The Scream trilogy

The horror film was in a moribund state in the mid-90s. The stalk ‘n’ slash genre had reached not so much its apogee (it never really had one) but a point of saturation the previous decade, endless ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ sequels and equally innumerable micro-budget imitators adding up to a graveyard of stock characters and shopworn clichés.

Then along came Kevin Williamson and a whip-smart script loaded with post-modern irony which managed to have its cake and eat it by effortlessly operating within the very generic conventions it so satirically sent up. That script was entitled ‘Scary Movie’ (a titled later hijacked by for increasingly unfunny franchise of puerile comedies founded on spoofing a film that was itself a spoof … only in Hollywood!), and it found its way to Wes Craven.

Craven had the horror genre in his blood – he made his directorial debut with ‘Last House on the Left’, made the original, gut-wrenchingly tense ‘Hills Have Eyes’ and scored a massive hit with the first ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. He revisited the franchise six films down the line with the much underrated ‘Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’, something of a precursor to ‘Scream’ in its self-reflexive approach to genre material.

‘New Nightmare’ failed to find an audience, however, and his follow-up ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ fared no better. ‘Scream’ changed all that, giving Craven a career renaissance which only faltered with ‘Cursed’ as well as paving the way for a stalk ‘n’ slash revival headed by Jim Gillespie’s ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ (from a script by Williamson that jettisoned the ironies of ‘Scream’ and played the whole thing straight), which snowballed into the “torture porn” movement epitomised by Eli Roth’s ‘Hostel’ and saw virtually every key horror movie of the ’70s remade and eagerly gobbled up by a new generation of gore hounds (although not, and the power Christ compels Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production from ever getting their mitts on it, ‘The Exorcist’).

‘Scream’ tips its hat to Craven’s most iconic creation, with the director himself appearing, in Freddy sweater and hat, as a school janitor (elsewhere, one of the high school students name-checks ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ as their favourite scary movie, adding “the sequels sucked, though”), as well as slyly evoking a panoply of classic creepfests. You’ve got the white picket fences of ‘Blue Velvet’, the tree-lined avenues of ‘Halloween’, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from ‘Exorcist’ star Linda Blair, and more video-store movie geek references than you can shake a knife at.

Better still, ‘Scream’ pays lip service to the interchangeable victims of so many slashers by having a smart and snarky cast – resilient survivor Sidney (Neve Campbell), sassy best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan), wiseass film nerd Randy (Jamie Kennedy), hardass reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and affable but hapless Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) – happily mock them even as the body count piles up.

The little matter of the killer’s identity (or did I put that apostrophe in the wrong place?) is almost beside the point. Plot mechanics, sleight of hand and a working knowledge of the genre are Craven and Williamson’s touchstones here. ‘Scream’ is a movie movie and as self-consciously cool as anything in Tarantino’s ouvre.

A sequel was inevitable. Let’s face it, which even moderately success horror film hasn’t spawned at least a couple of sequels if not a bona fide franchise? “By definition alone, sequels are inferior films,” Randy pontificates, setting off a film class debate as to whether ‘Aliens’ outclasses its predecessor or ‘House II: The Second Story’ represents the pinnacle of that particular saga. Later, he succinctly lays out the rules of the sequel: higher body count (check: it’s double the first film) and more elaborate death scenes.

A friend of mine believes that the slow start and theatrical denouement are deliberate ploys by Craven to pitch ‘Scream 2’ as a slightly less satisfying film than the original – a bravura decision if it that was the case. In my opinion, though, ‘Scream 2’ is the better film: the high water mark of the trilogy. And it works so well because of its theatricality.

Craven has stated that ‘Scream 2’ was specifically conceived as a sequel about sequels. But it goes a lot further than that. The plot has Sidney trying to forge a new life for herself and integrate into university (her drama teacher – David Warner in an effective cameo – encourages her to use art as catharsis by taking on the role of Cassandra in a student production of the Greek tragedy) while shadows from the past continue to plague her, not least Gale Weathers’ sensationalist book ‘The Woodboro Murders’ and its unsubtly-titled movie adaptation ‘Stab!’

‘Scream 2’ opens with a double murder at the ‘Stab!’ premier, the killings intercut with footage from the film which basically replays the opening sequence of ‘Scream’ (but done in deliberately naff exploitative fashion). Heather Graham essays the Drew Barrymore role and – later – we see Tori Spelling interviewed about her role as Sidney (a nifty in-joke, Dewey commenting in the first film that “a young Meg Ryan” would be ideal to play Sidney in the inevitable movie only for Sidney to muse that “knowing my luck they’d cast Tori Spelling”).

Sidney, then, is dealing with a kind of warped celebrity – one she doesn’t want. Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber), exonerated after a year in prison for the killing of Sidney’s mother, wants the limelight: clearing his name is not enough – he views celebrity and the financial rewards that go with it as compensation for the year of his life lost to incarceration.

The killer wants their fifteen minutes of fame (or rather infamy): “I got my whole defense planned out. I'm gonna blame the movies ... This [the spate of murders] is just the beginning, a prelude to the trial … These days it’s all about the trial. Can you see it? The effects of cinema violence on society. I’ll get Dershowitz or Cochran to represent me. Bob Dole on the witness stand in my defence. Hell, the Christian Coalition’ll pay my legal fees.”

This, for me, is what kicks ‘Scream 2’ up a notch. If ‘Scream’ is a skit on the conventions of genre movies with the odd sideswipe at the media, then ‘Scream 2’ not only sends up sequels but raises questions about the media in all of its forms – reporting, publishing, cinema, theatre, the cult of celebrity – and how it disseminates horror as entertainment, as well as the audiences who lap it up, ie. us. That the killer delivers the rationale quoted above against the backdrop of the ‘Cassandra’ stage production makes it all the juicier.

‘Scream 3’, then, had a lot to live up to. Craven returned to the fold, but with Williamson busy on other projects scripting duties went to Ehren Kruger, working from notes sketched out by Williamson. With a name like that, he was pretty much destined to work with Craven. And while his continuation of the series is thematically in keeping with the previous instalments, it’s nonetheless disappointing that the whole trilogy couldn’t have been a unified writer/director collaboration.

Kruger’s set-up takes its cue from the film-within-a-film of ‘Scream 2’ and has the set of the in-production ‘Stab 3’ as backdrop to, yup, another spate of murders. Sidney takes something of a backseat, spending the first half of the film living in seclusion while dealing with memories/hallucinations of her mother. Meanwhile, Dewey and Gale are drawn into the escalating tensions on set, Dewey working as an ‘advisor’ on the production and dating the star of ‘Stab 3’, Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey). Jennifer is playing Gale, and relations prove fractious when Gale herself turns up at the studio in pursuit of a story.

With the self-reflexive inclusion of ‘Stab’ already used to its fullest in ‘Scream 2’, and the under-use of Sidney leaving the film curiously devoid of a protagonist (the script never really settles on Dewey or Gale or any of the new characters as the focus of the narrative), ‘Scream 3’ doesn’t engage or cohere as effectively as its predecessors. There are a couple of effective set pieces and the Gale/Jennifer interplay makes for some spiky comedy, but none of this can disguise the fact that the series had simply run out of ideas by this point.

Sadly, it seemed to mark a downturn in the fortunes of its creative team. Craven and Williamson reteamed for the disastrous ‘Cursed’, which Craven followed up with the formulaic thriller ‘Red Eye’. Williamson’s directorial debut ‘Teaching Mrs Tingle’ (the original title, ‘Killing Mrs Tingle’, was subject to a hasty rethink post-Columbine) flopped. Much of his work as writer has since been for TV.

With ‘Scream 4’ in the offing, is there anything to be excited about – even with Williamson scripting again – or will the biggest scream be that of the flogged horse just as it expires? I fear part three has already proved that they tried to go an irony too far.

THE FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: Grindhouse

Do you know how excited I was about ‘Grindhouse’? Imagine the adrenalin levels of a kid on Christmas Day, a fat kid in a sweetshop lockdown and no adults around to tell him not to, a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory, a dipsomaniac left in charge of a distillery, a voyeur given carte blanche to roam around the Playboy Mansion, and a member of the NRA at an arms bazaar. Now combine all those adrenalin levels, throw a few tequila slammers into the mix and shoot the whole thing full of heroin.

That’s how excited I was.

Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy reviewed it under the pullquote ‘The Movie I Was Put on This Earth to See’, and I was almost wetting myself.

And. Then. Something. Happened.

‘Grindhouse’ underperformed at the American box office. I started hearing dispiriting rumours: the film was being split in two for its European release; ‘Death Proof’ would come out first; there was no confirmed UK release date for ‘Planet Terror’. There was a big question mark over whether the spoof trailers would be released theatrically.

I. Was. Not. Happy.


I’ll admit it here and now: I was looking forward more to ‘Planet Terror’ than ‘Death Proof’, having been monstrously underwhelmed by ‘Kill Bill Vol. II’ (another Tarantino opus that got released in two parts, with a six month wait after the blistering first instalment with its iconic “House of Blue Leaves” set-piece).

Sure enough, the handful of lobby posters I’d seen for ‘Grindhouse’ quietly disappeared, to be replaced by ‘Death Proof’ posters. Frequent IMDb visits seemed to confirm that there was still no release date for ‘Planet Terror’. In the meantime, I’d tracked down the spoof trailers online and bookmarked them.

A week before ‘Death Proof’ opened, I got hold of ‘Planet Terror’ on Region 1 DVD, featuring the ‘Machete’ trailer (my personal favourite of the four spoofs). Me and Paula decided to have our own, cobbled together ‘Grindhouse’ experience: we watched ‘Planet Terror’ on DVD in the morning (including ‘Machete’), fired up the computer and watched the ‘Don’t’, ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ trailers, then went to the cinema and watched ‘Death Proof’ on the big screen in the afternoon.

It doesn’t quite equate to taking your seat in the cinema, watching two 90-minuters (each complete with ‘missing reel’) back to back, interspersed with the spoof trailers – ie. three and a half hours of moviegoing designed as an affectionate, often ironic but ultimately down and dirty throwback to the grubby joys of the exploitation B-movie double bill.

The point of those 70s double-bills was that you saw them in a cinema. Usually a dingy fleapit where the seats were dimpled with cigarette burns, smoke was still hanging in the air courtesy of the audience at the earlier screening, your shoes adhered to the floor thanks to a combination of melted ice cream, popcorn and spilled Ki-ora, and the films were interrupted at least a couple of times during the screening due to technical problems with the projector.

In order to recreate the experience, ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ – the former more authentically – are scratched and distressed and jump about a lot, simulating hamfisted splicing, and in the case of ‘Planet Terror’ the film seems to bubble up and burn into white nothingness.

Seen on DVD, you think “hmmm, that’s quite a convincing effect”. Seen on a computer, the spoof trailers are quite obviously that: spoofs. You find yourself picking hairs. Both ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’, as sleazily inspired as they are, are billed as “a film by Eli Roth” and “a film by Rob Zombie” respectively, the latter trumpeting a big star name (Nicolas Cage) – but no zero-budgeted exploitation flick would be thus advertised. Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ hits the mark as acutely as ‘Machete’, though, delivering a minute’s worth of stalk ‘n’ slash highlights while the voiceover drones monotonously “Don’t … don’t … don’t … don’t.”

Still, all of these component parts were meant to be taken together, as a three and a half hour whole … and were meant to be seen at the cinema. Instead, we got expanded cuts of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’, the former now clocking in 1 hour 45 minutes, and Tarantino’s opus pushing the two hour mark, again pushing the films another step away from their original aesthetic.

The damage done to both films is that you view them as separate entities, which leads to pointless exercises in critical approach whereby you try to reconcile the more authentic ‘look’ of ‘Planet Terror’ with the post-modern ironic playfulness of ‘Death Proof’ instead of thinking “zombie movie – cool; car chase movie – cool”. Or ruminating on the promise of the erotic given the plethora of eye candy (two quartets of heroines in ‘Death Proof’; cleavages a-go-go courtesy of Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton and Stacy Ferguson in ‘Planet Terror') and the non-inclusion of actual nudity (want topless women? the ‘Machete’ trailer’s the only place you’ll find ’em) and coming to the conclusion that an implied salaciousness : disappointment ratio is par for the course in exploitation movies and Rodriguez and Tarantino have played on this most effectively … when you should, of course, be thinking “wow, hot chicks”.

Tim comments, in his brilliantly written review, “the structural vulernability of Grindhouse makes it the same as those things it mimics, even while the very soul of Grindhouse is that, as a mimic, it is not the same thing. Therefore, the film becomes both thesis and antithesis”, and he’s absolutely right. To discuss structure is perhaps the most intelligent way to approach ‘Grindhouse’ critically. Otherwise, as just as valid, you can simply kick back with a big tub of popcorn, turn off your critical faculties and let your mind go “zombies, cool … wow, Rose McGowan’s a fox … machine gun leg … shoot-outs, cool … stuff blowing up … fast cars, cool … wow, Vanessa Ferlito’s a fox … Kurt Russell being a badass, cool … wow, how long’s this car chase gone on for? …” and so on and so forth.

They’ve been constructed deliberately – and a lot more cleverly than a first viewing might lead you to believe – but the component parts of ‘Grindhouse’ are quite simply a hymn to the gleeful pleasures of moviegoing in an age where hot chicks, fast cars, cheesy special effects and 90-minutes of low-budget mayhem were their own raison d’etre.

Comparing and contrasting the films is a redundant exercise. The distributors, by splitting ‘Grindhouse’ in two, have left the likes of your humble blogger here with no choice other than to do just that. I was even tempted to use this post as a prologue to articles on ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ over the next two evenings.

But I won’t because I’m convinced that if I ever get to see ‘Grindhouse’ in the format Messrs Rodriguez and Tarantino intended me to, then I’ll have seen a masterpiece of post-modern throwback indulgent irony. Yup, I know those last four words seem like a quadrille of contradiction but I reckon the movie that underperformed in America and never made it to the UK has what it takes to synthesise them; and until ‘Grindhouse’ gets released in this country in its original format (preferably in a theatrical run), or until I can get my hands on a Region 1 DVD, it will have to remain the best movie I’ve almost seen.