dent out and use nail polish to fill in the scuff marks
• The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
• I start receiving ominous text messages seemingly sent by the bumper threatening to tell my mother what I did
• No one ends up dead or stabbed through the face with a machete
• It turns out the threatening messages are a viral marketing campaign from an auto body shop and my heightened sense of guilt made it seem as though I were being stalked by a shadowy unstable person (or gecko) in a rain slicker
• My mother never finds out I dented her bumper
• … OR DOES SHE???

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN I smell a sequel

As much as I wish my teenage angst bullshit had a body count, there’s just no scandal there. They’ll never make a teen slasher flick about my life, and that’s one regret I’m just going to have to live with forever. *sigh*

I never get to have any fun.