How The Scream Franchise Made A Fortune With Violence & Sexism
While the films pretend to mock dumb horror movie tropes.
Teenage Drew Barrymore got the death call in the 1996 film of the Scream franchise. That shocking moment I saw her lifeless body hanging was when Scream became my favorite scary movie.
In 1996 I was sixteen, naïve & full of shit when I became a fangirl of the Scream franchise.
Flying high on the success of Scream 1, the franchise released five more films in three decades. All five films use the same bait in the opening scene for their audience; a young attractive woman certain to die.
Between then to 2022, I couldn’t wait for the next Scream movie & then the next. I am ashamed to admit I was seduced by the juicy gore of each sequel. But by the time Scream 6 was released I became a parent. As I prepared to enjoy the film during a rare two hours of empty time, I felt my feelings shift. I felt my absent family’s rebuke. I was repelled rather than fascinated by the gore. When our stakes are low, we are Gorehounds (Urban Dictionary: Gorehound). We take the bloodshed in our stride, pretend to be nonchalant about it, and routinely relish it. After parenthood, the violence & sexism in the Scream franchise hit me hard because it celebrates dumb horror movie tropes while pretending to mock them.
People are disposable plastic in the horror movie kingdom.
Have you noticed that characters who die in Scream have no backstory? No one mourns their deaths; no dreams die with them. Even when I was a faithful fan, I could see that those who eventually die have served as mere props to boost my terror when Ghostface struck. The cat-and-mouse game means we don’t feel empathy when people are slaughtered. We feel bloodlust. In the horror movie world, the higher the death count the cooler the movie. Case in point: Google ranks the films in the franchise based on the number of deaths in each. Of course, it’s a mere inconvenience that teenagers slaughter each other onscreen while in the real world, school shootouts traumatize.
The motivation to murder is as flimsy as waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
Spoiler alert: killing for fame is a thing. In the Scream Universe, you can polish off schoolmates like dessert because you want your three minutes of notoriety.
Vulnerable kids could emulate what they see on screen, but I may be talking ahead of myself. It is politically incorrect these days to blame the movies.
Sexist Much Scream franchise?
The sexism in Scream was okay in 1996. Or was it? Ghostface(s) want to kill a woman for her mother’s wanton wanderings years earlier. They forget that it takes two to tango & so do we.
Scream may be a clever meta franchise but it follows bankable horror movie rules. Women are used to terrorize or titillate. Every Scream killer, including female killers plague, stalk, sexualize & murder women. We praise the Scream for allowing its heroine to survive after she’s enjoyed sex. As someone wise, can you grasp how ridiculous this sounds? How much ground do we have to cover to become genuinely groundbreaking? Scratch below this shallow progressive veil & you will see that every Scream movie has big-breasted, flirty cheerleaders who are killed for being big-breasted & flirty. They are punished for being female humans with sexual needs.
We are so used to this trope that we no longer question it. You know the dumb blonde who titillates on screen will be killed in minutes. She has no charisma beyond her looks. She has the brains & mean streak of a 10-year-old. The movie paints her as so degraded that we silently cheer when she is put away. The misogyny is so bizarre that when the killer is finally overpowered the movie mourns their back story rather than the girls they slaughtered.
Evil is the motivator.
The urge to do evil is the force behind each killer’s supernatural power. They appear & disappear like magic, they come back to life when inches away from death & get away with murder in broad daylight. Back in the day, I cheered the superhuman strength. Now I find it ridiculous, upsetting & irresponsible.
Scream may have revealed the narrative of horror flicks, but it has cemented the narrative with its stereotypes.
I am a sucker for punishment. I’ve been ignoring the tropes for years because the screenplay is cool & the music racy. Not anymore. Not now. Because I know how high the stakes are for me. I wish I’d realized sooner.
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