In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream, released on this date in 1996, here’s how the movie revived a genre, previewed a defining characteristic of Generation X, dramatized the psychological toll of trauma with uncommon emotional honesty—and how it even offers a roadmap out of the prevailing narrative of our time: extractive capitalism.
For all the decades we’ve been together, my wife and I have observed a particular protocol, probably owed to how many movies we used to see at the two-dollar cinema in Hell’s Kitchen when we were dirt-poor college students: Upon exiting the theater, neither issues a comment on or reaction to the film we just saw. Instead, we save the discussion for when we’re seated at a nearby restaurant, at which point one or the other invariably asks, “Do you want to go first?” As far as I can recall, we’ve broken with that tradition but once.
“We just saw a classic,” she blurted as we staggered our way through the lobby moments after seeing Scream. “They’ll still be talking about that in twenty years.” (Such an estimate, in fairness, seemed like a glacially long time when you’re only as many years old.)
In fact, a full quarter century has now passed since the release of the late Wes Craven’s postmodern slasher masterpiece, and the movie has very much earned a fixed place in the cultural consciousness. That opening sequence alone, so shocking at the time, hasn’t lost any of its power to frighten and disturb; an entire semester could be spent studying it, from the exquisite camerawork to the dramatic pacing to Drew Barrymore’s heartwrenchingly credible performance as a young woman scared shitless—and this despite having no one in the scene to act against save a voice on a phone. Ten minutes into the movie, its marquee star is savagely disemboweled… and now you don’t know what the hell to expect next!
I really can’t say I’ve seen a horror film since that was at once so scary, clever, entertaining, influential, and of its moment the way Scream was. With eerie prescience, Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (born 1965) seemed to put their finger on an idiopathic attribute of Generation X that would, as Xers settled into adulthood and eventually middle age, come to define the entirety of the pop-cultural landscape over which we currently preside: that rather than using fiction to reflect and better understand reality—viewing narrativity as “a coherent design that asks questions and provides opinions about how life should be lived,” per Christopher Vogler—we more or less gave up on understanding reality in favor of mastering the expansive, intricate storyworlds of Star Wars and Star Trek, DC and Marvel, Westworld and Game of Thrones. And such figure-ground reversal started long before the Marvel–industrial complex capitalized on it.
In the early ’90s, as the first members of Gen X were becoming filmmakers, avant-garde auteurs like Quentin Tarantino (born 1963) and Kevin Smith (1970) not only devoted pages upon pages in their screenplays to amusingly philosophical conversations about contemporary pop culture, but the characters across Tarantino and Smith’s various movies existed in their own respective shared universes, referencing other characters and events from prior and sometimes even yet-to-be-produced films. That kind of immersive cinematic crosspollination, inspired by the comic books Tarantino and Smith had read as kids, rewarded fans for following the directors’ entire oeuvres and mindfully noting all the trivial details—what later came to be known as “Easter eggs.”
What’s more, the trove of pop-cultural references embedded in their movies paid off years of devoted enrollment at Blockbuster Video. Whereas previously, fictional characters seemed to exist in a reality devoid of any pop entertainment of their own—hence the reason, for instance, characters in zombie movies were always on such a steep learning curve—now they openly debated the politics of Star Wars (Clerks); they analyzed the subtext of Madonna lyrics (Reservoir Dogs); they waxed existential about Superman’s choice of alter ego (Kill Bill: Volume 2); they even, when all was lost, sought the sagacious counsel of that wisest of twentieth-century gurus: Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee (Mallrats).
For Gen X, our movies and TV shows and comics and videogames are more than merely common formative touchstones, the way, say, the Westerns of film (Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven) and television (Bonanza, Gunsmoke) had been for the boomers. No, our pop culture became a language unto itself: “May the Force be with you.” “Money never sleeps.” “Wax on, wax off.” “Wolfman’s got nards!” “I’m your density.” “Be excellent to each other.” “Do you still want his daytime number?” “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…”
Those are more than quotable slogans; they’re cultural shorthands. They express a worldview that can only be known and appreciated by those of us encyclopedically literate in Reagan-era ephemera, like the stunted-adolescence slackers from Clerks and nostalgic gamer-geeks of Ready Player One and, of course, the last-wave Xers in Scream:
The characters from Scream had grown up watching—arguably even studying—Halloween and Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street on home video and cable TV, so they had an advantage the teenage cannon fodder from their favorite horror movies did not: They were savvy to the rules of the genre. Don’t have sex. Don’t drink or do drugs. Never say “I’ll be right back.”
There was a demonstrably prescriptive formula for surviving a slasher movie—all you had to do was codify and observe it. That single narrative innovation, the conceptual backbone of Scream, was revelatory: Suddenly everything old was new again! A creatively exhausted subgenre, long since moldered by its sequel-driven descent into high camp, could once again be truly terrifying.
Much has been written about the way in which Scream satirized and subverted the tropes of the slasher genre, but the movie’s staggering success at the time of its release, to say nothing of its lasting legacy, is owed to what a supremely satisfying thriller it is even absent its metafictional references. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the ample cinematic antecedents Williamson’s screenplay invokes, Scream is still an utterly absorbing edge-of-your-seat whodunit in its own right. Its allusions add seasoning, sure, but they are not the meal; the meal satisfies all by itself.
Contrast that with, say, Loaded Weapon 1 (1993), which only has value as a spoof of Lethal Weapon (1987). Ditto Wrongfully Accused (1998) vis-à-vis The Fugitive (1993), MacGruber (2010) to the 1980s TV series MacGyver, and Scary Movie (2000) as a sendup of—and how’s this for an act of only-in-Hollywood self-cannibalism?—Scream itself. Devoid of their cinematic reference points, those parodies have no meaning, purpose, or story unto themselves. They aren’t commentaries on or subversions of their source materials, merely funhouse-mirror farces, invariably opting for the cheapest, easiest, most momentary gag. Pull their dipshit references out, and those movies have no raison d’être.
Scream, on the other hand, has a lot to say—about the horror genre and its puritan values (women are frequently punished for the very things our action heroes are celebrated for doing); about whether movie violence inspires actual violence; about a generation for whom popular entertainment—the majority of it, let’s not forget, originally intended strictly for indiscriminate children—became a kind of socioreligious belief system, and the VCR its study bible.
Scream is all of those things, to be sure, but it’s also an emotionally honest story about trauma—with particular regard to sexual violence against women and slut-shaming. The killings that catalyze the events of the plot come on the first anniversary of the murder of the heroine’s mother, Maureen Prescott (Lynn McRee), a woman long rumored to have a history of extramarital affairs. A year earlier, Maureen’s corpse was found at home by her daughter Sidney (Neve Campbell), having been (presumably) raped then killed by Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber). Cotton, who admitted to consensual sex with Maureen but denied the other charges, was convicted for the crime based on testimony offered by Sidney, whose eyewitness account of him fleeing the house was corroborated by a piece of evidence found at the scene (his coat).
But the innuendos about Sidney’s mother, ever whispering in her mind’s ear, coupled with the current murder spree in her idyllic Californian community of Woodsboro, have both reopened still-raw wounds and shaken her ironclad certainty in Cotton’s guilt. Did Sidney help put away an innocent man? And, if that is indeed the case, does that substantiate her mother’s reputation for promiscuity? Was her mother a slut? Because if so, that’s a sin punishable by death. Those, after all, are the rules.
Consequently, rather than merely being on the run from a serial killer (external conflict), which would be sufficiently dramatic in its own right (just ask bellbottomed babysitter Laurie Strode), the events of Scream—Maureen’s anniversary, the ongoing murders, the pressure Sidney’s receiving from her boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) to have sex—are all conspiring to rub Sidney’s nose in the most shattering tragedy of her young life (internal conflict). In Scream, the past is very much prologue, and the filmmakers use that backstory masterfully to advance both the plot and Sidney’s transformational arc.
We can turn scenes only one of two ways: on action or on revelation. There are no other means. If, for example, we have a couple in a positive relationship, in love and together, and we want to turn it to the negative, in hate and apart, we could do it on action: She slaps him across the face and says, “I’m not taking this anymore. It’s over.” Or on revelation: He looks at her and says, “I’ve been having an affair with your sister for the last three years. What are you going to do about it?”
Powerful revelations come from the BACKSTORY—previous significant events in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create Turning Points.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997), 340–41
It’s an elementary if underappreciated principle: scenes turn on action—something unexpected happens—or on revelation—something unknown in disclosed. Scream never feels repetitive because the filmmakers continually jerk Sidney—and, by extension, the audience—from action to revelation, revelation to action, compelling her to react physically and/or emotionally from moment to moment. The story’s external and internal conflicts are like counterparts in a Swiss watch; the favorable resolution of one is dependent on the same for the other. Yet the very “rules” keeping Sidney alive also require she unconditionally accept that her mother was a bad person—a slut—deserving of the act of violence that ended her life.
At the story’s critical moment, Sidney violates the cardinal rule of slasher movies—she gives up her virginity to Billy, who turns out to be responsible for all the murders, including Maureen’s—and yet she triumphs nonetheless. She refuses to play by the rules of the genre, learning to see her mother as a complicated human being, not a reductive archetype, whose personal shortcomings were neither hereditary nor worthy of capital punishment. Sidney doesn’t merely survive the events of the movie; she emerges from them a newly self-actualized person. That’s why Scream has endured—because it is both viscerally and emotionally cathartic.
Scream 2, by contrast, is entirely external conflict: With no backstory left to pull from, only Sidney’s life is in danger, not her soul, so the sequel turns strictly on action, not revelation. The climactic reveal of the killers and their motivations is merely a surprise, not a revelation, because it has no consequences for Sidney emotionally; she has no transformational arc in Scream 2. (And as an exercise in metafiction, Scream 2 is, at best, a stretch: In one scene, a character delineates the rules for making—not surviving—a slasher sequel, but it’s so perfunctory and inconsequential that another character impatiently interrupts the discourse, and the matter is never revisited.) All told, Scream 2 a reasonably engrossing thriller—Craven could stage a scare like no other horror director—but it doesn’t stick to you the way the original does; it just doesn’t have nearly as much to say.
(And it’s worth noting that one-trick screenwriter Williamson’s irrepressible instinct for too-clever-by-half life-imitates-art referents, deployed with narrative purpose and judicious restraint in the first movie, start to prominently assert themselves in Scream 2, which is full of indulgent and obnoxious and ultimately silly conversations—some of them literally occurring in a Cinema Studies 101 class—about sequels and whether or not they can surpass the quality of the original… blah, blah, blah. For all of his success, he never again wrote anything as sharp and subversive as Scream; indeed, most of his subsequent projects, like Stalker and The Following, conspicuously trafficked in the very genre clichés Scream satirized.)
Perhaps recognizing, consciously or otherwise, the need for internal and external conflict to work in tandem, the killer in Scream 3 is revealed to be not merely Sidney’s theretofore unknown half-brother, but also—surprise!—the vengeful puppet master behind the Woodsboro killings of the original. Any emotional impact from that is, unfortunately, diffused by the creative decision to have Sidney in hiding for the entire first half of the movie (a production concession to Campbell, who didn’t really want to do a third Scream but was contractually obligated), so the supporting characters are left to drive the plot until its protagonist finally deigns to show up. That’s narratively problematic in itself, to say nothing of the fact that movie series, as we’ve observed, are seldom improved by There was more to the backstory all along! addendums.
In Desperate Housewives (2004), the picturesque suburban street of Wisteria Lane is rocked by the sudden suicide of longtime resident Mary Alice Young, and the first-season story arc follows her four closest friends and neighbors who, upon discovering a mysterious blackmail note among her belongings, gradually uncover some very dark secrets behind the veneer of their friend’s seemingly perfect life. Much like Scream, the initial season of Desperate Housewives is a supremely satisfying satire-cum-whodunit that turns on an alternating mix of action and revelation, with all of the main characters very personally invested in both the events leading up to the central mystery as well as its conclusive resolution.
Having burned through all their backstory, however, the producers had new neighbor Alfre Woodard move to Wisteria Lane for the subsequent story arc, where she proceeded to spend the entirety of the second season looking pensive. Very pensive. She’s hiding something BIG. Oh, yeah! And as soon as the show’s writers figure out what that secret is, both the regular characters and the audience will care. A lot.
Ugh. Desperate Housewives limped along in this mode for two additional years, introducing a new, ill-defined mystery each season, and, accordingly, bringing in a new secretive character devoid of history with the ladies of Wisteria Lane. When the fifth season premiered in 2008, five years had elapsed since the spring finale. That narrative ellipsis wasn’t motivated by anything other than creative desperation: Unlike Lost, whose disorienting time-jump in season three was justified by the show’s central conceit of nonlinearity—the rules of time did not apply on that crazy island—the producers of Housewives just wanted to have a fresh well of backstory again. So, when we rejoined the ladies of Wisteria Lane, their status quo had been completely upended from what it was at the end of season four, meaning scenes could turn on revelation once again—for anyone who still cared.
Even in non-mysteries, backstories can provide emotional depth. Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) is generally considered to be the weakest of Indiana Jones’ sidekicks—she’s been criticized for whining at Indy throughout Temple of Doom—but I might argue that has less to do with her characterization than her lack of history with Indy himself; they only meet for the first time at the beginning of the adventure. Contrast that with Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders, embittered over having been deflowered then dumped by Indy a decade earlier, and Henry Sr. (Sean Connery) in The Last Crusade, who withdrew into his work—and away from his teenage son—after the premature death of Indy’s mother. When Marion and Henry give Indy a hard time on their respective excursions, it’s an expression of the tension that underlies the relationship; when Willie does it, it just comes off as bitching and moaning.
All of which only makes the decision to present Indy and Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) as strangers to one another in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even more baffling. The “twist” late in the movie that they are in fact father and son means nothing because they mean nothing to each other. With nearly two decades having passed since the previous movie, the filmmakers had ample opportunity to devise a rich, complicated shared backstory for those characters that could’ve then been used to turn their relationship, for both comedic and emotional effect à la The Last Crusade, as they grudgingly team up to go rescue Marion from the Russians. Instead, Spielberg and Lucas opted for cheap surprise over artful revelation. If any storytellers should’ve known better, it was them.
Scream’s use of backstory, though instructive, is but one of its many virtues. It’s also a story about the relationships between women: Not only is Sidney at odds with the memory of her late mother, but she is in direct conflict with the tabloid journalist who reported on Maureen’s murder, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the second most prominent female character. Like most women in fiction created by men, they spend the entirety of the movie sniping at one another (and in one scene, Sidney gives Gale a black eye), but, in an appropriately subversive twist, they both survive to the end—by putting their differences aside and actually supporting each other. Gale has an arc, too: She goes from an unethical opportunist to someone willing to risk her own wellbeing to help others. Gale’s transformation adds yet another layer of emotional complexity to a terrific story.
And David Arquette’s Deputy Dewey Riley provides a healthy male counterpoint to the mama’s-boy insecurity of murdering sociopaths Billy and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), to say nothing of the obsessive fanboying of video-store clerk Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy). Dewey is neither a puffed-chest lawman nor a Keystone Cop; rather, he is a decent man and competent professional with a goofball sense of humor who, despite a dearth of respect from the community he serves, concerns himself with public safety, not pop culture, unlike all the other males in Scream:
You know, if you’d asked me twenty-five years ago—and perhaps this is even something my wife and I discussed over dinner after Scream?—I would’ve absolutely agreed with Billy’s assessment: that you can’t fault our entertainment for the ills of society. I feel very differently today. Do violent movies and videogames produce violent people? I don’t know what the statistics are on that. I imagine “copycat” crimes, though they do occur, are rare. I would think any instances in which a person is inspired to commit a crime explicitly based on something they saw done in a movie probably had a lot of unaddressed mental problems long before they ever watched that movie.
But to my view there’s no question whatsoever that the stories we consume, in aggregate, subconsciously shape the way we see the world. Popular fiction has a way of conditioning even the most outspokenly liberal of us to accept patriarchal hegemony, and the inevitability of environmental apocalypse; our favorite thrillers serve, knowingly or not, to normalize conspiratorial thinking, and police brutality; our storytellers conflate violence with masculinity, or make women just as violent as men and pat themselves on the back for their progressive sense of feminism. And all of our stories, save the most pragmatically optimistic science fiction (Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville; Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future), is predicated on the presumption of extractive capitalism as a God-given absolute—that the rapacious exploitation and unsustainable consumption of natural resources is just what makes the world go ’round. Those are the rules.
Neoliberalism is the horror story to which we’ve been consigned for the past forty years, ever since a B-movie actor became president. (Christ, is it any wonder all the world’s a soundstage as far as Gen X is concerned?) Accordingly, we’ve all been forced to play by the sacrosanct rules of the genre: deregulation, privatization, profiteering, austerity—the cornerstone conventions of free-market fundamentalism. These rules serve to extract value out of anything and everything, from the material (natural resources, manual labor) to the immaterial (stock markets, human attention), thereby redistributing that value to an elite minority: the “wealth creators.” The extractivist agenda of neoliberalism is present in every facet of our lives, from healthcare to housing to social media to our must-see Hollywood mega-franchises, gobbling up our money, time, and attention like Super Pac-Man. (How’s that for an ’80s-specific reference?) It’s the dominant narrative of our lives.
It doesn’t have to be. We can challenge and change institutionalized modes of operation, particularly ones that stack the deck against us. That’s the lesson Scream teaches. Sidney had had enough of the bullshit rules governing her existence—rules she neither created nor consented to—and if the sociopolitical upheaval of the past two years is any indication, so have we. We’re tired of the wealth inequality and systemic injustice of deregulated capitalism, the zero-sum ethos of Randian individualism. We’re ready for a new story.
Like any monster worth its salt, though, neoliberalism will not go quietly into that good night, even and especially when it looks moribund. Now more than ever, we need Americans out in the streets fighting for a Green New Deal, for Medicare for All, for Housing for All, for gun control, for election reform, for reproductive rights, for a livable minimum wage, for an end to the filibuster. So, don’t do what Gen X did: don’t permanently retreat into the Multiverse of Madness; don’t look for meaning in meaningless diversions; don’t choose fantasy exclusively over reality, no matter how tempting Hollywood makes it.
Such is why I have no use for the Scream sequels, including the brand-new one next month: It isn’t strictly because I oppose nostalgic backward-gazing; it’s that I’d much prefer to believe Sidney and Gale and Dewey, after their harrowing nightmare in Woodsboro, got to move on to new stories, in different genres, rather than finding themselves relegated to the same old soul-crushing, self-perpetuating shit year after year, decade after decade. It’s what I hope for them. It’s what I hope for us all.
In 2021, I experienced a big plot twist in my own personal narrative, a surprise sequel of sorts to “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse—and How We All Might Find Our Way Back Home,” which I’ll blog about next month. In the meantime, I wish you a joyous holiday season—and the best of health, happiness, compassion, and creativity in the new year.
Not a fan of psychological thrillers (get enough of that in this crazy everyday world), but I enjoyed reading your informed take on the affect of Scream on movies. I had no idea.
I did get somewhat distracted by the term “extractive capitalism”. I’m an economics major and frame lots of what I see around economics but I’d never heard of that term. I had to DDG it! Very interesting and I can see its application to certain economic philosophies.
These days, Jacqui, I mindfully limit my exposure to movies/shows that traffic in dark and/or violent themes (which admittedly seems like a contradictory position from a writer of supernatural horror and magical realism!). For example, I bailed on the critically acclaimed TV series Hannibal (a Silence of the Lambs spinoff) halfway through its first season because I just didn’t want to invite its darkness into my life on a weekly basis; it had nothing to do with the show’s quality so much as its subject matter. I made the same decision about The Sopranos midway through its run; I’d just reached the point where I’d had enough. And last year, I pretty much renounced all the buddy-cop action comedies I’d loved as a kid; I simply find them too distasteful now to support or revisit.
I had no idea you’re an economics major! All these years of supporting one another’s blogs, and we’re still learning things about each other! Extractive capitalism is very much tied to the neoliberal economic policies that took hold under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s and have flourished ever since throughout Republican and Democratic administrations alike — policies that are largely to blame for the vast wealth inequality and carbon emissions destroying the planet as well as most people’s quality of life. The Build Back Better Act, whose fate is very much in question as of this past weekend, is designed in part as a Rooseveltian corrective to those doctrines. Author Naomi Klein, whom I’ve reviewed on this blog, has written extensively about the subject of extractive capitalism in books like The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. I highly recommend her work.
Thank you, Jacqui, for being so supportive of this blog month after month, year after year. I wish you only the best of joy and creativity for the holidays and the new year to come.
Two rules to follow if you’re in a horror movie
1. Don’t take showers
2. Don’t have sex
The good news is that the more you follow Rule Number One, the easier it is to follow Rule Number Two
Haha! Indeed, Dell! The granddaddy of all slasher movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, firmly established rule no. 1!
Since Scream was Monster In The House, simply having another slasher show up means that the new guy is simply less scary; He’s trodding familiar ground (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/monster-mash-when-its-too-long-at-the-party/). Superhero might have been the way to go, along the lines of the comic book Hack/Slash
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I saw There’s Nothing Out There (1991) before I saw Scream. Similar premise: Genre-savvy guy and his friends are being hunted by something out of a horror movie. I never saw anything like it before. I loved it
However, since then there’s been a slew of “self-aware horror movies”. Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon (2006), Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil (2010), The Cabin In The Woods (2011). The aforementioned Hack/Slash is the same thing in comic-book form
And now these so-called “self-aware” movies bring nothing new to the table. It’s gotten to the point where I stopped watching one movie halfway through, because it was nothing but “self-aware” cliches. Ironically, it didn’t have the self-awareness to realize that
The first person to mention “on Star Trek the guy in the red shirt is toast” was clever. Making a joke off of that NOW is… not as clever
Agreed, Dell. I was more generous to the Scream sequels in “Monster Mash,” but in retrospect, they present the same conundrum as the endless Freddy and Jason installments. Hell, Scream even arguably painted itself into a tighter corner: Since there’s a different killer behind the Ghostface mask in every movie, each with a personal vendetta against Sidney Prescott, the series is essentially asking us to believe that untold people in Sidney’s life — including multiple blood relatives — are all murdering sociopaths. It strains credulity much the way Dude with a Problem sequels do: How many fucking times are we meant to believe John McClane found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I saw the fourth Scream exactly once, during its theatrical run, and remember absolutely nothing about it, save Sidney’s niece being the killer (I think). I recall thinking at the time that the movie had no idea if it wanted to satirize the torture-porn genre of the aughts (Saw, Hostel) or the slasher-movie reboots that Scream‘s success had helped inspire (Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, the Jackie Earle Haley version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.), and that it ultimately tried so hard to speak to all of those subgenres that it had nothing meaningful or memorable to say about any of them. If the new Scream were really clever — and I doubt it is — it would satirize all the post-reboot “legacy” sequels that ignore all but the first movie and go by the exact same title: Halloween (2018), Candyman (2021), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), and David Gordon Green’s forthcoming Exorcist remake-cum-sequel. But I suspect the new Scream will be yet another sad entry in that nostalgic trend rather than a subversive takedown of it.
I saw the first season of the Scream TV series, which was a conceptual reboot with no in-universe connection to the films. (I think there was a second season that followed the events of the first, and then a third season which was a direct sequel to the Craven films, but I never watched either of those.) I watched the Scream TV show not because I much cared about it, but rather to see if it could disprove a theory of mine: that slasher stories don’t work as episodic TV shows because the entire point is that these stories hold you in white-knuckled suspense for ninety (or so) minutes, ratcheting up the tension to near-unbearable levels… before blessedly providing cathartic release. That’s what a good horror story does: It works on your fears and then gives you the opportunity to release them! My hunch was that you couldn’t make that kind of story work in an episodic format, because the tension would deflate at the end of each episode, which is not how good horror works. I think the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer TV shows basically proved my hypothesis. (As does American Horror Story, by the way. Not a fan.) Horror shows tend to work better — though there are exceptions — when they employ the anthology format: Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Freddy’s Nightmares, Nightmare Cafe.
You know, I’ve never even heard of There’s Nothing Out There?! I’m going to see if I can’t hunt down a copy! It certainly seems as though the film’s director, Rolfe Kanefsky, had his finger on the same thing that Williamson did: a sense that the next phase of horror was going to incorporate an element of self-awareness about the genre itself. You can even detect a bit of this in The Lost Boys (as well as The Monster Squad, both from 1987), where the concept of vampires and their powers/vulnerabilities aren’t entirely foreign to those kids; they’ve read enough comics and watched enough movies to inform their approach to problem-solving. And it’s worth noting that before Scream, Craven himself metafictionalized the Freddy Krueger phenomenon in New Nightmare (1994). There was definitely a sense in the early 1990s that the genre had been taken as far as it could go, and the only thing left to do was deconstruct it.
The problem with the whole self-aware/self-referential thing is that it really only works once. I recall reading a review of Deadpool (I don’t remember where, so I can’t link to it) in which the critic noted that when you do a movie that lampoons the entire franchise — that effectively says, “Yeah, we know this is all bullshit” — you’ve completely undermined yourself when the next somber X-Men sequel comes out and you’re once again asking the audience to take it very seriously. Self-referential humor is an admission that a franchise and/or genre has been beaten into the ground. I certainly think Scream was more akin to a eulogy for the slasher genre rather than the revival Hollywood interpreted it to be. It was a way of saying, “Let’s move on to new stories.” That’s why I think the best sequel to Scream might have been Sidney in a romantic comedy, or Gale in a political thriller like All the President’s Men, or Dewey in a sendup of the buddy-cop comedy. You know? And now for something completely different!
At this point, I much prefer earnest stories like Ted Lasso to postmodern, self-referential metafiction. I can’t tell you how many rave reviews I read of John Scalzi‘s Redshirts only to be completely underwhelmed by it. We need to get out of this cycle of fiction that only exists to comment on either other fiction (Ready Player One) or itself (Jay and Silent Bob Reboot). Under Gen X, pop culture went from a form of self-expression to one of self-cannibalization.
Dell, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for all your wonderful contributions to this blog throughout the year. I wish you all good things in 2022. Happy New Year, my friend!
>slasher stories don’t work as episodic TV shows
Most “horror” series, Friday the 13th the Series (which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do w/ Jason or the movies), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kolchak, Supernatural, etc., tend to have episodes that are some variation of Whydunnit or Golden Fleece, or occasionally Superhero. A quick glance at my franchisablity rankings (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/monster-mash-when-its-too-long-at-the-party/#comment-2096) will tell you why these three are the most commonly used
Hope 2022 is amazing for you!
Yep, even the most influential and successful horror-based TV shows rarely if ever adhered to the Monster in the House story model. Consider the 1990s, which could in many ways be considered a Golden Age of TV horror: Most episodes of Tales from the Crypt were “Curse Bottle” stories (a bad person does a bad thing and, accordingly, gets his cosmic comeuppance); The X-Files episodes, both the standalone and the mytharc installments, could by and large be classified as “Fantasy Whydunit”; and both Buffy and Angel were textbook “Fantasy Superhero” series.
The entire point of a Monster in the House story is that we, the audience, are trapped in that “house” until the monster is defeated. You don’t get to take a break! Think about the absolute terror you felt on board the Orca or the Nostromo, with no way to get off either of those ships! Or recall how desperately you wanted to flee the Overlook Hotel or the MacNeil house the first time you saw The Shining and The Exorcist, but no, sorry — you’re here till this is over, baby!
I submit one cannot make a MITH work in serialized-television format because the storyteller is effectively releasing the audience from the “house” at the end of each episode, asking them to come back for the next installment, versus trapping them in the house with only one way out: to “survive” through the end of the story! That’s why The Exorcist TV show (2016) with Geena Davis as Regan didn’t work, nor did Damien (also 2016), the series based on The Omen. I would even argue — and I acknowledge this show has a rabid fan base — that American Horror Story: Murder House is a testament to extravagant style over coherent storytelling. (And subsequent installments became increasingly reliant on point-and-clap fan service over narrative logic, which seemed to be just fine as far as the show’s fans were concerned.) I bailed on From Dusk till Dawn: The Series midway through its first season because I was so bored with it, and this despite being a fan of Robert Rodriguez. (My wife and I even saw the original movie on our second date!)
Now, if some innovative storyteller were to actually make a MITH work as an episodic series (either limited or ongoing), I’m absolutely game, but as the storytellers increasingly view streaming services as an opportunity to make a “ten-hour movie,” their thinking is that they can just take the feature films they loved as children — even MITHs like The Exorcist and The Omen — and give you the same, only more. I’m all for narrative experimentation — I at least admire AHS for attempting something different and for tackling sociocultural themes that were a few years ahead of its time, even though I think its well-intentioned messaging got muddled by some orgiastically indulgent storytelling — but trying to turn Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer into a TV series is nothing more than nostalgic pandering to Millennials, no different than what Halloween Kills is meant to do for Xers. If we want to experiment with new forms and formats, I’m all for it — I’m the first one to appreciate the value in trying and failing — but that means leaving old narratives behind. We simply cannot move the art form of storytelling forward if we insist on telling stories that only gaze backward.
I always loved the Scream movies and thanks to your analysis, I love them even more! But the plot twist! Come on, don’t leave me hanging!
Thanks, Suzanne! I suspect, however, you’ll be disappointed by next month’s blog post since I’ve already “spoiled” that plot twist in our private correspondences!
Much of what you say here, Sean, causes me to think back on much older storytelling from centuries gone by. From Aesop’s fables (e.g., “The Rich Man and Tanner”) to “Henny-Penny” (aka “Chicken Little”) to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it seems cautionary tales about long been told about what seem to be strictly modern issues: acceptance by degrees of what once was not tolerated; the dangers of hysteria and group-think; the lengths to which people will deceive themselves in order to hold onto perceived status and more.
It is of note that these stories were written “for children.” And yet, at least in the case of Andersen’s story, a child was the only one honest enough (and not yet brainwashed) to speak the truth of things.
You’ve extracted and laid out for us many important insights from scream. And yet I would venture to say that 99.9% of people who watched it didn’t think this deeply about it—didn’t go away having the types of conversations that you and your now-wife were having. The majority of people just consumed it and moved on.
And yet any attempt to spell things out any more plainly through story is eschewed as moralistic, didactic or agenda-driven. Beneath us. Childish.
If you were to sit today’s average American down and somehow force them to listen to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” they’d sigh and say they know all that. They would see themselves as the smart one in the story, not someone who’d be so obviously fooled.
And yet… well, here we are, with people accepting ludicrous notions contrary to so-obvious-a-child-can-see-it facts, simply because an “Emperor” and his advisors and enough other self-serving people said something loudly enough and often enough and with sufficient wagging of jowls.
What’s to be done about it? I guess it all comes back to “whatever lies within my own choice to do.” For me, that is to share my own stories in new ways that hopefully help people accept old truths as relevant to them. For you, it’s continuing to do just what you’ve done here.
Erik,
First off: Happy New Year! Your visits to this blog are always most welcome!
Your comment here gets at the heart so many of the issues that have preoccupied this blog over the past two or three years, including the different ways children and adults perceive narrative, a topic I covered in “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″:
This obsession with making meaning of fiction as opposed to finding meaning in it — a practice called “fan forensics,” which I covered at length in “In the Multiverse of Madness” — is the reason so many grown adults treat the “shared cinematic universes” of Star Wars and Marvel with such studious solemnity. But in their neurotic effort to connect all the dots of those media universes, fans of these blockbusters often fail to interrogate the social values encoded in them:
Now, in the essay above, I assert that the socioeconomic philosophy of neoliberalism is embedded in virtually all the stories we consume. Here’s how that manifests, for instance, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
And that gets at the underlying theme of virtually all my blog posts since the start of the pandemic, where I found myself with a lot of time in quarantine to think about the stories we tell: Storytellers need to write with at least as much moral imagination as they do commercial imagination. Stories tend to either challenge the status quo — like Scream and Don’t Look Up do — or, far more commonly (alas), they affirm it, which is certainly the case with our superhero franchises and the Fast & Furious movies and all the nostalgic pandering to Xers and Millennials by way of “legacy” sequels and the like.
You are correct: Audiences are not always going to consciously analyze the moral lessons in the stories they consume; most will merely unconsciously absorb them. Therefore, the onus is on the storytellers to tell more socially responsible and morally imaginative stories, as I addressed in “The Road Back”:
Good question. A year ago, I interpreted the election of Joe Biden as a sign that we hungered once again for aspirational narratives, and the colossal success of Ted Lasso last year seemed to confirm that hunch. So, the storytellers have a profound opportunity — and commensurate responsibility — to envision a world worth living in, “a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred” (Alan Moore, Twilight of the Superheroes, [unpublished comic-book proposal, circa 1987]).
With hope in my heart for progress and prosperity in 2022, I wish you a very Happy New Year, Erik! Thanks, as always, for dropping by.
SPC
I haven’t watched any of the Scream movies, Sean. Horror creeps me out, since I believe in evil manifestations. Bwa ha ha ha. But some great quotes in there, especially about the movie industry’s impact on our culture of violence. Little brains are almost fully formed by age 5 (forgoing significant trauma), and then they change again at puberty. So is horror influential on childhood? I don’t believe it’s healthy for the little ones who are still forming templates related to how the world operates.
I will say that my husband and I have changed our behavior in some ways based on what we’ve watched on the tube. We will definitely not stop to kiss if we’re being chased by an ax murderer. 🙂
And I had to laugh at how you rounded into Reagan and Neoliberalism. Lol. It’s all connected, isn’t it? It’s all one giant story made up of smaller stories. 🙂
Happy New Year, Diana!
For me, a story’s genre, or even its MPA rating, is less important than the values encoded within its narrative. Scorsese’s R-rated movies are, by and large, hyperviolent, but they have a lot of nuanced things to say about violence. Contrast that with too many action movies and police thrillers, in which violence is used to titillate, or to affirm patriarchal authority, and/or it has no appreciable consequences. Scream is violent, yes, but it’s not exploitive the way so many of the slasher films it satirizes are; its violence is deeply, and purposefully, uncomfortable.
All my friends with young children allow them to watch the Marvel movies on the premise that they’re merely “harmless entertainment”… but are they? As I demonstrated in my reply to Erik above, Marvel promulgates — even celebrates — neoliberal values, and it masterfully encourages and exploits capitalistic consumption: Every new offering in the franchise is an advertisement for the next one. Star Wars is just as bad, peddling in anti-democratic propaganda under the guise of escapist space opera. Those movies, produced by Disney, are ostensibly appropriate for children — by the arbitrary precepts of the MPA — but I sure as hell wouldn’t want my own kids, if I had any, unconsciously absorbing their pernicious messaging.
Much more so than content, the metric we use to judge which stories are appropriate for our children — and for ourselves — should be their moral agenda. But that requires prescreening and evaluating what we show our children, and who’s going to make time for that, especially in a culture of automatic and accelerating behaviors? To say nothing of that fact that most of us, as I assert in the essay above, have ourselves been systematically and unknowingly indoctrinated with neoliberal values by the Hollywood entertainment we’ve spent a lifetime consuming. All of us — even the storytellers — have become unwitting agents of consumer capitalism.
Well, not all of us. If you haven’t already watched it, check out Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up on Netflix. Now, there’s a movie with moral imagination! Whereas most dystopian stories are libertarian wish-fulfillment fantasies and/or disaster porn, Don’t Look Up aspires to be the most noble type of science fiction: the self-preventing prophecy. It’s a wake-up call for a culture being strategically distracted from the climate emergency — to say nothing of the ongoing democracy crisis — by cable news, by corporate politicians, and by techno-capitalists.
Anyway, I don’t mean to soapbox! I just love the robust conversations this blog inspires. To that end, I appreciate your comment, Diana, and that you took the time to read the post despite never having seen any of the Scream films. Here’s to your creative prosperity in 2022!
Sean
When I watched Freddy vs. Jason in the theatre, some guy had brought his little boys. And by “little” I mean maybe literately five to eight years old
The man asked the boys if they knew who Freddy was. The younger one said, “He’s like Wolverine! He’s got claws!”
The man did insist the boys cover their eyes during any nude scenes, though…
Right. Well, by that point, Freddy wasn’t the villain of A Nightmare on Elm Street, was he? He had long since been promoted to series protagonist. Those later sequels were less about how the teenagers outsmarted Freddy than the creatively grotesque manner in which he killed them. As such, the series got progressively campier (with The Dream Master and The Dream Child) before they killed him off for good (Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare) and then intellectually deconstructed him (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare). By then, the only thing left to do was a franchise crossover, which was still — can you imagine? — a relatively novel concept a mere twenty years ago.
So, I can absolutely see some middle-aged dad who’d grown up on Freddy, perhaps initially scared by him but gradually desensitized one hokey-jokey sequel at a time, taking his kids to Freddy vs. Jason and not really giving much thought to the message of the original movie, which had long since been buried under a mound of increasingly exploitive follow-ups. As Wes Craven himself once noted, “The fact that they made Freddy more and more jokey took him farther and farther away from that child-molester thing that just kind of sticks to you in a way that maybe you don’t like.”
I was FaceTiming with an old friend earlier this week — I guy I’ve known since we were in grade school — and he and I used to watch and love the old 21 Jump Street TV show back in the day. He was telling me that he recently put on the 2012 Jonah Hill Jump Street to watch with his ten-year-old son — bonding time — and was horrified to realize that it is a hard-R comedy spoof that plays more like a Todd Phillips movie than the original issue-driven Johnny Depp series. Over the protests of his son, he was forced to turn the movie off during a joke about fellatio!
Now, I actually quite enjoyed Freddy vs. Jason and the 21 Jump Street movie for what they were, but they don’t have meaning for me the way the source materials do. (I didn’t, however, care for 22 Jump Street, which was too self-consciously meta for its own good.) I enjoy them the way I enjoy an SNL sketch of a popular movie, you know? It’s amusing, and perhaps even clever in places, but it doesn’t stick to you. Spoofs are easy, but good satire — like Mel Brooks and Spinal Tap and Scream — requires real skill, as I hope this blog post demonstrates.
And when a series like A Nightmare on Elm Street goes on to long, it eventually becomes a parody of itself; I am hard-pressed to think of any long-running franchise that didn’t eventually devolve into some measure of self-parody: Lethal Weapon, Indiana Jones, Raimi’s Spider-Man, the Burton/Schumacher Batman cycle. From its reasonably credible origins (the Connery years), James Bond has been stuck in an interminable cycle of careening from campy (Moore) to brooding (Dalton) to campy (Brosnan) to brooding (Craig). Rocky got silly before Stallone course-corrected with Rocky Balboa and the Creed spin-offs, and Rambo got wildly ridiculous with each steroidal sequel only to redeem its gritty reputation with the belated fourth movie… and then spiraled into Is this a joke? absurdity again with Last Blood!
The trouble sequels get into — and Scream is a prime example of this — is that they follow the formula established by the original film, but they don’t have anything (or at least as much) to say. They’re not about anything, other than (perhaps) themselves. (You and I were just discussing this very subject on Twitter, Dell, with regard to Psych.) We go to see these movies out of brand loyalty only, which is what makes the experience so empty. And supporting a brand, as opposed to experiencing a story, is the very definition of consumer capitalism. It’s what our transmedia mega-franchises do so efficiently. And it’s destructive to our culture.
I cannot tell you how many Gen-Zers I know who loudly and proudly declare themselves anti-capitalists — as if such a label were a fashion accessory and not a carefully considered, deeply felt worldview — as they scroll hypnotically through TikTok, caution their friends against No Way Home spoilers, and actively aspire to be social-media influencers. But their parents have allowed them to consume neoliberal narratives that they accept as gospel, even when those narratives fly conspicuously in the face of their stated beliefs. They don’t see the discrepancy, though. I didn’t see it myself, liberal, enlightened New Yorker though I thought I was, all those years I spent gobbling down pro-police propaganda. But I see it now, and I have come to believe that we are never going to emerge from the crises of our time — the climate breakdown, the loss of biodiversity, the ongoing assault on democracy — until the storytellers step up and start telling more morally imaginative stories. That is our burden and our privilege. If we don’t interrogate long-cherished narratives and mythologies, who will?
(That’s why I love this blog: Where else can a brief comment about Freddy vs. Jason inspire a long-winded existential meditation? You won’t find shit like this anywhere else on the Internet, folks!)
I loved, loved Don’t Look Up. What a great movie, and moral imagination with a hammer! My husband and I were giggling about how happy we were that everyone died in the end. The wake-up call wouldn’t have been a wake-up call otherwise. 🙂
Exactly, Diana. Despite the (inevitable) ending, Don’t Look Up is in no way cynical; on the contrary, it’s one of the most humanist movies I’ve seen in a long time. The messiah-exaltation of the Star Wars and Marvel movies — that’s cynical.
(And through his portrayal of the absolutely loathsome billionaire Peter Isherwell, Mark Rylance at least somewhat redeemed himself for his turn as deified techno-capitalist James Donovan Halliday in Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably despicable adaptation of Ernest Cline’s equally hateful and evil novel Ready Player One.)