Rick & Mortyhas spoofed countless genre conventions over the years, but one of the show’s stinger scenes perfectly parodied an entire sub-genre of horror movies. Debuting in 2013, Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty has become a genuine cult phenomenon thanks to its witty writing and clever subversion of genre tropes.

Part irreverent sci-fi comedy, part raunchy sitcom, and all spawned from a filthy Back to the Future parody, Rick & Morty is famous for taking nothing seriously and aiming satirical ire at the worlds of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. No genre is safe from Community creator Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s anarchic series, as proven by Rick & Morty’s clever call-out of an age-old horror tradition in season 2.

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In season 2’s ‘Big Trouble In Little Sanchez’, the characters of Rick & Morty take on some high-school inhabiting vampires in a blatant parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The stinger scene of the episode sees the head of this bloodsucker coven complaining that its members need to stop using “clever” codenames such as ‘Coach Feratu,’ a blatant riff on Nosferatu since these obvious references are cluing humans into their true undead form. The stinger scene is a great one-off gag, but there are a surprising number of horror movies that the joke could be a reference to since, even dark, serious horror movies love using this hoary cliche to this day.

When Rick & Morty’s swearing vampire demands that the rest of his brood stop giving themselves cutesy pun names, he’s calling out a longstanding tradition of horror writers giving give their antagonists obvious giveaway names for the sake of a joke, even though these names would obviously reveal their evil origins to anyone with even a marginal amount of familiarity with the horror genre. The blatant backward spelling “Alucard” has been Dracula’s alias as far back as 1943’s Son of Dracula, and it shows up again in 1989’s Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat.

Meanwhile, the devil himself also isn’t above dealing in these goofy tropes that Rick & Morty parodied, with the otherwise-solid 90s legal thriller The Devil’s Advocate featuring the marginally more subtle John Milton as an alias. For those who don’t know, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, an iconic epic poem… About the Devil. The Witches of Eastwick has the slightly more obvious Daryl Van Horne, although that Jack Nicholson-starring John Updike adaptation at least has an excuse since it is intended to be a comedy. However, the most egregious case of this Rick & Morty joke cropping up in the world of horror has to be the otherwise terrifying, deadly serious Angel Heart which features the laughably blatant Louis Cypher (as in, Lu-cifer). The true identity of this character isn’t unveiled until the closing moments of this bleak, creepy noir-horror, but there will be no prizes for viewers who managed to decode this cipher after viewing Rick & Morty’s spoof of this enduring, goofy trope.

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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