We're back at it again, huh? The fifth go-round of an entire month's worth of spooks and screams and scares. A year is going to come where I quietly retire this series because I've run out of interesting spooky films I care enough about to view. That's not this year, though, but it's always on the horizon. Much like any horror film franchise which gets re-iterated to death, which brings us nicely to our first spooky topic of the month. What better way to start a sequel to my horror blog series than with the sequel to a slasher movie? Of course, Scream wasn't just any slasher movie. It was unique at the time for breaking the fourth wall and interrogating the bullshit ideology and "rules" of horror movies. Scream 2 does much the same, but in its own fresh way. Let's poke at that a little bit.The opening is honestly just a little ghoulish, but in its own special way of holding a mirror to the audience and being all meta. A college couple get killed at the movies while seeing an in-universe film adaptation of the events of the original Scream. What's fucked up, beyond the murder, is that everyone here is treating this like a fucking midnight showing of Rocky Horror; they're giving out Ghostface outfits at the cinema and everyone's hooting and hollering and waving fake knives around. It's the kind of audience you'd expect for... well, a midnight showing of a horror movie. Remember though that in-universe this is a [rue crime story adapted into a slasher movie. It'd be like if they made a movie about the OJ Simpson killings from Nicole's perspective, filmed it like a slasher movie, and had a bunch of assholes howling for her to show her tits before getting the life stabbed out of her. It'd be fucked up, right? And yet here these idiots are hooting like banshees, much like real people in real life hoot over fictional murders in the movies. Nobody's hooting when the girl gets up in front of the stage, life stabbed out of her, though. It all becomes real for them then.
From there it's another string of horrible murders, with Neve Campbell's Sydney horrified that all this shit is happening again. The meta artifice of the movie is slipped right under our noses early on, during a scene in a college film class where a bunch of students debate the killings and the nature of violent movies inspiring violent acts... before they go into a talk about how sequels almost universally are lesser than the originals and rehash the same old shit. Exceptions are given, but that's the meta core of the movie. Do violent movies inspire violent acts in real life? How can a slasher sequel (or copycat killer, if you will) innovate from what came before? It's notable that the student in the class who says that violent movies do inspire violent acts is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she's the next one to die in the movie. She also dies in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but I think that came out after this. Stop killing Buffy in your slasher movies, 90's.
The rules of the slasher sequel, as outlined by Jamie Kennedy's character, are that it has to have a higher body count and be more violent. A quick peek at a fan wiki says that yes, Scream 2 has a higher body count. I don't remember the violence level of Scream the first that much, but we'll give the movie the benefit of the doubt here. The movie moves along its way, but I want to skip ahead to the killer reveals. Before that, a fun thing in the middle of the movie or so; Sydney rehearsing a play. David Warner's the drama professor, and it's always good to have a David Warner cameo in your movie. So the killers. It's another duo, and the first one does try a fakeout to trick Sydney into thinking her new boyfriend is his accomplice. Ha ha ha I was lying, I'd never repeat the same dumb trick in the second movie! You stupid dummy, how'd you even buy that? What, do you have trust issues over your traumatic almost murder in the last movie? Boo hoo hoo, now let me explain my motive.
It's violence in movies. This dumb motherfucker film student wants to get caught and plead insanity because the violent movies made him kill a bunch of people as a derivative of some other dumbfucks with a ghost mask and knife. Speaking of those dumbfucks, his accomplice is the mother of one of the killers from the last movie, who just wants revenge. The mom here betrays her accomplice, but what's interesting is how Sydney fights back. The venue here is back at the college theatre from before. The villains have been using different tricks; slasher movie tropes and vengeance, the oldest motivation for murder. To fight against the meta slasher movie she's in, Sydney weaponizes the theatre. Specifically getting into the control room with an axe and dropping stage lights and sandbags and the goddamned set on the woman trying to kill her. It's wild and it's saying something about the performative nature of these movies. That's where I'll leave Scream 2. It's neat, if not a little grim in places. One down, 30 to go.
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