Blame the Media!

Rating: 8/10 (20 May 2010)

Scream was a cutting-edge film, the first horror movie in which the characters had seen other horror movies, knew all the conventions, and didn't make the barefaced boo-boos without letting us know that's what they were. In Scream 2, the characters have seen a movie about the first killings, and are caught once again in a slasher fantasy. Like all sequels, this one is a see-through endeavor to cash in on the original, but, naturally, it knows it is, and features its own educated discourse on sequels. The finding is that a mere handful of sequels have been as good as the originals; the characters particularly like Aliens and The Godfather Part II. As for Scream 2, it's, well, about as good as the original. Both movies use a narrative contraption for making the audience flinch and gasp and grasp their pillows. The shocks this time come from a mad slasher in an oddly unsettling Halloween ghost mask, who ambushes a slew of college freshmen who lived through the initial murders. The killer is also concerned with such hangers-on as a TV newsman and a physically and emotionally wounded former deputy sheriff.
Kevin Williamson's basis this time is that violence is swiftly rendered into commercial ritual by the media: Because he is doing that very thing in Scream 2, there are paradoxes within paradoxes here. The movie is so expressive about what it's doing, in fact, that you can't knock it on that basis because it gets there first. Do movies prompt people to commit violent acts? Scream 2 seemed to think so, or is that a mocking position, to make the movie more effective? Have movies like this, by enlightening its audience to the traditions and ridiculous banalities of horror films, pacified their violence and make them less apt to be persuaded by the violence? Now there's an interesting thought.
The movie's brilliant beginning sequence involves a theatrical premiere of Stab, a movie based on the killings in the first film, and at the screening two audience members are, well, see for yourself. Soon the slasher has moved to a neighboring campus, where survivors including Sidney Prescott are students, and the wounded Deputy Riley has found a job as a security guard. Also loitering is TV newswoman Gale Weathers, who---this is priceless satire---covered the first murders and wrote a best-seller about them that became "Stab" and has thus influenced the new murders. Also brooding around is Cotton, accused by Gale in the first film but found innocent, and now urging a second helping of his 15 minutes of fame. There is no way to predict the identity of the killer, and everyone who acts leery is (almost) certain to be innocent.
The Williamson screenplay employs the horror scaffold as a rocket platform for considerable parody. I'd like to have seen him work on a more serious film. When Courteney Cox, playing the TV newswoman, is asked about her nude photos on the Internet, she replies, "It was just my head. It was Jennifer Aniston's body." And a killer says he wants to be caught, because he's already determined his plan of action: "The movies made me do it," he'll proclaim, and he plans to have Bob Dole as a witness for the defense. "I'll get Cochran!" he boasts. "The Christian Coalition will pay for my defense!" Wes Craven was made to direct the Scream films. One of the most productive of horror filmmakers, he made The Hills Have Eyes and the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and was already headed in the same metatextual trajectory as Williamson when he wrote and directed Wes Craven's New Nightmare in 1994, which took his own series' blurring of reality and nightmares to a new extreme, Freddy crossing over to attack the filmmakers in the "real" world. There's a difference here in the Scream movies where an all-new slasher killer causes the post-modern irony to be more disguised, and what might be the most ironic thing about these ever more ironic movies is that it resuscitated the entire genre. Spawning countless imitations, the joke is on them!