“Scream”, the horror film drowned in its mise en abyme

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

“Hollywood is running out of ideas”, declares one of the characters of this relaunch of the franchise Scream, created in 1996 by Wes Craven, who died in 2015. This had revitalized a whole booming rhetoric, that of horror cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, by confronting it with self-awareness, by presenting the conventions of the genre as clichés therefore mastered by the characters themselves, sort of clones of the adolescent audience to which this type of film was addressed.

Quite miraculously, this mise en abyme injected cinematographic horror with a sort of frightening and joyful postmodern reflection at the same time, humorously questioning the power of contemporary images and their consumption. A Hollywood “short of ideas” thus reinvented, in extremis, an unexpected dimension to popular cinema, a dimension precisely founded on the idea of ​​an exhaustion of fiction.

This new cover of the series, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, without Wes Craven but produced by Kevin Williamson, who was the original screenwriter and inventor of the concept, can not, from now on, work on such a principle. without displaying any obvious cynicism. The hunt for the masked serial killer which terrorizes a small town is apprehended according to a principle which brings nothing new here. The reflective film becomes the object of a perpetual commentary, often boring (and long, since it lasts almost two hours), by the characters themselves who not only have integrated the conventions of the film. slasher original but also those of the commentary of the series Scream.

Two generations of actors

It is therefore difficult not to feel disappointed in the face of a production which does not bring anything really substantial, if not an umpteenth position of overhang on the commentary, an overconsciousness of oneself which would make everything ridiculous. The limits of this system, which partly spoil the spectacular demands of entertainment, undoubtedly lie in the ease with which an erudite amateur of this type of fictions manages here, rather quickly, to take the narrative quickly and to guess the identity. of the masked assassin.

This new variation, finally, which opposes two generations of actors (those of the original franchise and the newcomers, with whom the public of teenagers today is supposed to identify), nevertheless strikes by the realism of graphic violence scenes. Throats and disembowelments here come up against, sometimes head-on, the initial irony of the project, as if what was lost in psychological depth had to be compensated by a frenzy of ultra-violence. However, we can have fun savoring a moment, the one when Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), is the subject of a tasty visual citation. But it is difficult to say more without spoiling part of the artificial pleasure menu that characterizes this genre post-cinema.

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