Scream, scream,
scream again
And if we’re talking genres, what better way
to unpick the time-old conventions of the Horror movie than revisiting the
ultimate in Horror parody – the Scream trilogy. Tonia de Senna deconstructs.
During the 1990s, genre film production saw a
multiplicity of remakes, sequels and adaptations. The Horror genre is no
exception to the ‘rule of the remake and sequel’ during the 1990s and beyond.
In his article ‘Same as It Ever Was: Innovation and Exhaustion in the Horror
and Science-Fiction Films of the 1990s’, David Sanjek states that, although
there seems to be an abundance of cinema screens, these offer nothing new or
intellectually exciting or stimulating to the audiences.
Indeed, in the early 1990s the film industry
seemed to return to classic novel adaptations and the Fantasy/Horror cycle of
the 1930s, with films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994). By the mid-90s, we saw
the release of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which revives the Teen Slasher
Horror cycle of the 1970s and 1980s. This, at first, would seem to corroborate
Sanjek’s assertion. However, the film actually refers directly, consciously and
unashamedly to many classical Horror movies, such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock,
1960) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and invites its fans to engage
actively in deconstructing key generic conventions along with the characters,
who are themselves Horror film buffs. Based on an analysis of visual and
narrative elements in the Scream trilogy, this article will argue that, rather
than ‘intellectual understimulation’ , practices of self-referentiality,
pastiche and parody (see glossary) have contributed to a redefinition of the Horror
genre by offering its audiences alternative forms and levels of engagement with
the texts:
inviting the moviegoer to participate in the
construction of the Horror experience via modes of response which are
increasingly self-aware.
Reading Scream
Scream starts with a murder sequence of a
young couple about to see a ‘scary movie’. Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is
home alone, making popcorn and waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. An
establishing shot informs us of the isolated location of the house, a stereotypical
locale of Horror films, allowing for the unsuspecting and helpless victim to be
terrorised by the killer without any witnesses. The means of terror is the
phone, a prop that plays a key role throughout the film – and indeed in many
Horror movies, as we are later informed by Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the Horror
film enthusiast. The conversation between Casey and her murderer ironically
focuses on (Slasher) Horror films featuring psychopath killers. Among others,
we are reminded of Halloween and its killer, Michael, characteristically
identified by his white mask. Soon enough, the killer in Scream appears,
wearing a white mask and holding a rather sharp knife, which he motions in a
very familiar Psycho fashion. Casey is stabbed several times and hung from a
tree in the garden. The sequence finishes with Casey discovered by her mother,
whose terrifying screams remind us once again of Jamie Lee Curtis’s memorable
screams in Halloween. Apart from the thrill of the chase of the victim by the
killer and our fear for her, the audience are, from the beginning of the film,
encouraged to embark on a Horror-conventions-and-allusions-recognition game.
Establishing the survival rates
Throughout the film, many other direct visual
and narrative references are made to Halloween, a seminal Slasher-Horror film –
and by extension to other films of the cycle. Scream does not, however, just
recreate or repeat those as a nostalgic or reverential statement; nor is it
just another film following an established and tired formula; it
self-consciously draws our attention to its own elements of pastiche through
the dialogue and the mise-en-scène. For example, when Randy tries to explain to
the other teenagers in the house – who are effectively an audience, like us –
how to survive a Horror movie, he is in fact becoming a vehicle for the
conventions he draws attention to. At this point, we know they have to survive
metaphorically not only the killer in the film they are watching (not,
coincidentally, Halloween), but ironically and literally, the killer in their
house, who we have seen, but they have not. Randy recites the following ‘rules
of survival’:
i. You never answer the phone – the
detrimental effects of which we have already seen in the first sequence,
described above, and we expect to see again bearing upon Sidney (Neve
Campbell).
ii. You do not have sex – at this point we
have a cut, taking us to the bedroom where Sidney and Billy (Skeet Ulrich) are
having sex, conventionally a warning of impending death.
iii. You don’t leave the room saying ‘I’ll be
right back’, ‘cause you’re never coming back – this is when Stu (Matthew
Lillard) leaves the room and mockingly says he’ll be right back. This makes the
other characters (and us) laugh, whilst our expectations are teased about whether
he is actually coming back or whether he is the next victim.
In the first instance, the phone ultimately
becomes a tool in the heroine’s hands, which exasperates the killers, who are
incapacitated by their own means of intimidation. Secondly, not only does
Sidney not die, but she gets to act out the role of the Final Girl to the end,
even if not a virgin any longer. Randy, a male character, on the other hand, is
the one who now appropriates the convention as he happily identifies his
virginity as the reason for being alive. Finally, our expectations of the
friend’s conventional death are subverted as Stu does indeed return, but as one
of the psychopathic killers. Each of the rules, then, is established – only to
be revised by later action in the film.
The conventions of the sequel
While Scream re-articulates key Horror film
conventions, Scream 2 (1997), the sequel, does the same about Horror film
sequels. The film-within-a-film referential structure is used again to provide
the backdrop of the generic conventions explored, occasionally mocked out-right
and redefined. The film that the characters watch and talk about while more
gruesome murders take place is ‘Stab’, a film inspired by Gale Weathers’s
(Courtney Cox) book Woodsboro Murders; in other words our Scream! In the
opening sequence of Scream 2 we find ourselves at the cinema, watching, along
with the predominantly teenage audience in the film, the opening sequence of
‘Stab’, which we know to be a recreation of the opening sequence of Scream.
During the screening, a young couple is murdered: this recycling of conventions
becomes an acute criticism of modern-day media – and more specifically
Hollywood – practices, such as capitalising on repetition of formula,
sensationalist violence and its influence on (young) audiences, and
‘sequelling’ or the ‘McDonaldisation’ of Horror; but at the same time we are
still watching one of these products, i.e. the sequel. It appears that the film
parodies its own essence, providing a sort of commentary on Hollywood production
while reiterating its methods.
Indeed, as in Scream and then in ‘Stab’, we
see another murder of an innocent blonde girl at home alone. Once again, we see
her terrorised over the phone and driven away from the front door (a logical
route or escape) and up the staircase where she hits a ‘dead-end’ and
eventually gets killed. Although Scream had drawn our attention to this
convention only to subvert it with Sidney, here it is re-enacted reverentially
(the familiar staircase, the chase and the locked doors, the creepy sounds that
enhance our sense of fear), reminding us that we are watching a Horror film. It
is precisely this return to the generic convention that bewilders the audience;
having seen Sidney escape her ‘genre-predicted’ fate in Scream, we are now
unsure what to expect from the film. The thrill in Scream 2 comes not from the
expected codes of Horror, nor from the direct subversion of those (as in
Scream), but in the unreliability of the narrative. We never know if the
convention is going to be followed or not.
One more time, the character who ‘guides’ us
through the rules of the sequel is Randy; he prepares us for a ‘bigger
body-count’, similarities in the killer’s practices, but also for a surprise:
no-one would be interested in a sequel if it was exactly the same as the first
film. In other words, Randy’s comments here reflect the position of many
theorists, who suggest that ‘genres work on the terrain of repetition and
difference’. Scream 2, in a playful manner, draws our attention not only to genre
cinema, but also the genre theory that has developed around it, placing us at
the heart of academic debates about film: a class in a Film School of an
American university. The setting, in other words, is very carefully constructed
for film-theory-aware and literate characters and audiences.
The final chapter
Similarly, Scream 3 (2000), the final part in
a trilogy, refers back to the first film, thus bearing visual allusions to
itself and the influential Halloween. The film once again starts with a double
murder, which again takes place in the home. Cotton Weary (Live Schreiber) –
who had been wrongly accused of the murder of Sidney’s mother in Scream – gets
a phone call from the killer, who informs him that he is in Cotton’s house
watching his (Cotton’s) girlfriend having a shower – all too familiar
conventions. The sustained use of a subjective camera from the point of view of
‘the monster’ signifies the murderer’s approach and implicates the audience in
the violence that follows. A medium, point-of-view shot of Christine’s
Psycho-style silhouette behind the shower screen prepares us for the imminent
attack...which does not happen. Instead, we cut back to Cotton still on the
phone with the killer, and then back to the house, where we see Christine (medium-shot)
coming out of the shower intact. Cue sense of relief and wry smile at the
playful revision of arguably one of the most powerful scenes in the history of
cinema. And then... a low level shot of Christine’s bare feet on her way to
investigate a noise, and the stereotypical and much expected chase by the
killer down the corridor. By the end of the rather lengthy opening sequence,
both Cotton and Christine are stabbed to death in the same way as all the other
victims in the Scream series.
Randy, our Horror film guru, has died in the
previous instalment; along with the characters, we now no longer know where we
stand in terms of the ‘rules of the game’. However, Randy does return to
enlighten us through the use of a very significant prop: the TV. Randy has
recorded a message for his friends, all too knowingly suggesting that the
events could lead up to a trilogy. He informs us that previous rules, sequel
rules, do not apply; and among other things, the past returns with a hidden
secret, which holds the key to the motive behind these murders. Once more, the
film self-consciously sets out the rules only to challenge them and reinvent
them as the narrative unfolds.
Sure enough, ‘Stab 3’ is in production; the
self-reflexive film-within-a-film formula is in use here, too. ‘Stab 3’
recreates through pastiche the house on the hill where the horrible Woodsboro
murders occurred in Scream; at the same time, it is itself the last part of a
trilogy. Despite pushing the boundaries of self-consciousness to the extreme, Scream
3 manages successfully to walk the fine line’it sets between parody (of itself)
and serious Horror action. From a certain point onwards we see everything
double as the suspenseful narrative unfolding in the ‘real’ world of Scream 3
is uncannily reproduced on the set of ‘Stab 3’. Self-referential humour
combined with gruesome violence, as a Horror genre feature that is maintained
throughout, reinvigorate the sub-genre by engaging the audience in a more
complicated than expected storyline for a Horror movie. In Scream 2 Randy did
emphasise that in Horror films ‘you gotta keep things simple; you don’t want to
confuse your target audience’!
...and the final resolution?
In order to make sense of the trilogy as a
whole, what remains to be found out is who the killer/s are in this final part.
It turns out that Sidney’s ‘abandoned’ and unwanted half-brother Roman (Scott
Foley) had been orchestrating the murders from the very beginning because of a
grudge against their mother and, by extension, against his half-sister, who
ended up being the ‘protagonist’ in what should be his triumphant story.
Therefore, the revelation of Roman is the vehicle for the ultimate parody: his
invention in the final episode of the trilogy redefines the trilogy itself,
making us re-construe the story of the previous two films.
The allusions of the wanting and traumatising
relationship between mother and son are carried throughout the series,
replaying and reinventing a theme introduced in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Perhaps not
coincidentally, the name of the arch-villain, Roman Bridges is a quasi-anagram
of Norman Bates...
The last words
Not all Horror films of the 1990s have been
as self-conscious as the Scream series. Neither have they as directly and
openly offered:
pleasures of their own, with their own
particular rules and conventions about the exploration of the rules and
conventions of the broader slasher (sub) genre.
However, I believe that the Scream films are
a useful and clear example of re-framing pre-existing codes, pastiche,
self-consciousness and parodic humour, practices that led to the redefinition
of the Horror genre, its boundaries, its function and its engagement with
audiences. Each film in the trilogy pushes these elements further.
Consequently, Scream and its subsequent sequels became generic blueprints
themselves as they generated a particular type of Horror film – namely one that
is both scary and humorously self-referential.
Rather than over-burdening the Horror genre,
or the genre film production of the 1990s, postmodern practices of
self-referentiality, parody and pastiche have instead enabled generic rules
have been revised and reaffirmed.
Glossary of key terms
Final Girl: Stereotypically, the virginal
girl that survives in Horror films. In her very influential text Men, Women and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) Carol Clover defines the
Final Girl as a ‘phallic’ heroine, who is only acting as a male protagonist
would, thus both undermining her feminine address, and her (often literal) role
as ‘castrator’; however, this view has been questioned as these female heroines
often distinguish themselves by rejecting the established codes of masculine
behaviour and by enhancing their credentials as modern post-feminist women. On
this you can further consult Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: from Beelzebub to
Blair Witch (2000).
Intertextuality: The way in which (media)
texts refer to and interact with other texts, assuming that audiences will
recognise those allusions.
Parody: Mocking in a critical way, according
to postmodernist critic Fredric Jameson.
Post-feminism: A position that suggests that
women should take respect and equality for granted after the successes of the
1960s and 1970s feminist struggles, and should enjoy the ironic and playful pleasures
associated with traditional ‘femininity’.
Postmodernism: The social, political and
cultural attitudes of production and consumption of (media) products in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries. The term carries several meanings but is
usually associated with the self-reflexivity of contemporary culture and media
(see page 6).
Self-reflexive: Texts which display an
awareness of their own artificial status as texts.
Self-referential: A text that makes a
reference back to itself, usually in a self-ironising and playful manner.
Pastiche: Texts which are made up from
different sources, favouring practices of copying or simulation and rejecting
authenticity. The term is often used negatively for texts that do not display
originality; an approach that has, however, been revised by many theorists.
Tonia de Senna is a Lecturer in Media and
Multimedia at Amersham College, Buckinghamshire.
from MediaMagazine 22, December 2008.
