Review of Scream 4 (2011) by Shiira — 28 Apr 2011

The cinema club leaders of Westboro High are pretty uninformed about the genre they profess to admire, or maybe it's a matter of the two fanboys placing restrictions on what constitutes a horror movie; a matter of tastemaker-sanctioned genre staticness.

During a meeting, in which the rules for surviving a horror movie are being dissected, Charlie says, "To be the new version, you know, 2.0? The killer should be filming the murders." With this heedless declaration, John McNaughton's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", and more importantly, "Man Bites Dog"(the original meta-horror movie that meant serious business), goes unacknowledged, especially when Robbie puts in his own two cents, adding that "it's the natural next step in psycho slasher innovation," as if the murderers in "Scream 4" are pioneering a new methodology in the killing business.

Benoit Poelvoorde, playing "himself" in the 1992 Belgian production, is the subject of a documentary film that profiles the day-to-day travails of a serial killer. To paraphrase and co-opt Robbie's proclamation in its proper context, "the psycho slasher innovation" of "Man Bites Dog" is how the filmmaker shifts the focus away from the cult of personality surrounding the homicidal maniac and more towards the person he's putting under life-threatening duress, so that the moviegoer identifies with the inevitable victim and not some hillbilly with a chainsaw, or a knife-wielding goalie.

Ben doesn't have the sex appeal of an anti-hero; he has no gimmick. With the cameras rolling, this no frills psychopath, at one point, suffocates a young boy in his own bed, the culmination of a home invasion gone awry.

The hands that hold the pillow steady over the smothered child's face are ordinary hands, all-too-human ones, without the accoutrements of knives extending from the fingers. The vicarious thrill of harmless bloodlusting people get from watching people die is largely absent, made strange by the film's straight-faced mockumentary form, in which the horror is the end-result of a slaying, and not the creative spectacle(the incident that prompts the arterial spray and all manners of bloodletting) leading up to the latest casualty in Jason, Michael Myers, or Freddy Kreuger's killing spree.

The content is self-reflexive. It confronts the moviegoer with this burning question: Why do we like to watch people die in grisly fashion for fun? The "Stab" franchise, the movie series within the movie series, is used in "Scream 4" to exemplify the fandom behind slasher flicks in the form of an impromptu film festival, a "Stab"-athon staged by Robbie and Charlie.

Playing to a capacity crowd in a barn house, "Stab" open just like "Scream", but with one significant change in the film-within-the-film adaptation of "The Woodsboro Murders", the Gail Weathers bestselling book that gives the "real-life" account of the Ghostface Killer , whose fictitious handiwork is transformed into non-fiction by "Scream 2".

Heather Graham, playing the role of the girl who gets murdered at the outset of "Scream", disrobes in the bathroom, an outright deviation from "actual" events leading up to the crime.

To us, the actual moviegoers, the nudity is implied, but to the "Stab" audience, the partygoers at the "Stab"-athon, the suggested nudity from their diegetical perspective is frontal, and gratuitous, since the character Drew Barrymore plays, never endeavors to shower, therefore deconstructing the slasher pic trope of topless nubiles, because the bathroom scene in "Stab" is indeed superfluous, which is proven by the put-upon historicity of the original "Scream".

In "Stab", just like many slasher movies of its ilk, the young woman shows us her breasts, then sooner or later, she shows us her blood. "Man Bites Dog" knows the trope well, and is more blunt about the interconnectedness that binds sex and violence together in all its R-rated glory, by replacing the usual display of exhibitionism(or consensual sex) found in most dead teenager movies with gang-rape as the prelude to the woman being murdered.

"Man Bites Dog" brings to the foreground the seeming disinterest in sex that is common to all the major figures in the annals of horror cinema. Like "Man Bites Dog", the killer has sex on the brain in "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", when Otis sexually assaults the woman that he and the titular character kills(along with her husband and son), and videotapes.

These two seminal horror films are real in a way that "Scream" can never be, even with the advantage of the film-within-the-film device. As the Ghostface Killer records his attempted murder of Gail in the hayloft, the juxtaposition between the "true story" and "based on a true story" reveals nary a difference in form and content, especially since the homicidal videographer never shows his true face.

He hides behind an iconic mask, a signifer of entertainment, purveyor of cinematic violence.