Tag: horror movies

The Strange Longevity Of The ‘Scream’ Franchise

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment

Ghostface in Space when?

By Imp Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2282368

I’ve been on a horror kick lately. I finally watched Barbarian. A film I wanted to see two years when it premiered, only to completely forget about until it resurfaced on Prime recently.

Barbarian is the latest in the “socially conscious” horror trend, which started with Get Out in 2018. Even our horror film franchises have to be woke nowadays. I recall a much simpler time. A time when all you needed was a mask, preferably a white one, and some maniac with a knife. A little cat and mouse. Some butchered coeds. And there you go, you had your movie.

Of course, the slasher tropes started by Halloween and Friday the 13th were tired and formularic even by the late 1980s. This is why Scream was such a refreshing hit back in 1996. It playfully toyed with the genre conventions in a fun, meta way, with characters using them as a “rulebook” to help ensure their own survival.

  • Don’t go off alone.
  • Never say you’ll be “right back.”
  • Never, ever have sex.

Scream was the shit back in the day. It not only kickstarted the teen slasher craze all over again, it helped director Wes Craven get back in the game. It was a mega jackpot win for screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who wrote the script on spec. It’s unlikely his record for most commercially successful spec script not written by a writer/director will ever be broken. The Scream franchise has scored nearly $1 billion at the box office alone. Imagine that. Being some rank nobody 31-year-old screenwriter and you have a pdf file on your rickety old PC computer that’s worth billions. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. And he wrote it in a weekend.

Two sequels quickly followed the original hit. Then the franchise went dormant for awhile. This is back before reboots and requels and prequels became a big thing in horror. In 2011 Wes Craven directed Scream 4. That was followed by another movie lull, though the TV series Scream ran from 2015–2019. Until finally Scream (the fifth film) and Scream VI came out back to back in 2022 and ’23, with plans for a seventh on the way.

It isn’t just Scream’s almost 30-year longevity that’s amazing, but the relative high quality the franchise has maintained. Most horror series fall apart after the original. Some keep chugging along despite being objectively goddawful, i.e. Halloween, Saw, Hellraiser, etc. With the exception of Scream 3, every installment in the franchise is fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Even Final Destination, with its clever teen-killing conceit, sits mainly in the sub-50s on RT.

So, what’s Scream’s secret? Why has it qualitatively lasted for so long while so many others have pathetically limped from one refresh to another?

Scream has some built-in requisite elements that act as quality control. Every Scream film has its gimmicks — mainly a twisty whodunnit plot with multiple meta references. A balanced measure of comedy, thrills, and melodrama. A tone that strays just outside the lines of realism into cartoonism. This precarious tight rope act isn’t easy. The latest two films are meta inside of meta; referencing the in-movie Stab series, which itself is a self-aware horror film that replicates scenes from the first Scream. The whole self-referential effect becomes like an MC Escher staircase, but with blood and knives.

‘Scream’ (1996): Dimension films.

Scream has also served as a recurring mirror of the current state of horror, if not the cultural subtext influencing the genre. In 1996, it was quite innovative to introduce a beloved B-list sweetheart like Drew Barrymore, only to brutally kill her off in the opening. By 2011, the franchise had to adjust that formula with multiple twists, with mixed results. The latest two films have followed Hollywood’s latest diversity push, replacing the mainly White teen cast in the previous four with two leads of Hispanic origin — Jenny Ortega and Melissa Barrera — and assorted minority back-ups, with hardly a White male in sight (save for villainous roles, of course). All while letting OG Scream-ers like Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox reenter on occasion.

It all makes for a nice adaptive organism of a franchise that can constantly reinvent itself to fit the times. I wonder what sort of State of the Horror Union address a Scream re-re-re-boot might make come the 2030s or even 2040s. The latest sequel already transplanted us to the Big Apple, à la Jason Takes Manhattan. Ghostface in Space is just a matter of time.

These days, it’s not enough to just throw another set of endangered teens out there and watch them get butchered in obscene ways. Scream films are a thinking man’s slasher flicks, dare I say. At the least they offer something a cut above your typical violent bloodletting. I find myself strangely looking forward to the next one.

‘Talk to Me’ Will Freak Your Mind

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment

A good creepy film with a solid cast.

Source: A24

Talk to Me was a movie I instantly wanted to see immediately after catching that freaky AF trailer. It gave me Hellraiser and It Follows vibes. Plus it’s nice to see an independent horror that’s not associated with the The Conjuring universe. A24 — the Nike swoosh of the indy horror world —has done me good thus far, with prior entries like Ari Aster’s Midsommar and his instant classic Hereditary.

While I still had some reservations, being equally reminded of similar godawful teen “prop horror” films like Truth or Dare, Wish Upon, and Unfriended, I was still looking forward to checking it out.

Unfortunately, I live pretty remotely from any decent theaters. The one a two hour’s drive away from me, where I saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 this summer, had a giant tear or rip or something going right down the middle of the screen. So I wasn’t about to waste time or money on that one again. So, I was forced to wait until Talk to Me finally arrived on streaming, and for a decent price.

Was the wait worth it? Absolutely.

The premise of Talk to Me is at-a-superficial-glance silly — a group of teens use the embalmed hand of a dead medium to conjure spirits for fun and games, until one of them takes it too far and things turn murdery. We’ve seen this sort of set-up before, in which a group of young people screw around with the spirits and quickly get in over their heads. Such as in the miniature Ouija franchise from 2014 and 2016.

However, while many horror films have a slick and disposable feel to them, TTM boasts a strong cast that really manages to capture that elusive organic sense of a genuine group of teen friends. The standout is lead Sophie Wilde, playing Mia, whose spellbound facial contortions are ones for the ages.

Source: A24.

It Follows has a similar group dynamic aesthetic, but in a more subdued laid back Midwestern style. TTM, with its Australian energy, actually has one of the most amusing montage moments I’ve ever seen in a horror, if any film, period, where the friends all take turns getting temporarily possessed by the spirits they conjure with the evil hand. The camera work by director and writers Danny and Michael Philippou is clever and Evil Dead-esque in spots, and appropriately playful in the beginning.

But it’s not long before Mia falls prey to the tricky (and kinky) evil spirits on the other side of the hand. The rules for the game Talk to Me are pretty straightforward, if a little dubious. You light a candle to “open the door” so to speak. Grip the hand and first say, “talk to me,” Then a spirit only you can see will appear. You then say “I invite you in,” to let the spirit swoop into your body, where you experience what can only be described as a three-way cross between a rollercoaster ride, a mushroom trip, and an orgasm. But be careful not to let yourself stay possessed longer than 90 seconds, or forget to blow out the candle, or else the spirits will be able to linger, and get in your head.

When Mia’s dead mother appears to her, who died from suicide recently, she sees this as her only chance to reconnect with the parent she dearly misses. Except this is exactly what the evil spirits are looking for. They then try to manipulate Mia into killing so they can absorb another soul, with the “mom” spirit taking the lead. Evidently freshly dead spirits (or demons, it’s left amibiguous) are charged with possessing the next batch of suckers. Sort of like an afterlife pyramid scheme. Herbalife from beyond the grave. Talk about pure evil.

I judge horror on whether the story slithers into my mind and haunts me for a spell, as opposed to cheap jumpscares or profuse corn syrup. This one checked all the right boxes. As did Hereditary and even the original Saw, which is underrated as it is forgotten under the weight of a million sequels.

It’s also nice that Talk to Me doesn’t fall to the temptation of trying to be another “social horror.” Though it does make relevant thematic use of social media and drug abuse. And while the dead parent trope is often overused — Midsommar did it for instance— TTM wisely doesn’t center everything around it. Where the narrative of last year’s Smile was effective but thin, and ended somewhat unsatisfyingly, Talk’s ended in — spoilers incoming — quite frankly, terrifying fashion, if a tad predictable. I’d always imagined Jack Torrance’s spirit winding up in a similar way. Trapped discorporate at the Overlook Hotel forever and trying to bugger the living, just as our protag Mia ends up on the opposite side of the evil hand, with an ill-fitting and existentialist nightmare fate reminiscent of Craig’s demise in Being John Malkovich.

Talk to Me ia good creepy stuff that’s worth checking out.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to check out some of my other articles linked below. I’m also a novelist. You can check out my books here.