The Rules of Reviving a Genre: ‘Scream’ and Postmodern Cinema
By: Jon Alexander
Tags: Movies, Horror, Film, Art, Postmodernism

Craven’s depiction of fandom can also explain the film’s sustained success. Make no mistake, Scream was made for horror cinephiles. In fact, it’s one of those postmodern films that one needs to “get” in order to truly appreciate, like Pulp Fiction or Austin Powers. Without a background in popular culture and visual culture, the self-awareness will escape the viewer. Whether it’s Freddie Krueger, Tom Cruise, Halloween (1978), Hitchcock, Sharon Stone, or Munch, Scream is the kind of film that cinephiles discuss at coffee shops for hours, making lists and charts devoted to the film’s allusions, which become symbolic manifestations of their grasp on popular and visual culture.

Just as Scream is a film for cinephiles, it is also a film about cinephiles. The scene in which Randy (Jamie Kennedy) interrupts a group screening of Halloween in order to explain the “certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie” is a perfect example.

What’s memorable about this scene, in addition to its intertextuality and self-awareness, is its depiction of obsessive fandom. The scene portrays a group of teenagers who form a community based upon their mutual love of horror cinema. With popcorn in abundance and videos of their favorite horror films to choose from, this communal experience becomes an event.

The rules of horror, according to Randy, are: 1. Never have sex. 2. Never drink or do drugs. 3. Never say, “I’ll be right back,” because, as Randy puts it, “you won’t be back.”

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Craven ends up breaking these rules with Scream. For example, Sidney has sex toward the end of the film, but she survives each Scream installment. The second rule does not apply, as most people at the party have a beer in their hand, and not all of them are killed in the film. Finally, the third rule does not hold, as one of the characters Stu (Mathew Lillard) jokingly says, “I’ll be right back” to the group, and we find out later in the film when he returns that he is one of the killers. It’s appropriate to assume that real-life fans would obsess over the ways in which Randy alters the rules, as I have just done.

Rather than representing fandom in a favorable light, however, Craven shows how it can be taken to the extreme, and the ways an obsessive love of cinema can lead to hyper-reality.

Case in point: The murderous methods of Ghostface and how he treats actual murder (at least in the filmic world of Scream) as cinematic. In the opening scene, he asks the film’s first victim Casey (Drew Barrymore) to answer various questions about movie trivia, and her level of cinephilia determines whether or not she will die. Here is a brief transcript of the scene:

“Name the killer in Friday the 13th.” “Jason! Jason! Jason!” “I’m sorry. That’s the wrong answer!” “No, it’s not. No it’s not. It was Jason.” “Afraid not. No way.” “Listen, it was Jason! I saw that movie 20 goddamn times.” “Then you should know that Jason’s mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was the original killer. Jason didn’t show up until the sequel. I’m afraid that’s the wrong answer.”

A game of horror movie trivia gone wrong in ‘Scream’

The exchange between Casey and Ghostface demonstrates the dangerous implications of fandom, and the ways it can lead to the hyper-real. Ghostface clearly has an understanding of horror cinema, and he deliberately asks Casey a trick question that she must answer in order to spare her life. She gives the wrong answer, and one can imagine a true horror fan watching the scene and thinking that any self-respecting cinephile would have known that Mrs. Voorhees is the original killer in Friday the 13th.

Ghostface’s interrogation separates those who are in the know from those who are not, but at what cost? Is knowledge of popular culture really a matter of life and death?

Craven and Williamson seem to address these questions with Scream, as the killers are revealed to be two teenagers obsessed with movies. Billy and Stu, we come to find, have collaborated in the murders, and they learn all of their tricks, so to speak, from horror cinema. Below is a brief excerpt from an exchange between Sidney, Stu, and Billy after their identities are revealed:

“You sick fucks. You’ve seen one too many movies.” “Now Sid, don’t you blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!”

Obsessive fandom in ‘Scream’

Billy and Stu are unable to separate the world of movies from reality, and as such, they treat actual murder as if it is a game, and they learn how to play it from the horror films they watch. It seems, then, that Craven is critical of fandom and its potential to overtake the cinephile’s consciousness to the point where film cannot be distinguished from reality.