The SCREAM Franchise Has Betrayed SCREAM

Now the movies DO make psychos.

This contains spoilers for Scream VI, and kind of assumes you’re familiar with the Scream franchise.

To understand where the Scream franchise started you have to understand the lay of the horror landscape in the 90s. Younger viewers today may find this hard to believe, but horror was considered a very low class genre at the time. Slasher films in particular were gutter movies for teens, weirdos and creeps. Yes, Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture but people bent over backwards to explain that the movie was a thriller, not horror.

Slashers were not just disreputable, they were dangerous. By the end of the 80s the MPAA was cracking down on gore, giving Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood more blood in the title than they got in the film itself. Critics were aghast at the violence and misogyny; Roger Ebert went off on an unhinged rant about it on his TV show. And there were protests of movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night. The vibe in the 80s was that slashers films were for morons or sickos, and that the morons might very well be induced to become violent sickos by the movies themselves.

The societal disdain didn’t kill the slasher - bad movies and repetition did, as well as general tastes moving on (horror moves in cyclical patterns; you’ll go through a big period of exorcism movies or vampire movies and then they’ll fall out of style before coming back a decade later) - but by the time Scream came out in 1996 the genre had essentially gone to its grave. But like all good slashers themselves you couldn’t keep the genre down, and Scream resurrected it with a self-aware wink.

One of the things that resonated with us horror hounds when the movie came out was part of a speech given by the killers. Yes, the killers were right… about some things. Billy Loomis says “Horror movies don’t make psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!” Obviously you’d prefer to not have a homicidal maniac being the one delivering that line, but you know that Loomis was speaking for Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson. Craven in particular had a history of deeply controversial and wildly shocking films - Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes - but he was a kind, sweet man. He had first-hand experience with the disdain for horror - Last House was banned in the UK and put on the list of “video nasties.” The UK media blamed horror movies for the murder of a toddler, an outrageous bit of sophistry.

We horror fans knew that these films were not responsible for violence in the real world. In fact we have always argued that the release and catharsis that comes from watching these films has kept many of us sane(r). What’s more, there has always been something philosophically grotesque about blaming movies for violence - it is an abdication of social responsibility for the violent offender, seeking to put the blame somewhere convenient so that nobody has to take a look at how our society is structured and whether that might be creating people who harm other people. It’s the same thing with blaming video games for school shootings - if we could stop shootings by banning violent video games I’m sure many of us would happily throw away our Call of Dutys, just as I would happily dump all of my Friday the 13th blus if anyone could ever show a reasonable connection between watching movies and becoming a lunatic.

To me the line from Billy Loomis is really central to what makes Scream work. It’s not just a meta movie where the characters understand that they’re in a slasher, it’s a movie that is about loving slashers. Some later installments may have lost this aspect, but the original Scream isn’t mocking the well-worn cliches of the genre, it’s warmly embracing them while also busting their balls a little bit. But at its heart the killers are formed by their own experiences, and horror movies don’t make them kill.

After the first movie the franchise rapidly disappeared up its own ass. It kind of had to, if it was going to continue the meta aspect of the original. But by the time we got to Scream V it seemed like the franchise had become less about slasher movies and more about Scream movies. It’s a franchise about itself, an ouroboros of self-reference. Scream VI takes it to the extreme, with a major location being a shrine honoring the previous Scream/Stab movies. The character still talk about horror movies, but in the way any character in any movie might, and the “rules” of the series have become largely disconnected from the tropes of the slasher genre. The latest one talks about Luke Skywalker when discussing how legacy characters are not safe. Luke Skywalker!

Because these movies have become so insularly about Scream, something has happened - the movies have begun making the psychos. Now, you can argue that isn’t the case, and textually you’re mostly right. As is tradition in the Scream series the killers are related to previous killers - this is a series that posits grief is the most dangerous emotion. But that’s just window dressing. It’s all about the movies.

One of the great things in the original Scream is the idea that Billy Loomis has no real motive - he’s just kind of wanted to kill people (he waves at the idea that he’s mad Sydney’s mom broke up his family, but that’s nonsense), and Stu is just along for the ride. That’s brilliant, and it speaks to the idea that movies don’t make psychos. It was also prescient - while a lot of people believe that the Columbine shooting was motivated by the killers being the victims of bullying, the truth is that Eric Harris was just a psychopath who hated the world and wanted to hurt people, and he pulled Dylan Klebold along with him.

But by the time we get to Scream V there is a motive - and it’s specifically movie related. Gone are the days when the killers were motivated by psychopathy or vengeance or jealousy - in V Richie is motivated by his entitled fandom. That’s brilliant, and I really enjoyed it when I saw the movie - it was a very cheeky poke at the modern internet-based fandom that perhaps demands more than they should.

While it’s a fun little satirical thing, it also means that killers Richie and Amber are 100% motivated by the movies. They’re huge Stab fanatics, and they want to force the series - which they see as having lost its way - to reboot by adding new killings to the lore. They did it all for the movie - yeah, the movie. That’s the whole reason they killed anybody, was because they love the slasher franchise Stab so much.

In Scream VI this gets out of control. This movie has no less than five Ghostfaces, and the first two (who are killed in a rare double-Janet Leigh - first Samara Weaving gets it at the hands of and then Tony Revolori, who killed her, gets it) are also specifically driven by the movies. In fact - and maybe I’m reading this wrong - it seems like they are not only trying to finish what Richie started, but that Richie was maybe making a snuff movie? It’s hard to say - the film is disjointed and a number of plot points get dropped in exposition that is leaden even by the standards of a series where the killer monologues put Republic serial villains to shame - but we see that Richie was making some kind of Stab fan films. It’s just not clear if he was filming his kills in the last movie, reenacting them or perhaps essentially pre-vizzing them.

What matters is that there are four killers in the last two movies who are explicitly motivated by slasher films! The final three Ghostfaces in this one are Richie’s family, a reveal that is not only tired by Scream standards but also nonsensical in the larger structure of this movie, but by the time we get to their unmasking the lines between motives have become so blurred. Richie’s dad wants to… honor his son’s work? They’re completing his task of reminding Sam of all the previous Scream movies? I don’t really get it, but at one point he says that maybe Richie was too much into the Stab movies, which is really just doubling down on the idea that movies make psychos.

Look, I think Stab VI is a pretty bad movie (we have reached a point in this franchise where I believe a main character could be decapitated and still show up okay at the end of the film) but what really bugs me is how deeply it has drilled into a theme that is the antithesis of what Wes Craven was doing in the first movie. Of course new entries in a franchise are not beholden to the thematic concerns of the original, but this is a series that is so tangled up in trying to suck its own dick that it feels impossible to separate the later entries from the earlier entries.

I’m disappointed that Scream VI kind of sucks, but I love the Friday the 13th series and “kind of sucks” is a pretty good rating for some of those films. I can roll with a slasher movie that kind of sucks. But the continuing emphasis on movies making killers… I don’t like it. It was cute in V, but now it’s feeling like a right wing talking point. VI is clearly setting up a finale of a new trilogy - Sam fully goes Cory Feldman in Friday IV/Danielle Harris at the end of Halloween 4 - and her motivation is that she has inherited Billy Loomis’ psychotic murder nature (I’ll let someone else handle the article on why that’s problematic, I don’t really care all that much), so maybe the franchise is going to drop this in the next film. Maybe - I don’t have a ton of faith they’ll make Sam the killer next time. It’s going to be yet another dork who is obsessed in some way with the Stab movies, probably whatever one they make based on the Gayle Weathers book mentioned in this movie. Or maybe they’ll introduce a Stab true crime podcast, which will allow the series to go from blaming movies for making psychos to blaming true crime for making psychos, another bullshit thing we 80s horror kids had to deal with. Whatever I have thought of the Scream franchise, I never imagined it would one day reinforce old fashioned negative views of horror nerds.