Scream : Creating Horror through the Transformation of Every
Although its generic title suggests otherwise, Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) is a horror film that in many ways transcends the banality of its genre. Indeed, Scream distinguishes itself from other horror movies by an understanding, made explicit within the diegesis of the film, of the horror genre and its standard "formula." This genre-consciousness is developed through its characters, an ensemble of movie-obsessed teenagers whose identities are inextricably linked with their culture; appropriately, the killers are two members of this group who view life as "one big movie." Although this cinephelia does make the film unique, Scream self-consciously achieves the goal of any horror movie: terrifying its audience. In order to understand exactly how this horror is achieved, we must look to the opening scene to locate central themes established through the intercutting, mise-en-scene, and dialogue of the sequence. Evident in the bloody deaths of two of the protagonists, the movie becomes horrifying when innocuous everyday phenomena--the telephone, the Jiffy Pop, and the cultural omnipresence of cinema-- become threatening.To understand how Scream functions as a horror film, we must first understand the notion of cinematic horror and t . . .
cast: Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, and Courtney Cox. However, the intercut appearance of the constantly rising Jiffy Pop exacerbates our horror as we watch this scene, as it establishes a metaphoric relationship between the commonplace and the (ideally) rare occasion of gruesome violence. Through dialogue and details of the mise-en-scene, the sequence creates a pastiche, one which borrows the presence of cinema, as well as the social stereotypes which this particular genre perpetuates. Here, the ideas from both William’s and Rony’s essays are simultaneously operating. the tenor half of the metaphor belongs to the action of the diegesis and the vehicle half belongs to a part of the decor or, in the case of the pure metaphor, to an entirely extraneous element brought in from the outside the narrative. As she backs away, we see a medium shot of the door, a shot included to increase the anticipation in the audience of the killer’s entrance. At this point we can just barely hear her increasingly desperate, inaudible cries of "Mom. Thus, in the film an everyday, seemingly innocuous object like a phone can be a device of horror because of the temporal and spatial boundaries it violates. Thus, it seems that Craven is placing the popcorn’s cooking and the threat to Casey’s life on some sort of time-line, one in which beginning, middle, and end points are contemporaneous; by doing so, he is evoking a metaphoric relationship between the two which is predicated on time. As this presence is manifested almost completely through the telephone, we can say that, in Scream, the commonplace object assumes a threatening role; the telephone becomes "killer.
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