THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID
While the horror genre seems, recently and happily, to return to a kind of primitive theater of cruelty (the Terrify 1 And 2in 2017 and 2022) or go beyond your own limits by opening up to an even darker dimension (Halloween Endsin 2022), the franchise of Scream keep on going. Created in 1996 by screenwriter Kevin Williamson and filmmaker Wes Craven (1939-2015), the series, which is in its sixth installment, aims to be a game with the ultra-repetitive and fixed conventions of this horror subgenre that is the slashera tale of an assassin repeatedly attacking teenagers, often with a knife.
The characters, aware of themselves, had fun with the clichés, commenting on them, sometimes anticipating the adventures and dismantling the frozen mechanisms of a cinematographic genre that was beginning to have its day. The way became more important than the root cause. One could reproach this postmodern way of approaching the adventures and of laying them bare in a kind of cynical irony, speculating on the incredulity of a spectator to whom it is no longer done.
Skillfully, however, the saga Scream constituted a pleasing conceptual mise en abyme on the very nature of cinematic entertainment, ranking horror cinema as a commodity that is both infinitely reproducible, like the number of killers in each episode, determined by the evolution of the means of communication (mobile phone, Internet, social networks, etc.) and subject to contemporary developments in the cultural industries.
Miraculous turnarounds
This sixth version takes up the characters of the previous episode: two sisters, having escaped the killer who raged in the small town of Woodsboro, settled in New York, where they hope to recover from the trauma suffered. The murders begin again, carried out by a masked individual, dressed like the original killer. Who, in the entourage of young girls, is the assassin?
By moving the action from a small town to New York, the designers of the film no doubt wanted to give it a slight facelift. It is true that the starting principle – the cliché, then the designation of the cliché as a cliché – seems to be exhausted and give birth to endless dialogue scenes, where the characters themselves reveal the conventions of which they are prisoners.
The scenario here lets water pass from all sides and sometimes progresses according to a series of accidents and truly miraculous reversals. The height, when one thinks of addressing an audience that has become incredulous. Moreover, who has not seen or has forgotten the previous episode will find it difficult not to get lost in all the allusions to the past of the protagonists. And then, what is the point of wanting to “deconstruct” cinematographic stereotypes if it is to fall back, in fine, into the praise of romantic love and the family?
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