Scream

For this week's blog assignment, I chose to watch the movie "Scream". I won't lie, I've seen Scream more times than I can count. I love this movie, I've loved it for years. I could probably quote a good majority of the film to someone if they asked me to (for whatever weird reason). I think I saw it for the first time when I was about eight or so (thanks to having an older brother who let me watch tv with him). Obviously, my views on the film have changed over the years. My overwhelming consensus is that I still love it. It remains one of my top three films I have to watch around Halloween time.

What I love about "Scream" is that it's both scary, but also hilarious. The lines are ridiculous. Stu, my favorite character in the film, at one point says "liver alone", as in "leave her alone". It is stupidly funny, but also gets me to my first point when thinking about this film in terms of Hall's "The Work of Representation". That line is in response to the main group of characters discussing the murder of two fellow classmates. What I never noticed about this scene, or most of the film in general, when I was younger was just how ridiculously apathetic almost every single character is to what has happened. No one seems to care at all that these two students were gutted. When the news is breaking at the school about it, there seem to be no mourning students. No one even seems upset. Only the main character, Sidney, shows any concern, and this is only because her mother had been murdered almost a year earlier. Apparently, because no one else had any direct experience with murder, no one seems to care that these students have been killed. I see this as also being a take on society. Terrible, horrible things happen every single day, and we just pass by them without a second thought. Unless something happens directly to us, we aren't affected by it in the same way, if at all. That's completely what was happening in the film. It took me several times watching it to really see that absolutely no one but Sidney and the school principal show concern. When school is announced as being closed for several days after the murders, the students celebrate by having a party. When the principal is murdered and then hung from the football post, all of the drunk students decide to drive and check it out, rather than being scared for their lives or even remotely upset. It really, in my opinion, does reflect how we as a society deal with certain situations. Unless it happens to us, we don't care.

Something else in the movie that has always stood out to me, and I personally love, is that one of the killers (SPOILER ALERT) declares that he has no motive for why he killed, other than "peer pressure. I'm far too sensitive". This always stood out to me because there are serial killers out there who really just kill for what seems like no reason to others. It is just out of the sheer desire to murder. The other killer has a clear reason, but the other one has no backstory for his madness. This just makes me think about how in our society, we want reasons and motives for what happens, but in reality, there sometimes just aren't logical ones. This isn't as closely related to Hall's work, but it just always stood out to me in the film, so I felt like adding it to my blog.

All this said, I think "Scream" is one of the best made horror movies in the past 20 years. It is smart, socially aware, and a ridiculously clever take on the horror genre. Every character knows every convention of horror films, and all of them succumb to them. It's humorous and twisted, and I love it.