Scream!

    The movie Scream is a great example of a meta-film. The characters reference various other horror films throughout the movie, ranging from the characters taking inspiration from the movies to just discussing what the people in the films did wrong. When the killer confronts Tatum Riley, she thinks it’s just a joke, and does what every dying girl does in a horror movie, and it ends up killing her. Tatum asks the killer if she’s supposed to act like all the girls who get killed in movies, and she takes it as a joke until she’s actually stabbed. While the boys are in the video store, Randy almost figures out the whole plot of the movie by describing how other horror film killers would have acted in this case. He also tells everyone that going off alone, or to have sex, will result in them getting killed. All the slasher films have the same components, described in Clover’s work as “killer, locale, weapons, victims, and shock effects”.

As soon as Sidney has sex with her boyfriend, the killer appears once again to kill her. This demonstrates one of Clover’s points about the components of victims in slasher films, that, “killing those who seek or engage in unauthorized sex amounts to a generic imperative of the slasher film”. Tatum also gets killed, and it’s obvious throughout the film that she and Stu are actively having sex. Randy even says while he’s watching Halloween with the group that the way to survive a horror movie is to not have sex, and to avoid other “sins” like drinking and doing drugs. Everyone laughs, but Randy is left one of the last people standing when he reveals that he’s a virgin.

Billy has childhood trauma as his catalyst for killing. He says how his mom left his dad and abandoned him because Sidney’s mom slept with his dad. Her mom doing that ruined Billy’s parents marriage, and by extent, his childhood. Billy takes out his frustrations on the women in the film, focusing on their deaths being more gruesome and more intimate then when he kills the men. When Kenny the camera man is killed, it’s almost a merciful death compared to that of Tatum, who was killed by the garage door. This supports Clover’s idea that, “the death of a male is always swift […] he is dispatched and the camera moves on”. In the beginning of the film, Casey’s death is long and drawn out, and ends with her being strung up on a tree with her organs on the ground, while her boyfriend was just gutted, which is a quick death in comparison.