Film Magazine Analysis

The Crazies: Poster Analysis

Insidious: Poster Analysis

Short Film Analysis: The Descent

Short Film Analysis: The Hills have Eyes (2006)

Creep Analysis

Halloween & Scream: Comparitive Essay

After John Carpenter’s Halloween, the Horror genre became saturated with repetitive copy-cats as many directors started to imitate the conventions used in Halloween. It started to become too unrealistic, as audiences became uninterested as the plots and characters failed to relate to real life. The violence was also seen as unnecessary, violence for violence sakes, and this was connected with the violence and rising crime rates in society and therefore fell out of favour with the majority of the public as parents were scared of their susceptible children. The violence was also shown to be without consequence and this created a sense of moral panic as gratuitous crimes were blamed on the gore and situations that were portrayed within the films. The Horror genre also failed to attract a wide proportion of society as their audience was mainly male, as this is what the conventions attracted, and females became additionally apathetic towards the outworn similarities between the horrors that were released. This led the Horror genre making a disappearing act, much like Michael Myers, as the audience were no longer concerned with boring copies and obsolete plots. Enter Scream: The revival of the Horror film, as Wes Craven was keen to change the perspective and representation of the genre he loved.

Scream was a lot different to the Horror films that had come before; it was new, intense and comical in places. Wes Craven was determined to leave the clichés of the Horror genre in the dirt as he avoided them like the Black Death. This was also helped by the new technology of the era, Scream avoided use of the Steadicam and instead used improved editing and climatic music to ensure that the stalking scenes remained thrilling. Other clichés are not only avoided but also mocked. Throughout the film, characters refer to the old conventions of earlier Horror, “Never say "who's there?" Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish. You might as well come out to investigate a strange noise or something.”, in an attempt to show the audience that things have changed. Not only does this work, but it also gives Scream a humorous side, and the audience laughs despite the situation, creating a perfect contrast, between Horror and Comedy, which eventuates the shock the audience feels when the violence kicks in.

Horror films had, up until Scream, represented the female characters badly; they were often shown to be helpless, stupid and sexually objectified and this was seen, by most audiences, to be sexist. This could also explain why the female audience felt annexed from the genre and a factor to as why it lost popularity. However, in Wes Craven’s Horror flick, the character of Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) is shown to be a lot tougher than most ‘damsel’s in distress’ and breaks the stereotype of the helpless girl. Nevertheless, this isn’t just kept to women and the audience can easily see that the characters are a lot less stupid than those in Halloween. There is also a semblance of equality between the victims and their killers, and in some scenes the victims even inflicts lasting injury on the killer, before they are ‘dispatched of’ of course. This is very different from Halloween, as no one is able to fight back against the might of Michael Myers and, even when he is shot multiple times, he survives to fight another day. This ‘super-human’ villain approach is discarded with in Scream, it had become a cliché by that time, and the killers are revealed to only be local boys from the community.

The use of big name stars in Scream was also a step away from that of Halloween and other early horrors. Horror, at that time, had been viewed as a low budget genre, using every day suburban locations, lacking special effects and cheap unknown actors. Scream was, of course, different. With a number of big name stars, e.g. Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox, it was made more appealing to mass audience and females as they were able to see big name female actors and didn’t feel so cut off from the genre as before.

The music also differed from that of Halloween. In Halloween, the music was monotonous and obvious and the audience became aware of a ‘scary-part’ as the music picked up which ruined the suspense as the audience new when something was going to happen. In Scream, however, the music was used much more efficiently. It contained atmospheric music as a background to add suspense and tension, subtle to most audiences, and used different soundtracks for different scenes, so as not to indicate so obviously when a scene was about to hit a climax. This brought back popularity for the Horror genre as people where actually able to ‘jump’ and be scared at the film, rather than just know when something was going to able and give them times to brace themselves.

Halloween and early horrors were also very obvious in the narrative. The audience became aware, quite early on, who would die and who wouldn’t. They also didn’t contain any plot twists, or if they did they were obvious and the audience felt let down as there was no challenge or surprise to the film. Scream, introduced a lot of plot twists to the genre and the audience were always kept guessing. The ending would have also surprised a lot of the viewers as Craven not only used one killer, but two and it wasn’t just mindless murder, the ‘psychos’ had understandable motives for their actions, unlike it Halloween where Myers is literally just a psychopath.

In conclusion, Scream brought back the popularity for the horror genre that had been lost by repeated clichés and differed a lot from Halloween and other early horror films. It changed many aspects, including the soundtrack, actors, and plot and added a sense of humour to create a film that not only surprised its audience but brought it back.