Hey welcome to The Reading List
this episode we're examining films that
influenced a worldwide phenomenon and
resurgence of intelligent slasher films
in the scream franchise.
Spoiler alert by the way
we're gonna dig deep into these movies
so you're definitely gonna encounter spoilers
not only of the scream trilogy
but a bunch of other films as well
so there you have it, snowflake.
You would imagine a film series so stylistically entrenched and
self-references would contain a plethora of external film references as well.
Good news for you, your imaginations are correct.
Here's just a few to wet your appetite.
House 2: the Second Story
Bad Seed
Carrie
I spit on your garage
Silence of the Lambs
Basic Instinct
Exorcist
None of this self reference would be possible without
Wes Craven's New Nightmare
This film which on the outside appears to be just another
Freddy Krueger movie is actually a super-smart precursor to the scream trilogy.
It had been 10 years since Wes Craven last directed Freddy
and the franchise's popularity had waned.
Incorporating this into the story,
he developed a tale about
Heather Langenkamp who played Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street 1 & 3.
Her son, in real life, has started to dream about Freddy
even though he has never seen the movies.
Wes Craven makes an appearance as himself
and postulates that he didn't write Freddy,
Freddy existed before he made a Nightmare on Elm Street
he just channeled him into the movie.
And when the movies became less popular,
Freddy looked for a new outlet, the real world
and Heather Langenkamp son whose fear
gives Freddy the power he needs to break into our world.
It's so very meta.
Heather's husband is a special-effects dude
who is killed by a Freddy glove prosthetic
but all the references within references are built throughout.
In one sequence, John Saxon who plays Nancy's father in Nightmare on Elm Street
starts replaying a scene from the movie with Heather
pretty creepy, getting goosebumps here.
You just get yourself some rest please
get yourself some rest Nancy.
Its total self-awareness that opened the door for
Wes to expand on that ethos and scream
The movie scary and way better than you remember,
so if you haven't checked it then check it
and if you have, well check it again.
I officially dare you
You have been officially dared.
Modern horrors we know it, wouldn't exist
without Hitchcock's Psycho
it took a big stab at the American home in small-town way of life.
It unsettled audiences but was a commercial success
and has widely been regarded as one of
the greatest pieces of cinema of all time.
Why?
Hitchcock legitimized the disturbing themes by portraying the serial killer,
Norman Bates, as a sympathetic and emotionally vulnerable mama's boy.
My mother...What is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today
The killer in scream is Billy Loomis.
Whose reason to kill is simply his desire to take revenge for his
mother who was cheated on by Maureen Prescott, Sydney's mom
She's the reason my mom moved out and abandoned me.
His mother in turn takes revenge for his death
in a reverse psycho move in Scream 2.
You killed my son
Speaking of mommy issues Generation of Vipers postulated that the American man
being coddled from cradle to grave made men weak and extremely fallible.
Norman Bates killing his mother and her lover was a logical progression of this
reflection of the corrupt American home
and when Norman Bates reverts to his
mother at the end of the film the dissolve shows the car
The only evidence of his murder being pulled from the lake
The skull of Mrs. Bates superimposed on his face, he is his mother's son
and the chain holding it seems to pull straight from Norman's heart
Hitchcock cutting deep on the mommy issues, for sure.
We all go a little mad sometimes.
Drew Barrymore the highest billed actor in Scream
and used in all the Scream marketing
is killed after the opening sequence
Echoing shades of psycho when Janet Lee the protagonist is killed
barely halfway through the movie. Setting up a situation where the audience
realizes anyone could die at any time, this trend continued for the next two
films of The Scream franchises.
Including the death of Cotton Weary, a major character
in scream 1 & 2 and in the opening moments of scream 3
You lose
Scream's characters were self-aware and able to identify that they were characters
inside a horror film
There are certain rules
Perhaps no characters more self-aware than Randy whose rules provide us a
guide of what you have to do to survive a horror film.
you can never have sex,
drink or do drugs, never say I'll be right back
I'll be right back!
A sequel
the body count is always bigger, death scenes are always much more elaborate
and the third film in the trilogy
find yourself dealing with an unexpected backstory
and a preponderance of exposition, you are dealing with the concluding chapter
of a trilogy
But where did these rules come from?
First, John Carpenter's Halloween.
Halloween, no the one with the guy in the white mask who walks around and stalks babysitters.
Halloween provided many of the rules of The Scream franchise
allowing Kraven to break the rules or reinforce them
like these two parallel sequences
What's the point they're all the same some stupid killers stalking
some big-breasted girl who can't act he's always running up the stairs when
she should be going out the front door, it's insulting
In Syd's subsequent encounter with ghost face
she's forced to face her own cliche when the door is
locked and she has to run up the stairs rather than out the front door
NO!
In this sequence from the climax of Scream, Halloween is referenced visually
and Marco Beltrami score has taken over by John Carpenter's distinctive Halloween movie.
Direct story references exist
between Halloween and the Scream franchise,
including names.
Billy Loomis and scream and his mother from scream 2
are named after dr. Loomis from Halloween.
Dr. Loomis is in turn named
for Sam Loomis the character that goes searching for Janet Leigh,
in you guessed it, Psycho.
Dr. Loomis is the psychiatrist who has been treating Michael Meyers
before his escape and who always ends up
being the only one that believes that
Michael Meyers is pure evil.
which he clearly is.
I mean look at that reverse William Shatner mask
what kind of monster would do that?
Speaking of masks,
the mask and scream is modeled after Edward monks famous painting The Scream
so it kind of makes sense
why they changed the name of
the film from scary movie to scream.
See what they did there?
when Casey's father tells his wife to run for help
he tells her to go to the Mackenzies
the same place Jamie Lee tells the kids to run to in Halloween.
And like Laurie Strode, in Halloween
the main killer in the scream trilogy turns out to be
Sid's brother.
In addition, Kraven uses style elements from Halloween,
like the subjective camera from the point of view of the killer
If you want to talk simply about plot construction in the scream trilogy then
look no further than prom night.
In fact, all you have to do is listen to Randy he
knows that what Woodsboro is going through is exactly what happened in prom night.
"They watch Prom night they'd save time there's a formula to it a very
simple formula everybody's a suspect"
Other rules from the scream franchise find their
root in prom night including the notion that sex equals death.
I probably could have told you that myself.
Prom night featured the virgin queen,
Jamie Lee Curtis, who was in too many slasher films to name but who still
remained a vision of purity within the genre legacy Hollywood's slasher horror
legend Jamie's mom was Janet Leigh from Hitchcock's Psycho.
Popping up again in prom night
is the familiar slasher motif
of fraternal murderer.
In prom night, the killers revealed to be
Jamie Lee's brother
and in scream 3 the killer is
Roman Sidney's long-lost brother,
who's responsible for the scream 1 & 2
killings having shown Billy Loomis the footage of his mother cheating with Billy's father.
Before Jason in space and Jason goes to hell,
Friday the 13th edged out a spot in the slasher genre with its single-minded
focus on punishing sinful behavior.
Campers having sex,
campers drinking,
campers playing board games,
investigating strange noises in the dark.
According to our Puritan ethics and the MPAA,
all these people needed to die and
Jason Voorhees was just the person to do it.
mute and relentless Jason's power and
mythology grew in each film
culminating with his near and vulnerability in the
partially canon but super interesting
Freddy vs. Jason
although as pointed out in Scream
to a distraught Drew Barrymore
plotlines in scream 2 followed
this closely although we first suspect the killer as a young man,
it is revealed to be Billy Loomis's mom
taking revenge for Sid killing her son in the first film.
Just like Friday the 13th
Boom!
Where's my mic and how do I drop it?
they were making love while that young boy drowned,
his name was Jason
In addition the setting of scream 2,
a remote college campus,
echoes the location motif
from Friday the 13th: A Cabin in the Woods.
Another more minor influence in scream 2 comes from
Wes Craven's previous career as a professor of literature
and The Scream 2 campus
production of Orestia, a trilogy in its own right.
Sid plays Cassandra,
the character from Greek mythology
who was given the ability to foretell the future
but who goes mad because she's also been cursed
so that no one ever believes her.
Sydney becomes Cassandra in the scream trilogy
as she constantly tries to tell people what's happening
and they think she's losing her mind.
Now, I know what you're saying.
We already talked about Freddy Krueger, dude.
Nobody likes you and you're a burden on your poor mother
Well, before you say that let me angle the
looking glass a bit so you can see what I see
while new nightmare influenced the
self-aware meta aspects of the scream trilogy The Nightmare on Elm Street
becomes emotionally the heart of scream 3
where the rules of reality are bent
and broken as Sidney Prescott apparently loses her mind
when the killer has
inexplicably returned despite the fact that she's killed him or them
twice already.
We are introduced to doppelgangers and disturbing nightmarish and surreal
images from the other scream films.
There are two Gales two Dewey's and to Sid's,
as well as the houses from the original scream reimagined on a film set
creating a dreamlike journey as Sid walks down her horrific memory lane.
In addition, specific plot points reflect the Nightmare on Elm Street.
Freddie's mother was a nun who worked in a mental hospital
she was locked into the institution over Christmas
and was gang raped repeatedly
spawning her son, Freddie.
So when Freddie was born, he gained the
moniker bastard of a hundred maniacs.
Now, Roman the killer and scream 3 shares a
biographical origin with Freddie.
His mother having been raped by a bunch of
movie producers.
Compare these two scenes from scream 1 and 3
Sidney lays down for a nap, in scream,
she wakens to a dark house.
Cold hard reality.
In scream 3, she has her first stream of the franchise
and sees her mother returned from the grave,
haunting her and beckoning her to resolve the story by returning to Woodsboro.
These dreams and waking nightmares are woven in a way that we
can't be sure what's real?
who is actually dead?
and what might happen next?
And the deaths in scream 3 border on parody
echoing the nature of a nightmare on elm street.
Wes Craven could hardly have known what influence he would have and the strange
journey of his Scream characters.
Is the audience are left with this delicious
blend of horror humour and intelligent commentary that attacks our senses and
blows out our fear fuse.
While recognizing the intellectual can see we give to horror films.
We can never return to the single-layer superficial horror
films of the late 80s and for this we have Wes Craven and the scream franchise
to thank.