Earlier this month Alexander Chee wrote an article for Guernica Magazine about Dracula which proposed that some of the evil of Dracula was the sublimated eroticism that Stoker felt toward Walt Whitman. This article principally focused on the monster as a figure for interrogating evil and, midway through the article Chee recommends that his readers, ” Ask yourself what you might really fear, and why.”
Monstrosity is a threat. When I wrote about the desire to be monstrous in Cabal I said that the Nightbreed dance along the edge of the indescribable because they are everything that we can not bear to be. The monster is tied to the Jungian idea of the shadow – the idea that we, collectively as a culture, have parts of ourselves we can’t bear to look at. Even without the blood and the frenzy of the Nightbreed (who we should remember do, in fact, eat people) the very repression of the Nightbreed is a threat. They reveal what we all wish to conceal by their being.
The monster is not simply the inhuman. A chicken is inhuman. A rock is inhuman but neither chickens nor rocks are threats to humanity. We might sympathize with the chicken, kept caged, surrendering its young or being force-fed into a premature adolescence and slaughtered for food. But there is nothing of the monster about the chicken. Monstrosity is not simply being outcast or othered. While a monster is an othered figure this is a simplification of the monster. In No Future, Lee Edelman introduces his text to say, “Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it.” This negativity he describes is much like the Shadow in that it is grounded in rejection – a rejection of futurity itself.
Certain other critics have engaged with Chee’s work and seem to misunderstand it somewhat by proposing that Chee’s description of the “literary gossip” of a meeting between Stoker, Whitman and Wilde that never happened is the root of the homophobia of Dracula. In fact Chee alludes to the homoeroticism of Dracula by pointing out that, while Stoker and Wilde met Whitman separately, Stoker’s correspondence with Whitman was deeply homoerotic. If we are to treat Dracula as a homophobic text we should situate the monstrosity of the Count in this form of the Jungian shadow – a negation that fears to look at the monstrosity that lurks within the subject, the threat of the self as a self-subversion.
To the extent that Edelman invites the queer subject to embrace the monster it is not to reach out to the liberal majority and seek empathy. It’s to make, of a political body, an explicit threat: we want no future like this. You cannot cow us with the threat to some imagined child.
Sympathy and identification with the monster is complicated when we begin to treat people as being dividual. In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover is very careful with the idea of identification, saying, of identification with a character that it is fluid: “competing figures resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche.” A person might identify both with the slasher-killer and the final girl. As Chee points out it’s not uncommon to root for the monster and yet we still feel satisfaction when he is dispatched. We enjoy watching Freddy dispatch teens in increasingly absurd ways and we enjoy watching Nancy overcome him in the end. Both the part that delights in Freddy’s sadism and in Nancy’s flagellant heroism are elements of the psyche of the audience.
When examining the figure of the monster and the question of sympathy we might be well-advised to consider Frankenstein. There is that old joke that first you realize that Frankenstein is the doctor and not the monster but then you realize that the doctor is, in fact, the monster of the story, and that’s true. Doctor Frankenstein is a monstrous figure. But his creation, in full awareness of his senses, murders William and blames Justine. He murders Elizabeth, he kills and he glories in his kills. Frankenstein’s creature is the victim of Frankenstein’s promethean hubris, he is a subject with whom we can easily sympathize. He is also a hot-blooded killer who enjoys killing.
We don’t seek out identification with the monster for the purpose of comfort. Another key example is Knife + Heart. There is a scene at a burlesque in which an elderly woman begs a monster to couple with her and the monster warns her that in the throes of passion it will consume her. She pleads the monster to do so and the monster rips her apart. This relationship of monstrous attraction is highly reflective of the bitter, collapsing and abusive relationship between the protagonist Anne and her ex-lover Loïs. Anne, watching the woman circle the monster, beg for her death in ecstasy and passion, sees herself as the monster and Loïs as the victim who cannot separate herself and, in doing so, gives herself a kind of justification for her own abusiveness. But there is another monster in Knife + Heart – the revenant-like killer who stalks the gay porn scene of 1979 Paris. And he, too, is a victim whose story demands sympathy. He was a gay man maimed and possibly murdered by a homophobic father; he watched his lover burned to death in front of him. There is a demand for sympathy just to understand his murders. But in the end we cannot help but also feel sympathy for the patrons of a porno theater who cut him down.
Monsters aren’t nice.
The idea of the identity of the monster, the shadow-self that is rejected by society, is a critical lens for understanding the subaltern. But monsters have claws and fangs. Monsters do terrible things. As both Lee Edelman and Karl Marx remind us, when it is our turn we will make no apologies for the terror. The Nightbreed of Midian want no integration into the human community and they still eat flesh and drink blood. When we want monstrosity we must want to be monsters not because they are subaltern but because they are a threat. There is no need to invoke the monster simply to sympathize with the subaltern. All you need for that is a functioning heart. The monster is a reminder that some forms of minority are subaltern because they threaten to overturn an old order and replace it with nothing that can be recognized.
Terrifier 2 is a horror movie for the horror fan who thinks they’ve seen it all. A long film, clocking in at 2 hours and 18 minutes, it is nonetheless so impeccably paced that you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t check. This small-budget horror movie (budget estimates at $250,000) is yet another entry (along with Skinamarink and Psycho Goreman) that demonstrates how much inventive and truly alarming horror can be conjured without blockbuster budgets.
Anchoring the film are two standout performances: Lauren LaVera as Sienna and David Howard Thornton as the capering Art the Clown. LaVera is a very new actor with few credits to her name but I expect her to join the ranks of Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega and Samara Weaving among the new generation of high-talent scream queens on the back of her performance here as a grieving and anxious artist struggling with her family’s recent and tragic losses and the unwanted attention of an immortal murder-clown. Thornton, meanwhile, has some significant prior experience in television although much of this is off the back of his turn as Art the Clown in Terrifier (2016). He brings such impeccable manic energy to his performance as Art that this demon clown should be treated among the rank of the slasher killer greats like Freddy and the Ghostface Killer. Art is a mute and un-killable force of pure malevolence who, despite never speaking a word, manages to give one of the most expressive performances in horror cinema. Please believe me that favorable comparisons to Robert Englund and Roger L. Jackson are entirely apropos.
The film picks up where the prior Terrifier movie left off, with the cannibalistic clown awakening from his suicide at the conclusion of the prior film and murdering a coroner before escaping the morgue. He makes his way to a laundromat where he meets his unnerving psychopomp – “The Little Pale Girl” – a sometimes invisible child clown who acts as his guide and accomplice.
From there Sienna and Art’s existences will collide in a conflict that leaves a bloody trail of torture and extreme gore across the social circle of the young woman.
The special effects here are a treat, if you have the stomach for them. Terrifier 2 has been referred to as one of the goriest films of all time and, with a scene in which one of Sienna’s friends (Allie) has her eye cut off, is scalped, has an arm cut off, is given caustic chemical burns and then subjected to a form of slow-slicing torture, all while horribly alive, marks this film as one not for the faint of heart or the soft of stomach. But this is a movie, more than any other I’ve seen, that puts lie to the idea of “torture porn.” Certainly torture is depicted. It is depicted graphically and at length. Damien Leone, the director, was also responsible for the special effects (all practical, of course) and makeup in this film. He is a remarkable artist of the macabre and the disgusting. But part of what makes him effective is that the terrible violence depicted on the screen never seems to encourage any sort of prurient pornographic titillation. In fact, Leone has made statements in the past which indicate that part of the project of Terrifier 2 is to critique the tendency of audiences to root for the killer in slasher movies. Art the Clown is charismatic in a horrible and vile way. He’s also fully inhuman, cruel beyond measure and petty to boot.
In a middle scene of the film Sienna is at a Halloween store to replace a costume element that was destroyed in a fire (more on that later) and Art follows her to the store where he hangs around leering and making an ass of himself. He grabs a bike horn, one of those ones with the black rubber bulb that go “oogah” and he approaches Sienna and squeezes it in her ear over and over. The clerk at the store tells him to stop and Sienna makes her escape. Art immediately locks the store and murders the clerk for daring to speak back to him. It’s entirely evident through the narrative framing that, even as you are captivated by the cannibal clown, you should be rooting firmly for Sienna to overcome the un-killable foe.
Of course this raises a few questions: 1) why would an artist depict such torture? The torture of Allie by Art is a far more drawn out affair than many high-water marks of cinematic torture (such as the hammer scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). In fact it’s so extreme that it belabors believability that anyone could survive such abuse at all. As a result no claim to verisimilitude can be made here. This isn’t representing torture as it is in the world. In the world if you did to a person what Art the Clown did to Allie the victim would die of shock and blood loss far before he was done with her. So if it isn’t there for prurient purposes why display it at all? 2) What sort of audience would enjoy watching such a movie?
It would be all too easy for me to gesture, as I often do, in the direction of Georges Bataille and Story of The Eye, to discuss the Freudian proximity of Thanatos and Eros and to argue that art has no moral imperative to be comforting. I could go from there to a discussion of limit experiences and the idea of horror as a cinema of discomfort. For my kind readership this is all rather old-hat by now though, isn’t it? To do this would be to disregard the label of “pornography” as irrelevant and to play the Nietzschean “Yes Sayer” who denies nothing. Except this would be doing a disservice to this film because the truth is that the gore isn’t prurient; there’s nothing sexy about it at all. It’s almost pure and distilled abjection. And it occludes a key theme of the movie: recognition.
Before we talk too much about recognition, let us briefly refresh ourselves on the figure of the final girl. In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover describes the Final Girl thus: “the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B).”
Much as Clover is confident that Craven read Freud I am pretty confident that Leone has read Clover because much of Clover’s later interrogation of the gendered nature of a final girl’s heroism, focusing on the feminine coding of abjection, the gender-play of the final girl vis her role as an investigator and the use of gendered gazes (with a male gaze applied to the killings inverted when the final girl enters an investigative mode and gazes upon the killer) is problematized by the film. So I guess we haven’t entirely escaped Freud. But in this film it falls to the final girl to run to the rescue of a male character – her brother Jonathan, kidnapped by Art the Clown to lure her to him. Sienna doesn’t look death in the face alone. She does it with her little brother. But, yet, a gendered problematic remains a valuable lens to look at this film from. While Art the Clown happily murders men and women alike and while both Sienna and her brother take the position of “final girls” within the story this is unquestionably a film about the violence men visit upon women and the consequences of that trauma.
Throughout the film we discover that Sienna’s father, who died shortly before the start of the film, suffered from a brain tumor. This gave him prophetic visions related to Art the Clown and his metaphysically bonded relationship to Sienna. But it also made him violently abusive and self-destructively violent. He died, burning to death, in a crashed car. This legacy of sickness, dark transformation and abuse has left traumatic scars on Sienna’s family. Her mother, Barbara, is fragile, drinking and throwing back pills to keep things together while snapping variously at Sienna or Jonathan and refusing to believe them when they repeatedly tell her that they believe the various misfortunes that have befallen them to be the doing of the clown. Jonathan has become obsessed with serial killers and other dark figures of fiction and history. At the start of the film Sienna suspects her brother might be a bit of a sociopath. As the high weirdness that surrounds Art the Clown invades their situation Sienna’s suspicions of her brother subside; but her mother’s suspicions are heightened.
Sienna is fragile. She is also taking valium to keep level and, despite this, is prone to anxiety attacks and depressive ideation. Sienna actually does very little of the “investigative gazing” that Clover describes. She, much like Sidney Prescott, would prefer to avoid the killer. Unfortunately she is no more able to do so than Prescott.
You may have noticed I’ve mentioned Craven’s oeuvre a fair bit so far. I would propose that Wes Craven’s New Nightmare should be treated as a key influence on this film but it also contains much of the original Nightmare on Elm Street and of Scream in its DNA. This manifests in a variety of ways: early scenes in the film treat the idea of a slasher-killer fandom in much the same way that Wes Craven’s New Nightmare does. Sienna is, as I mentioned before, a final girl in the mold of Sidney in how she subverts the final girl trope – although there is no Gail Weathers equivalent to create a whole final girl in the way the first four Scream movies did. There is also something of a spiritual tie between her and Art the Clown that is evocative of the relationship between Nancy and Freddy Krueger. Art the Clown also demonstrates the ability to invade Sienna’s dreams, and some of the actions taken in dreams manifest in the waking world (in her dream Art the Clown attacks Sienna with a flame thrower which she parries with a gladius gifted to her by her father. The flames burn her bedroom in the waking world while leaving the sword remarkably unscathed. The Freudian idea of the sword as a phallus passed from father to daughter would likely catch Clover’s notice, especially with how it blends the waking and sleeping world).
But while Art is tied to Sienna in a metaphysical way, the specifics of why remain unclear. And this is where we can finally bid farewell to the Final Girl and talk properly about recognition of the other and the Master-Slave dialectic. (Yes I know Hegel calls it the lord-bondsman dialectic for the pedants in my audience but, let’s be honest, any non-Hegel scholars who know about it would be likely to use Master-Slave as the language.)
So in brief the Master-Slave dialectic is a parable from The Phenomenology of Spirit regarding the construction of self-awareness via the process of mutual recognition by unequal entities. Hegel describes two people coming into conflict. This conflict will proceed to a struggle to the death but, crucially, self-awareness fails if one party kills the other. Instead the lord must subordinate the bondsman by force. However this subordination is unstable and ultimately the master discovers that he is entirely dependent upon the recognition (and labour) of the bondsman while the bondsman, via the immediacy of his labour, is able to come to a place of more authentic self-recognition. This ultimately makes the lord the slave of the bondsman via his oppression of them. While Hegel saw this as suggesting that liberation occurred through the process of servitude Marx turned this on its head and used this dialectic as a basis for describing class struggle, whereby the stakes become not self-recognition so much as class self-liberation from servitude.
Art the Clown has a fraught relationship with recognition. The mute clown stands out, regularly making an ass of himself when he appears in public. He strips naked in a laundromat and silently laughs at newspaper articles about car crashes. He hangs out in the Halloween store mugging and playing with crap. He has bad manners. But, for all Art tries to attract attention to himself, he responds with lethal force to anyone who actually recognizes him. When he’s in the laundromat a sleeping man wakes up and sees him playing paddy-cake with an invisible partner (The Little Pale Girl) and he kills the man for seeing his display. At the Halloween store he kills the clerk who threatens to call the cops on him. When Jonathan sees him and the Little Pale Girl playing with a dead opossum he chases Jonathan.
“Just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition. Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that isn’t for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say, they put an end to themselves, and are done away with as extremes wanting to be for themselves, or to have an existence of their own,” Hegel says. And so, within the context of this dialectic Art’s tendency to murder anyone who observes him prevents him from any sort of independent experience.
To be blunt: this film tells us that, without a final girl, the slasher killer cannot live. Art the Clown is immortal. He cannot be killed. But likewise the text of the movie is that he cannot kill Sienna. She arrives to rescue her brother, adorned in her warrior-angel costume to find that Art has stolen the sword her father gave her – the sword she refused to take up earlier in the movie – and when Art stabs her with the sword and drowns her something magical happens and she is resurrected seemingly by a sympathetic tie to the blood on her blade. Just as there is no death for the killer so too is there no death for the heroine.
Sienna, occupying the position of the bondsman within this dialectic, overcomes Art, beheading him with her father’s magic sword, but, much as the Hegelian idea of history depends on a continuous process of these dialectical arrangements, so too does this film end ambiguously as the Pale Little Girl retrieves Art’s severed head and as his only surviving victim from the first film, a deformed mad woman marred by his cannibal hunger, gives birth to his living head.
Clearly this is a deeply odd movie. What it isn’t is a prurient one. Terrifier 2 traffics in extremes of abjection in part to demonstrate the necessity of the final girl to the slasher killer. Much of the focus of the deconstructive horror wave starting in the 1990s has been to interrogate the interiority of the victim but this often leaves the villain not much more than a foil. Even the best slashers of this subgenre (by which I mean our old friend the Ghostface Killer) ultimately amount to not much more than this. But, for all these attempt to deconstruct the early slashers they riff off of, this leaves them still confined pretty clearly within the Freudian bounds Clover set in her seminal work. Craven may have been responding to Clover in Scream but he never succeeded in getting past her.
Clover said here’s what the final girl is and Craven said “and here’s what that can mean.” Leone explodes this via a strange, bloody and surreal experiment poking not only at the same gender puzzles Clover speaks of but also of something simultaneously phenomenological but also deeply mystical.
So what kind of people would like a movie as disgusting as this one? Me for one. But more broadly this is a movie for people who love horror and also its critical interrogation. Much like Craven’s later works Terrifier 2 is as much a work of criticism as it is a work of art. It interrogates the limits of what has become a staid trope of a genre now in its fifth decade and asks not “what is this thing” but rather “why do we keep coming back to this thing?”
Sienna is the immortal final girl. She is the form of this trope raised up not just for deconstructive interrogation but for reintegration into our own collective spirit as horror fans. This collapses the comfortable distance Clover describes between a (male) audience and the (female) victim and gives immediacy to her struggle as part of a historically bound dialectical process. There may not be any more of a teleological end to the final girl than there is to history but, by showing us how Art the Clown is incapable of recognizing himself without her, by showing us that nobody needs the Final Girl more completely than the slasher killer, Terrifier 2 gives horror fans that one thing they often crave most: something completely new.
The four Scream movies contain both the best movies in the slasher genre and represent the most consistently good movies in the slasher genre. As with a lot of auteurial projects part of what allowed this consistence in quality in Scream is the involvement of a consistent team as Wes Craven directed all four, Kevin Williamson wrote three of four, Patrick Lussier edited three of four, Peter Deming was director of photography for three out of four and Marco Beltrami provided the score for all four films, On the other side of the camera, quite unusually for a slasher franchise, the lead cast remained consistent across the four movies with Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Roger L. Jackson and David Arquette reprising their roles in every successive film. In short these movies aren’t excellent because Craven was a singular genius but because a central core of creative workers came together to make something good and kept doing so. I say this because I will be treating the scream movies as very specifically auteurial throughout this review and I want to avoid a reductive conclusion that this is something that can be collapsed just to Craven or even to Craven and Williamson.
The scream series also charts the arc of satire at the end of its life in Hollywood. This wasn’t intentional – Scream didn’t kill satire, it was rather the last great flourishing of it. After all, the shattering of the American self-image of the 1990s in 2001 effectively forbade Hollywood from ever doing something as introspective as Scream again.
Scream: The rules of horror and the unexamined
The subject of satire in the initial Scream movie is reasonably evident. The Scream team were not being subtle in what is, effectively a reasonably straightforward criticism of the slasher genre. It’s become somewhat commonplace to read Scream as being largely a filmic equivalent to Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Having the kids of Scream being aware of slasher cinema in specific to the point where Randy is able to declare the rules: “you can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs, and never (ever, under any circumstances) say “I’ll be right back”.” But it’s interesting the extent to which Randy’s rules for survival elide the role of the final girl considering the extent to which the text of scream becomes an interrogation of that trope in particular. Scream is gesturing desperately toward this absence, telling us, look the kids in this movie, watching these movies, missed something.
And so, of course the killer is somebody close to the final girl. Of course she’s been pre-selected to be the final girl not because she followed some byzantine rules of horror but because the killer wanted to hurt her, in particular. The idea of the slasher killer as a moral arbiter is shown to be a bald lie by Scream as Billy lashes out at Sidney and her friends for his mother’s departure. Casey and Steven didn’t break any slasher movie rules. Nor was anything about Casey’s presentation in the opening sequence indicative of any kind of moral failing. She’s making popcorn for a quiet night in for goodness sakes. Principal Himbry is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tatum is getting a beer, yes, for one of the killers, because he asked her to do so in order to present the opportunity to murder her. Kenny is also just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rather, as Clover suggests, the killers of Scream are boy-children whose all-too-oedipal (Clover points out, of Craven, that, “at least some horror filmmakers read Freud,”) sexual hang-ups inform their crimes. Billy is mad because Sidney’s promiscuous mother seduced his father. Stu is along for the ride because of a fawning libidinal investment in Billy’s approval. Also in line with Clover’s assessment of the formal elements of the slasher genre, the boys use a knife. Right up until they don’t. It’s an interesting, and regularly repeated, characteristic that the final stand-offs of Scream films almost always involve a handgun entering into what has, until then, been a knife fight.
But, of course, all this problematizes Clover’s thesis a bit. After all, “In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction,” but the only person who is killed for a sexual transgression is Maureen Prescott, murdered off-screen before the action of the film has ever begun. But this is not so much a contradiction as it is a filmic way of under-lining what Clover gets at a little bit later, “always the main ones, die—plot after plot develops the motive—because they are female. Just as Norman Bates’s oedipal psychosis is such that only female victims will do, so Michael’s sexual anger toward his sister (in the Halloween series) drives him to kill her—and after her a string of sister surrogates.”
This fits the nature of the killings depicted well. Scream carefully balances male and female on-screen killings. Of six victims, three are men and three are women. But as I mentioned above, of the men, only Steven is deliberately targeted by the killers. An he is only targeted because of his relationship to their principal target, Casey. He’s killed so that they can terrify her before they kill her.
And so this brings us full-circle back to Sidney, the final girl, and how her specific abjection is deployed by Scream. Clover says that the final girl is, “abject terror personified, ” and this tracks for this poor girl who is pinballed between possible suspects across the film, uncertain and increasingly afraid as her friends die for her to discover. There is a ritualistic element at play. Much as Steven is killed explicitly to frighten Casey, every death by the hand of the Ghostface killers is orchestrated explicitly to frighten Sidney. It’s not enough for them to kill her, they need her to suffer.
Billy justifies this as wanting Sidney to feel an abandonment like his. As if her friends abandoning her into death will balance the pain of her mother’s loss. But it’s ultimately not revenge. Sidney didn’t do anything to hurt Billy even by accident – she fingers Cotton Weary as her mother’s killer, letting him off the hook for his original revenge-murder. And, of course, this film, in particular, seeks to absolve the audience. Billy and Stu don’t kill because they watch scary movies. They kill because they’re awful, sexually frustrated, mean little boys who don’t have a functioning conscience between them. They kill because they’re sexist assholes who see the girls and women in their lives as playthings. It’s fun when she screams. Billy’s selfish desire to torture Sidney is what anoints her as the final girl rather than any choice she or her friends make. This, again does the interesting dance of revealing Clover’s argument precisely by problematizing it. Clover argues that “The gender of the Final Girl is likewise compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name. At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signaled clearly by her exercise of the “active investigating gaze” normally reserved for males and punished in females when they assume it themselves; tentatively at first and then aggressively, the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first time, into our vision as well.”
And some of this does ring true in Sidney. She’s reluctant, at first, to have sex with Billy. But then she relents and sleeps with him at a party. She isn’t apart from other girls. She’s popular and well-liked by her peers; her main apartness is, rather, that her mother died and she was a key witness at the trial of the man accused of her killing. Sidney doesn’t engage in anywhere near as much ‘active investigation’ in this film as she does in the sequels or as Emma does in the sadly below-par Scream TV series. In fact, she spends most of the run-time trying to avoid the killer as much as possible. She flees her home and stays with a friend. She attends a party with lots of people at it. She sticks close to her boyfriend. Scream deliberately accentuates the femininity of its final girl. In fact the investigative character of the final girl is forked off into Gail Weathers, who does most of the actual detective work throughout, being honest, the entire quadrilogy. And, of course, Gail is also a final girl. It’s almost as if Scream intentionally divides the tangled sexual depiction of the final girl between these two women: the arch-femme Sidney and the tomboyish, investigative, Gail and shows us how these two elements together allow a final girl to be the survivor. But again this difference from Clover’s thesis serves, within the medium of satire, to emphasize the same point. Scream is a movie about the connection between sex and death in the popular consciousness that is perfectly aware of what it is saying. But it plays a careful bit of legerdemain in the establishment of Randy’s very incomplete rules being presented to us with all seriousness while in the background the story shows us just how much Randy missed. And in this duplication of the final girl and these responses to abjection, Scream hammers home far more about her construction within horror than they could have with Sidney alone.
Turning the camera: Scream 2 and the horror audience
In Scream, the opening sequence serves to skewer the slasher genre expectation of the killer as moral arbiter. It presented us a genre-aware victim who had done nothing wrong within the context of the genre she was within. In Scream 2 the action opens in a movie theater. The victims are again a young couple, a man and a woman on a date. The film is Stab – an in-universe cinematization of the events of the first movie but Stab is not as self-aware a horror so instead of situating Casey getting ready for a quiet night in, it situates her in the shower. Phil has dragged Maureen out to the movie on opening night and people are excited. Ghost face masks and rubber knives are in abundance in the audience in something of an explicit callback to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
Maureen isn’t happy about this state of affairs though – the attempts of Stab to place sex and death so explicitly close at the start through the inserted nudity of Casey-the-character is upsetting her. It’s just too sexist. She insists that Phil buy her a snack to make up for dragging her into this mess. Ghostface dispatches Phil in a bathroom stall and then joins Maureen at her seat. As the Ghostface-the-character murders Casey on the screen, Ghostface begins stabbing Maureen. She staggers up from her seat and stumbles to the front of the theater but nobody helps her; nobody really even notices her. She climbs up in front of the screen and presents her very real wounds to an audience who slowly begin to realize that this woman is dying in front of them. She dies as the title card pops up for Stab. The audience is indicted.
The conflict at the heart of Scream 2 is largely about how horror stories are disseminated to audiences and how the audiences use them. Gale has been making hay over the exoneration of Cotton Weary and has been trying to force a confrontation between Cotton and Sidney – it’ll be good for her career. Meanwhile the events of the first film have spawned Stab – the first of many films-within-films that the Scream series presents. These two threads – the non-fiction recounting and the fictionalization create a matrix of notoriety that the new Ghostface killers exploit. Audiences are no help. Randy’s rules for a sequel are that there will be more deaths an that the kills will be more elaborate. And both of these rules play true but it doesn’t help the audience. If we treat Randy as being our principal stand-in for the audience, well, Randy doesn’t make it out alive.
Between the deaths of Phil and Maureen first and of Randy in the second act of the film, the audience of the horror movie is subject to a more complete evisceration than the sequel as a filmic concept. The main bit of critical heavy-lifting this satire does is to gesture in the direction of its divided final girl. Sidney and Gail have a much more involved, and complicated, relationship in this than in the first film. Gail remains the investigator, the digger, while Sidney would prefer to withdraw. These instincts, between retreat and attack, are positioned in complete contradiction at the start of the film where Sidney decks Gail over ambushing her with Cotton. But in the final conflict this dialectic has been resolved with Sidney and Gail shooting Mickey repeatedly in concert. The final girl is shown, in a moment of cathartic release, to no longer be divided against herself. This is something Clover nearly anticipates as her treatment of Craven’s early cites sources that describe specific forms of familial dialectics as being an “obsession” of Craven’s. But resolving this divided final girl and a wink in the direction of sequels having unique rules compared to the pure cinema that establishes slasher franchises do little to advance a discourse about horror movies qua horror movies. Instead we get a killer who is a reporter, we get a killer who is a film critic – we get people whose role is to talk about horror stories. And these killers are juxtaposed against the actual reporter, the actual final girl. Scream 2 thus hints at themes more thoroughly explored in the superior two movies that follow it. No. The principal target of Scream 2 is the reception of horror stories. It’s a film about how we, as a public, respond to stories of abjection.
Mickey craves the notoriety of being the source of abjection. He wants to be caught and to go to trial so that he can be at the center of the circus. He wants the audience to look at him. And yet he isn’t satisfied with fictionalized versions of abjection. That’s why he has to collapse the artifice of the Stab premiere by killing two people for real there. Mickey knows that the audience has an affective response to true abjection that differs from a cathartic response to fictionalized abjection. He is unsatisfied with this real / unreal divide between fiction and history so, just as Sidney and Gail undergo a dialectic unification to complete the picture of the final girl so too does Mickey try to collapse the dialectic of the audience response to horror and to real-world cruelty. But the unity of these two elements is the final cruelty to the audience. Because, when push came to shove, the audience couldn’t tell real abjection from a simulation of it. Maureen dies in front of a theater full of people and the deafening silence of their slow realization is a final condemnation. There is an interesting twist here though because you would think this would reposition the slasher killer as a moral arbiter, but it doesn’t. Much like in the first film, Ghostface murders based on their own selfish desires and not based on any personal transgression of a victim. Randy wasn’t in the opening night audience for Stab. While he may stand in for an audience he is not the audience being indicted and yet he is the audience who is cut up. There’s this tension at the heart of Scream 2 which is never fully resolved. Mickey wants to say that audiences of horror movies are a problem and much of the film agrees with him. But he doesn’t get the final say. Instead he’s removed from the discourse when Mrs. Loomis wounds him and attempts to reinsert a familial conflict dialectic such as the one Clover calls out in her response to The Hills Have Eyes.
Hollywood, exploitation and the fake in Scream 3
Scream 3 contains one of the greatest action sequences in the history of cinema. Sidney has wandered onto the soundstage for Stab 3. This is actually the soundstage for Scream only with the camera pulled back far enough to reveal its artifice. She encounters the specter of her dead mother, who has been haunting her throughout the first act of the film, and she encounters Ghostface, back again.
Sidney flees Ghostface across the set and operates instinctively as if the geography of her home would map onto the set. Only it’s all fake and none of the doors open onto the right rooms. She escapes the set/house/memory and is found by Dewy and the police. They find no sign of the killer. The film never lands fully on an answer as to whether the killer chased her or whether it was all a figment of her imagination.
Set, as it is, on the set of the filming of Stab 3, Scream 3 is a film that revels in picking at the real / fake boundary that Scream 2 gestured toward. In an hilarious cameo, Carrie Fisher appears playing a receptionist who is regularly mistaken for Carrie Fisher. Gale is followed, throughout nearly the whole film, by Jennifer Jolie – an actress playing Gale in Stab 3. The second kill-scene in Scream 3 involves an actress complaining to the director that she is only in two scenes before her character becomes the victim of the second kill-scene in Stab 3. Her death is her second scene. The film is actively hostile to the idea of the fake and the real and wants to collapse reality and simulation into each other. This is used to good effect considering that Scream 3 picks up the feminist thread of the first film by approaching the original sin of the Scream universe as being Hollywood sexual exploitation of starlets. Possibly the single most damning scene of the Scream trilogy is when Gale interrogates producer John Milton:
“It was in the 70’s, everything was different. I was well known for my parties, Rina knew what they were. It was for girls like her to meet men, men who could get them parts, if they made the right impression. Nothing happened to her that she didn’t invite, in one way or another, no matter what she said afterwards.”
Consider that Harvey Weinstein was the executive producer. Milton gets his throat perfunctorily slit not long after this scene.
If Scream wanted to interrogate the construction of the horror movie and Scream 2 wanted to look at how it communicated with an audience then Scream 3 is aimed squarely and viciously at the institution of the film studio. I prefer Scream 3 to Scream 2 precisely because it has such a singular and intense focus. Scream 2 is a bit of a messy affair, it’s uncertain whether it’s a critique of the audience or whether it’s a dialectical interrogation of the relationships between subjects from the first film. Scream 3 points back at Hollywood and roars “from hell’s heart I stab at thee.”
As such its collapse of the real and the simulation serves the purpose of arguing that there’s no simulation; it’s all real. The fictional abjection of the final girl at the hands of the slasher killer is born out of a system of exploitation that produces its very own forms of abjection. Maureen Prescott is reframed not as a dead mother, a pre-film victim, but as a previous final girl: one who survived the all-too-real horror of being treated as a sexual commodity by wealthy and powerful men. In the final confrontation, Roman returns to the Freudian well saying, “And who’s our hero? The sole survivor, the one who bravely faced down the psychopath and fucked her with her own knife. You’re gonna pay for the life you stole from me Sid. For the mother, and for the family, and for the stardom, and for, goddammit, everything you had that should’ve been mine!” But Sidney rejects his familial psychodrama and stabs him, incapacitating him until he pops up to die in a hail of gunfire when Gail and Dewey finally arrive.
There’s an interesting arc in Sidney’s story. She tries to put the events of Scream behind her in Scream 2 but she fails and becomes a recluse despite the promise of a dialectical unity with Gail proposed by the conclusion. The third film ends instead with Sidney rejecting the position as final girl. She denies Roman’s deliberate application of narrative convention to her life and situates him as being another pathetic psycho. Scream is unique in how pathetic Ghostface is. You don’t ever root for the killer like you would Jason or Freddy in some of their outings. Ghostface pops up like a demented jack-in-the-box from beneath window sills and it’s honestly always very funny but that’s as far as “funny” goes for Ghostface who doesn’t quip. Ghostface only ever threatens. And when the latest Ghostface is inevitably revealed they’re shown in all their petty humanity. This becomes the final collapse of the artificial and the real. Ghostface is always just a person in a mask with a knife. No zombie killers. No unstoppable madmen. No ghost rippers. Just an asshole with a chip on their shoulder, a hatred of women and some serious mommy issues.
Scream 4 and the desire for the final girl
There’s an interesting shift of focus in Scream 4. It is the only entry in the series filmed after September 11, 2001 and the only entry to exist in a Hollywood that had otherwise abandoned satire. I mentioned at the top that the American film industry became reflexively incapable of the sort of introspection necessary for satire and this is largely true. It’s difficult to prove an absence but, between 2001 and 2010, the most famous explicit satires in cinema were almost exclusively foreign films. Within Hollywood there was the insufferable parody Idiocracy, which sometimes is mischaracterized as a satire (and Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods would bravely tread the exact same ground as Scream but absent any of the feminist text that made the earlier film a stand-out in what is otherwise a very clear Whedon-pastiche) but more straightforward satirical films like Get Out and Knives Out were still many years away and, honestly, the genre has never fully recovered.
This means that Scream 4 occupies a strange place as a piece of critical work. A surface read suggests a fair bit of cultural anxiety concerning social media and an always-online culture that’s hungry for fame but this is where that auteurial character I mentioned at the top becomes critical. Because this is the same team that created the three previous Scream movies and, as a cohesive team, they recognized the ground they’d already tread and used this new focus on the online subject to circle back around and interrogate the final girl from a new direction asking, “why would somebody want to be a final girl?”
This film is set ten years after Scream 3 and a full 25 years since the first Scream. Sidney and Gail are now middle aged and have lived the sorts of complete lives that final girls are usually denied. Gail’s married. Sidney has her own book out. Everybody has moved on. Except that Ghostface begins stalking Sidney’s young cousin and murdering a new batch of media-aware teenagers. What we get is possibly the most meta-fictional film in the series yet. As with Scream 2, the opening kill helps establish this well as the first kill is shown to be a fake-out, the opening sequence to Stab 6. The scene cuts to Chloe and Rachel (in a delightful pair of cameos by Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin) debating the merits of the movie which Rachel derides, saying, “It’s been done to death. The whole self-aware, post- modern meta-shit is over. Stick a fork in 1996 already.” As Rachel sits down on the couch, Chloe stabs her in the gut, snarling that she never shuts up. It’s the opening to Stab 7, which is being watched by the actual first victims of Scream 4. The film-criticism aspect of Scream 4 is, on the surface, a little perfunctory. It’s not happy about the remakes that filled the Hollywood horror scene during the first decade of the 2000s. Sidney eventually nails this to a wall when she says, “don’t fuck with the original,” in the final stand-off with the latest Ghostface. However there is a far more interesting critical thread in Scream 4 in its treatment of the final girl. Because this latest iteration of Ghostface wants to be the final girl.
Since we are reading the Scream series largely as a reification of Clover’s work let’s return again to the description Clover provides of the final girl in full:
“She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself.“
Scream 4 looks at this and says, “why in the world would anybody want to be this badly enough to kill for it?” And this is a fascinating question. But I think it deserves a moment to step back from it and look at how this target of satire varies from what’s come before in the Scream series. Scream films always previously targeted an institution: the horror film, the audience, the studio. This time though the target isn’t an institution. The new Ghostface isn’t a stand-in for Twitter. Rather the film is interrogating a form of individual subjectivity. It is almost as if Hollywood still wasn’t ready to look at itself in the mirror, nor even at the audience it created. Instead it had to look at this one person and ask, why is she like this?
Scream 4 is still a satire and it is a good movie but this is a fundamental difference from the previous films in the franchise and this marked difference is significant – one very much of a piece with the failure of Hollywood to create satire in the 21st century. Even this satire is compromised by an unwillingness to focus its fury on an institution. Eventually it seems to land on a fundamental failure of recognition. Sidney has been through some shit. Across the three previous attempts on her life, Sidney has been stabbed and bludgeoned she’s been shot and she’s been betrayed by people she loved. She’s become a recluse and then managed to come through the other side. But all Jill can see is Sidney is Famous. She has a book, an annoying publicist, rich friends, a personal story that eclipses the family story. Her mom is Maureen Prescott’s sister but the only person anyone cares about is Sidney because Sidney survived.
And so Jill tries to engineer becoming the final girl because she sees this woman forced into a direct confrontation with death, this woman who arises with strength in the face of abjection and fails to realize how fundamentally awful that would be. She sets up cameras everywhere so she can re-live being the killer, so that she can see the victims die again and again but she never seems to apprehend fully the character of her actions because she has stars in her eyes. Ultimately this is the concern that arises about social media: not the collective experience of Twitter mobs or Facebook Nazis but rather the idea that subjects would subject themselves and others to all manner of awful things for the chance to be famous. The real / unreal divide that Scream 3 worked so hard to collapse is already destroyed and everybody lives in this hyperreal space where the fundamental materiality of the signifier is already manifest. Sidney’s command not to fuck with the original serves a double purpose, first to take a shot at the remakes that Craven, at the very least, hated remakes. His back catalog was not well served by that period. But there’s another purpose there in reifying a kind of authentic experience. Sidney is famous for events that were out of her control and that she never wanted to happen. She survived three separate mass killers – that’s not something anyone should want. Attempting to engineer the circumstances where one becomes a final girl isn’t just monstrous because of all the killing along the way. It’s also monstrous because it fails to recognize the facticity of being the final girl. Sidney’s life isn’t an identity somebody can try on like a shirt. It’s dependent on 25 years of being through the meat grinder of life. And, at the end of things, Scream 4 says this is something that can’t be reproduced as a packaged identity.
The Scream series was the last great flourishing of satire in Hollywood before the rise of Jordan Peele as a film maker. Across their four films they managed to come full circle, interrogating the slasher killer – final girl relationship, the role of the audience and how tragedy is communicated, the exploitation of Hollywood in the creation of horror films and a dialectic collapse of the final girl into the slasher killer in the finale. In their attempt to pick apart the slasher movies of the 70s and 80s they managed, instead, to create the greatest series of slasher films yet. The scream series are a testament to the collaborative efforts of a committed team with a clear vision, something to say and the will to say it.
Simon McNeil 