This will knock your sweaty socks off.
Over the weekend, Kristen Wiig returned to Studio 8H to host “Saturday Night Live.” During her appearance, she starred in a sketch that was a horror movie parody trailer centered around a ridiculous terror — Pilates.
The spoof begins with “SNL” cast members Chloe Fineman and Molly Kearney playing two women who reluctantly enter a dark and mysterious room with strange machines. Soon after taking in their creepy surroundings, they’re greeted by a peppy Pilates instructor played by Wiig, who chirps brightly, “Hey mamas! Is this your first class?”
The title for the fake movie, simply called “Pilates,” is then shown as the trailer’s narrator describes the film as ”a chilling new look at girl horror” from “the creator of ‘Saw X’ and the marketing director for Alo.”
In the scene that follows, a traumatized woman played by “SNL’s” Sarah Sherman tells a friend about her nightmarish experience going to a Pilates class, saying, “It’s so hard, but it’s also so boring.”
The action cuts to Wiig’s instructor issuing impossible-sounding strap placement instructions, while a haunting version of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body” plays in the background.
The sketch also pokes fun at Pilates enthusiasts, as the customers a part of Wiig’s class include “eight gorgeous women, one gay man not wearing underwear, and sometimes Kaia Gerber.”
Gerber then appears in the sketch, with the model showing she’s got a good sense of humor as she says, “This is randomly so easy,” while using one of the workout machines.
Joking aside, linking Pilates to something more sinister isn’t too much of a stretch.
Joseph Pilates, a circus performer, invented the exercise during World War I, while he was being held in an internment camp on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.
According to Vogue, the movements in Pilates were inspired by “the island’s scrawny cats” that would “chase mice and birds,” with Pilates marveling at the cats’ “energy and agility — a striking contrast to the physical and emotional state of his fellow internees.”
It is also rumored that he fashioned the first Reformer, the machine used in Pilates classes, after tinkering with the camp’s hospital beds, as Vogue noted.