Scream has never quite figured out what its audience should fear

It’s a truism at this point that horror movies reflect the fears and anxieties of the culture from which they were borne. 1950s horror gave us fears of the new atomic age and invasions from beyond. In late ’60s and ’70s, the genre shifted from outside threats to those from within—reflecting roiling culture wars and battles over identity politics.

But the Scream movies reflect an unusual set of concerns, ones that often seem markedly different from the other films of their respective eras. If anything, the films in the franchise suggest a culture that is struggling to understand what it should fear. Whether a return of long-ago trauma or the recycling of past danger into a renewed threat, the films depict a fin-de-siècle culture that worried there was nothing new under the sun—an anxiety over postmodern self-referentiality in which mortal peril was almost part of the furniture.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The first Scream film was released in 1996, a time when Francis Fukuyama’s influential tract The End Of History And The Last Man was a focal point for discussions regarding cultural history on university campuses across the United States. Fukuyama’s thesis—one that arguably seemed foolish at the time, and looks downright idiotic in hindsight—was that major global conflicts had largely funneled the evolution of politics into its final form: Western liberal democracy. He argued this was slowly becoming the universal endpoint of all human government; that history, in a sense, had ended, because it had reached its last stage.

Whoops. The 21st century is nothing if not a sound tweak of the nose to such a conservative, short-sighted analysis. It was a time of Clinton-era cheerleading and a popular mindset (however misguided) of broad economic prosperity, when the most-covered political disagreements in the U.S. took place over blowjobs in the Oval Office. Scream’s depiction of its world—in which safety and security have as much to do with an understanding of popular culture as that of a political ideology—looked almost pragmatic.

And smart. Scream took a dying subgenre—the slasher movie—and single-handedly revitalized it, rescuing slashers from the increasingly diminishing returns embodied by aging horror icons Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees. And while the franchise’s cultural impact may have largely faded from view, its influence is visible in the subsequent reboots of those long-in-the-tooth franchises, nearly all of which feature elements of meta reflection or plot points involving new media that can be traced directly back to Scream.

Scream: Fear of sins past and media present

And the cultural fears and anxieties rooted in the original film do feel, in hindsight, like a plausible reflection of its era. Wes Craven’s film followed Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) as she struggled to survive a killer who wears a ghost mask and begins offing her friends one by one. It’s not until the final act that we learn the truth: A pair of killers (Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich) are using the tropes of horror movies to create a horror show of their own. It was a prior affair between Sidney’s now-dead mother and the father of Ulrich’s Billy Loomis that led the disturbed teen to begin plotting his deadly scheme and roping in his friend and co-conspirator. They wanted fame, true, but good old revenge was beneath the hood.

In other words, the film took a very old idea—the sins of the parents are to be laid upon the children—and wrapped it up in brand-new dressing. Namely, the conventions of the slasher genre: Using a contemporary understanding of the horror “rules” it both embraced and lovingly mocked (no sex, no drinking, no drugs, never say “I’ll be right back”), the film made the case that surviving the past’s desire for revenge depended upon a savvy understanding of the very popular culture that had created these kids’ predicament.

And the other key ingredient to the film’s representation of cultural anxieties is how mediated the characters’ experience with horror is—in both senses of the word. It’s no coincidence the killers communicate with their victims through a cellphone, their speech digitally altered to produce the series’ “Ghostface” voice. It suggests the seemingly random and unpredictable nature of the threat—coming from anyone, anywhere, with no need for a hulking monster à la Jason or a supernatural fright of the vampire or demon variety. It’s also a distancing effect: a disembodied voice that could attach to any person, stripped of the intimacy of physical proximity, thereby presaging the virtual anonymity of the internet introduced more in the sequels.

The other media in the equation is, well, media: These kids understand their situation through reference to the movies and TV shows that have come before, be it When A Stranger Calls, Halloween, or even the “Barney Fife” aside lobbed at David Arquette’s dim but good-natured Deputy Dewey. Part of the fun of the movie (its postmodern script and winks to other horror films) is also part of the anxiety. For what are we without our culturally mediated self-awareness?

This is far from the only way to read Scream; other interpretations suggest different fears baked into the structure and story, including viewing it through a lens of toxic masculinity or suburban not-in-my-backyard stress. In particular, a queer reading of the film has been a valuable standpoint through which to assess its scares, recently backed up by screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who said he believed the movies to be “coded in gay survival.” That’s the power of a final girl like Sidney Prescott—she stands in for any number of anxieties.

Scream 2: Fear of history repeating itself

As is to be expected from an unexpected smash hit, a sequel was rushed into production. And as befitting a franchise so self-referential as Scream, Scream 2 essentially doubles down on the arch meta themes, serving as more of a reaction to the response to the first film than reflecting any mirror image back on the culture at large. It’s a sequel that spends so much time commenting on its predecessor, it occasionally struggles to remember that all of this dialogue should serve a stand-alone film in its own right. As the killer taunts to Sidney at one point, “Don’t you know history repeats itself?”

After an opening that calls attention to the self-critical nature of the entire endeavor—of the first film’s plot, here repurposed as the movie-within-a-movie Stab, a character sneers, “It’s some dumb-ass white movie about some dumb-ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up, okay?”—Scream 2’s story redoes the first, only bigger, splashier, and with a higher body count. In other words, the very tendencies of horror sequels that Jamie Kennedy’s horror-movie dweeb Randy excoriates. (“The whole horror genre was destroyed by sequels!” he proclaims.) If you understood the first movie’s fears, here it’s more of the same.

If Scream had its characters experience their terrifying ordeal through the lens of pop culture, in Scream 2 Sidney and her friends’ stories are even more mediated through the scrum of media, in various forms. Characters watch Hollywood versions of themselves play out the first film’s events, culminating in an intentionally cornball Scream reenactment with Tori Spelling and Luke Wilson standing in for Sidney and Billy. An entire scare setpiece takes place on a literal stage during a production of the Greek tragedy Agamemnon, with (who else?) Sidney in the lead role of Cassandra. (Scream 2 returns to the stage for its climactic showdown.) Again, a killer intent on revenge pairs up with a movie-obsessed psycho to enact punishment on the now college-age victims. And again, fears are sublimated through the filter of popular culture—specifically, how we understand horror; and even more specifically, how we understood Scream.

Scream 3: Fear of the Hollywood machine

Two years before Columbine, Scream was a punching bag for life-imitates-art hand-wringing about the impact of violent films, which Scream 2 acidly refutes. When a character suggests blaming media for real-world violence, a character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar scornfully spits back, “That is so Moral Majority. You can’t blame violence on entertainment.” And that’s before real-life killers directly cited the film as a source of inspiration. So while Scream 2’s obsession with its forebear is understandable, it also offers little in the new of new cultural fears.

Scream 3, by contrast, is so dependent on the franchise’s fascination with its own media and art-imitates-art ouroboros, it ends up going right to the source of the previous film’s meta target: Hollywood itself. Here, any lingering fears of the unknown have largely been replaced by fear of the all-too-well-known—namely, Hollywood’s unending fascination with itself. The limp Creed song that erupts in the opening minutes is the first indication of the era in which this movie was developed; unfortunately, it’s also fairly indicative of the overall quality of the movie, 22 years later.

The third film in what was intended to be a trilogy finds Sidney plucked from solitude after someone begins killing the cast of Stab 3, in the order of the original movie’s deaths. On the movie studio backlot, she eventually uncovers the villain: The director of the new film (Scott Foley), who also happens to be Sidney’s hitherto unknown brother—a child Sidney’s mother abandoned before she left Hollywood for Scream’s fictional home turf, Woodsboro.

It’s messy and overly complicated, but it does do one thing right: Scream 3 points its accusing finger at Hollywood’s culture of normalized casting-couch violence, and powerful men visiting sexual abuse upon young women in the industry. It doesn’t make up for the reactionary treatment of Maureen Prescott, but by making Sidney’s mother a direct victim of the film business’ misogynistic practices, the movie forcefully pushes an important sociological button that was largely ignored at the time. As we put it in an overview of the series, “A culture of sexual violence and silent complicity is far more likely to lead to real-world damage than any slasher film.” It’s still the weakest film, but at least it reintroduces an all too real source of tinseltown anxiety and rage.

Scream 4 and beyond: The fear of obsolescence

By the fourth movie, there was the shift to something new in its representation of a certain era’s fears—even if it wasn’t exactly a positive shift. Scream 4 may be the most entertaining film in the series since the original, but its seeming target demographic and attendant concerns feel very much like those of middle-aged fussbudgets fretting about those darn kids glued to their smarty phones. Coming 10 years after its predecessor, the movie follows Sidney on her final book tour stop in Woodsboro, for her memoir about overcoming trauma and refusing to remain a victim, which not-so-coincidentally is one of the film’s main themes.

Fear of obsolescence (again, not exactly the purview of youth) drives most of the adult characters here, as Ghostface has turned from a killer into kitsch, his masked visage plastered on cheap memorabilia adorning the streetlights of Woodsboro. Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers fears her once-household name is no longer relevant in the internet age; Sidney is scared another rash of murders will doom her to permanent victim status; Dewey just fears the tumult of the modern era disrupting his stable existence.

And the new kids? They take up a good chunk of the screen time, but at no point is this their fight. It’s still all about Sidney; and even when the eventual killer is revealed and there’s a familial link, the film does little but indict these youths for daring to want to be famous, for remaining far more committed to online social life than their parents, and for being… ambitious, in the film’s more unpleasantly honest moments. (The villain’s lengthy final speech can be roughly chalked up to a caricature of “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”) For a movie this far up its own ass in terms of self-aggrandizing mythology, it’s pretty ironic to see it come down on self-obsession so hard.

Which brings us to the newest installment. (Yes, there was also the generally execrable Scream TV series, but with a completely different creative team, cast, and indeed universe—they didn’t even use the original iconic Ghostface mask—it doesn’t really count as part of the franchise.) Given this is the first film in the series not helmed by Craven (and penned by new screenwriters, though Kevin Williamson was a consultant), there’s bound to be some new cultural anxieties and concerns hidden below the surface of the plot. The new film engages with technology—as The A.V. Club’s Katie Rife says in her review, “in the 2022 Scream, smart home devices, location tracking apps, and phone cloning software are all tools in the Ghostface Killer’s murder kit.” It also touches on toxic fandoms and in-group tussles over “elevated horror,” but for the most part, it wiggles out of anything larger than self-referential fun. To quote Sidney’s climactic line in the last film, there’s a creative north star no Scream sequel will escape: “Don’t fuck with the original.”