There is a common misconception that all slasher films are made for brain-dead audiences, mostly consisting of teens who do not pay attention to anything other than the clichéd horror key moments for some minor, cheap thrills. Nonetheless, judging a film a priori from this flawed perception is for me as insulting as judging someone before having made personal contact or refusing to take him/her seriously out of racial prejudice. I find it difficult to understand how this prejudice can be found even in someone with an academic background in film theory or in a die-hard cinephile.
We have so many terms which apply to any form of a priori discrimination in the real world, but this political correctness should apply at a cultural level as well. It is simply unfair and bigot to dismiss a film a priori due to the particularities of its genre. Wes Craven’s Scream 4 proves the need for affirmative action at artistic level as well, or at least the consideration of a proper term against unfair prejudice, such as genrist (or something more creative than that). In this particular case, I will be referring mostly to the unjust prejudice against horror.
One can notice two genres that have been easily excluded by the Academy for award considerations throughout the years – horror and sci-fi. While the first never got close to any significant accolade, the latter is still not in the safe zone, not even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (which the US critics at the time dismissed from the start as “Soviet propaganda”). I am very aware that most pretentious cinephiles who label themselves as fans of artsy films or ultra-independent cinema (mostly made of footage stolen from other people’s work and put together in Windows Movie Maker) just for the sake of an elitist and snobbish self-gratification will dismiss horror films from the start as being too mainstream or anti-intellectual, without taking as much as two seconds to actually remember films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds or George A. Romero’s politically charged Night of the Living Dead. As a film studies student I have met so many people dismissing everything mainstream to the point of asking about a film’s budget and gross revenue as if those factors alone assured a great cinematic experience. The slasher (sub)genre for example has been grotesquely overlooked by the Academy right from the get-go.
The Slasher Film and Scream 4
First of all, for anyone still scratching their head when reading the term slasher, this refers to a particular exploitation (low-budget, independent, independent/counterculture flicks that started in grindhouse theatres as early as the 60s) style within the horror genre, mostly made of films with a plot centered on stereotypical under-aged protagonists trying to survive the attacks of a mysterious, masked murderer cutting them down one by one. Sounds stupid? Well, it’s not, since some of the first films that started the genre include Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and John Carpenter’s Halloween, universally regarded by film scholars as classics. However, I bend my knee to Scream 4 as it has rectified my knowledge in film history – apparently, Psycho is not the common ancestor of all slashers; that place is reserved for Peeping Tom, which was released only a few months before Hitchcock’s masterpiece, as Craven’s film explains.
Scream 4 takes the genre to a whole new level. It does not thrive on horror cliches or even the conventions expected in such a film. Instead, it constantly plays with our expectations entirely. Apart from his career as a director associated with the horror genre, Wes Craven is also a film theorists and he is applying his knowledge and understanding of the fabula, which Bordwell and Thompson label as a set of conventions and expectations that go beyond the plot of a film and connects it indirectly with previous works. Everything we are expecting to see is delivered for comic relief, not in the key moments when the killer strikes. Instead, Craven is doing the exact opposite, making any hardcore horror fan’s knowledge utterly futile in uncovering the mystery of the film. This is not just a film intended to make you jump off your seat in terror, treating its viewers with disrespect by offering the same cliches. Instead, it avoids them with extraordinary precision, while the misfortunate characters do not benefit from the same privilege as the audience. The protagonists, who are very cine-literate themselves, are very aware of their reality, in their attempt to change its outcome by predicting and going against the usual horror genre conventions in order to assure their survival. However, they are not privileged as the spectators with the same perspective, so we will always be one step ahead of them, although never quite enough to predict the ending or have any clue about what’s going to happen next.
Consequently, the process of identification takes a different form in this film. We no longer watch these characters for the sake of cheap thrills and dismiss them entirely after their gory deaths. Instead we think and carefully examine the situation and the bigger picture along with them. Because of this, I have to say that Scream 4 treats its characters with more respect and dignity than any other horror film produced recently. These characters are not disposable plot conveniences, they are very three-dimensional, meant to be taken seriously. Other than that, the obvious references to Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, and the homage discretely brought to cult and classic horrors and left for the more cineliterate viewers to decipher should make for a pleasant and unexpectedly challenging cinematic experience.
I can go on about all the aspects that make Scream 4 a really good film which overcomes all the unjust stereotypes associated with its genre, but I will end up spoiling it. Suffice it to say, this is not a shocking film – it does not contain any sexual content or references, it is not over-the-top gory - it is not insulting to any type of audience, at all. It is not meant to shock you, it is meant to get you thinking and for that alone, it is original and worth your time.
Sources:
- * David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction
Andrei Serban - Mostly film reviewer, but also two-time published author and independent filmmaker. Heavily influenced by Kafka, Palahniuk, Dangor, ...
