Do you like horror films?

"Do you like horror films?".

With this rhetorical question began in 1996 one of the most charismatic sagas in the history of commercial cinema, which celebrates these days its 25 years of existence with the premiere of

(2022), the fifth installment forced to play with the hybridization between formats —the sequel,

,

or reinvention of the original approaches— to extend a well-established brand value in the market. After all, the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a huge amount of entertainment — movies, video games, even books — that had the opportunity to permeate the memory of several generations of consumers and reach our days with a tremendous power. remarkable call. Today's popular culture has been trapped in that dynamic of the eternal return to the great successes of yesterday, largely because the multiplicity of proposals, their rate of consumption and the appropriation of their signs, through memes or gifs, make it impossible to the emergence of new myths in which to lose ourselves and find ourselves.

To be fair, the first

didn't have it easy when it was released, either. In the mid-nineties, mainstream cinema was going through an identity crisis that had hit the

particularly hard , a subgenre of horror focused on psychopaths skilled in the art of killing teenagers, often under masks and costumes that refer to the more sinisters of the classic carnival. The germ of the

can be traced in titles like

and

, both from 1960. One and the other coincided in the diagnosis of both a traditional masculine construct in crisis in the face of a world doomed to modernity and a technological exacerbation of our gaze brought about by the mass media.

Popular culture has been caught up in the eternal return to yesterday's greatest hits

The

not crystallize as such until the seventies.

1974) and

(1978) turn the

into an archetypal figure, an almost abstract sublimation of the latent ferocity in the social body, and codify their victims as boys and especially girls who openly enjoy morals of hedonism and its sexuality. In that context, the

The only survivor of Halloween night, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), becomes another archetype that can be interpreted in a polysemic way.

On the one hand, it represents the survival of women in the face of the most obvious patriarchal violence in the midst of the second wave of feminism.

On the other hand, her virginal attitude differentiates her from her friends corrupted by the system and satisfies the reactionary imaginary of the murderer.

Trailer for 'Scream' 5

In the 1980s, the

became the absolute protagonist of fiction and the demiurge of its convoluted mechanisms: between Freddy Krueger in A

1984) and Hannibal Lecter in

(1991), only median six degrees of sophistication. At this somewhat watered-down juncture comes

, the fruit of collaboration between an essential name in the genealogy of visceral terror, Wes Craven —director, among others, of

(1972),

(1977) and the aforementioned

t—, and an outstanding student of the

, screenwriter Kevin Williamson. Like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino, Williamson belongs to the so-called video store generation, which devours and integrates the entire history of this genre into its experiential DNA, at its disposal without any guardianship in its youth.

For this reason,

transcends its status as a

about stabbed teenagers in a small town where secrets and lies abound to become an encyclopedic essay on the constants of the genre, so embedded in fiction that the characters are aware of their meta nature. and the rules that govern it. "Life is a great movie," muses one of

's killers , "you just can't choose its genre." The sadism and cruelty raised by Craven and Williamson therefore have a lot of paranoid anxiety in the face of a postmodern conception of existence that dilutes the contours of reality and identity. It is no coincidence that the

Scream

saga

they are clumsy, they arise from the emotional environment of the victims, they resort to a disguise —the so-called

available in any supermarket and they have worldly ambitions: media fame, channeled by the reporter Gale Weathers.

The saga transcends the logic of tapes of teenagers stabbed in a small town

Scream

is not only an intelligent fiction in which the planning of the murders, the almost detective intrigue around those responsible and the reflections on the dynamics of the

are equally important . The film also works as a satire of an American society that is increasingly (un)communicated by technology, prey to the spectacle of itself provided by the rise of television channels, video cameras and, starting with

(1997), mobile phones. and Internet. A collective scopic drive that affects, according to Williamson, a certain amorality of the new generations linked to their immersion in audiovisual simulacra and the morbid fascination with death that reigned in pop culture at the time.

Craven and Williamson delve into these aspects throughout the saga.

is a game of mirrors between real fictional events, their translation into sensational

and their adaptation to films that are seen and commented on in the film itself.

, which was not written by Williamson, but by Ehren Kruger, is inspired by the mythical case of the Black Dahlia to throw a critical look at Hollywood that today is most pertinent, given that the studio responsible for the

, Dimension Films, was created by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, disgraced by the sexual abuse of the latter. As for Scream 4 (2011), it is a late and unforeseen sequel, but it manages to once again violate the expectations of fans and sharply predicts the democratization of

and the logic of prosumption sponsored by social networks.

Scream

also left the big screen for a while to take refuge on the small one. But the resulting series, broadcast between 2015 and 2019, was limited to cloning without much personality the motifs of the films, to the point that the spiritual heir to the creation of Craven and Williamson is another series, the crazy

, which stars Emma Roberts, the great villain of

Craven passed away in 2015, the

that is now being released trusts everything to the contrasting talents of Williamson and to directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, responsible for the fun and bloody

(2019). Far from the absolute renovation that

(2021) compared to its predecessor from 1992, this fifth installment —not recognized in the title— bets, like the recent

(2021) and

(2021), to combine new faces with old acquaintances, such as Neve Campbell , Courteney Cox, David Arquette and even an unexpected Skeet Ulrich.

It is neither a

nor a sequel, but "a throwback", as one of its young heroines explains.

"Something new, but not too new," he says in a film that takes up the logical goal of the first installment, beginning with its mythical start, and its unstable balance between the enhancement of past fiction and its projection into the future.

A strategy that, in the case of

, has a logic as industrial as it is creative.

'Scream'.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.

Released yesterday in theaters.

You can follow BABELIA on

Sign in to continue reading

Just by having an account you can read this article, it's free

RegisterLogin

Thanks for reading THE COUNTRY