A quarter of a century of cinema has passed since Wes Craven’s Scream 3. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, were we too harsh on it?
NB: The following contains a few spoilers for the first three Scream movies.
Did we all misjudge Scream 3? That was the question on my lips by the end of rewatching Wes Craven’s threequel to the original Scream, which was one of the defining horror movies – indeed movies generally – of the 1990s. It took, of course, a post-modern blade to horror tropes and conventions and sliced through them with abandon. The sequels also managed this to varying degrees.
The first Scream was released in 1996, a year after the nadir example of The Curse Of Michael Myers, the sixth Halloween film that suggested the slasher, and the horror franchise machine in general, was bloated and tired.
Scream, coasting on a wave of self-reflective pop-cultural analysis (and building on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), balanced fresh scares and incisive comedy to create a new slasher icon in Ghostface, the mask and black cloak that disguised the very human killers immersed in the beats of horror movies.
Scream 2, while less effective, took a knife to the horror sequel concept, building on the mythology of the Woodsboro murders of the original while observing the repeating narrative ideas in follow-ups. It made sense, given Scream was all about upending the horror origin story, to deconstruct the storytelling symbols of horror sequels. Every Halloween has its Halloween II, right?
Scream 3 naturally extends this same deconstruction, commenting from a metatextual standpoint about endings. I wonder if there was a self-knowing irony in this statement, certainly when it comes to horror; many of the most successful horror franchises – the aforementioned Halloween, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare on Elm St, and so on, all extended beyond three movies, stretching and sprawling out to innumerable sequels designed to extend the menace, often to decent box office returns.
Scream itself was no different – Scream 4 arrived in 2011, with a TV series a few years later, and the seventh film is shooting as this is being written. Scream 3 therefore ends up a moot point, a concluding chapter to a series that will eventually be revived, a property with as much cultural cache as the traditional slasher franchises it lampooned and deconstructed.
Yet we may have treated Scream 3 with too much scorn. With distance, though not on a par with its predecessors, it works in context with the films that came before.
The 1990s had been dominated by the trilogy. Franchises existed across genres – horror had those mentioned above, the superhero movie for Batman and Superman went to four movies by this point, and even Lethal Weapon squeezed out a tired fourth entry in 1998.
Nevertheless, the trilogy still held weight. So many series when Scream 3 was made were trilogies. Almost all of them are now franchises, having for better or worse been given a new lease of life in the age of valuable intellectual property by studios keen to maximise profit from recognisable characters and universes.
The biggest franchise of all, Star Wars, still principally operates cinematically in trilogies: the Original, Prequel and Sequel trilogies are all now in existence, and attempts to broaden the universe out into a wider franchises have met largely with less success. You can see why Scream 3’s focus would be to examine, through the lens of horror, what the ‘rules’ of the concluding part of a trilogy in cinema are. Heck, this even has a cameo from Carrie Fisher playing a failed actress who looks identical to Carrie Fisher and laments losing the role of Princess Leia to her.
One of the reasons Scream was so successful was because it understood the audience had become literate in the broader conventions and tactics used by horror filmmakers to invoke scares, and played on them to make the audience complicit in their subversion. Ghostface itself was the ultimate trick, the visage of a supernatural force who ends up being the creation of more than one human killer who is intentionally subverting, in movie, the expectations of characters who are also the horror movie audience.
The mouthpiece for these subversions was Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks, killed off in Scream 2 but who reappears here via pre-recorded video to explain to our characters the context of the latest batch of murders.
“True trilogies are all about going back to the beginning and discovering something that wasn’t true from the get go. Godfather, Jedi, all revealed something that we thought was true that wasn’t true”.
That becomes the key to Scream 3 – revisiting the events of Scream and recontextualising them in a different, post-post-modern context. Scream 3, perhaps more deliberately than we realised on release, is playing up to the tropes it previously deconstructed.
Craven’s movie is arguably more overblown, more explosive and more camp than the previous two films. It follows Part 3 rules in that everything has to be bigger, louder, faster.
The opening murder, of Liev Schreiber’s now famous Woodsboro survivor Cotton Weary, therefore contains speeding car chases in the glamour of the Hollywood hills. An entire house explodes.
The setting of the first Scream, where Laurie Strode-esque survivor Sidney Prescott (an earnest Neve Campbell) was stalked by killers, is recreated on a lavish movie set for ‘Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro’. It’s the film within a film that’s being shot, dramatising the events of Scream, with our main characters being portrayed by a rogues gallery of self-obsessed or just plain grotesque younger actors. Everything is about coming full circle to Scream and accentuating the events of that story for dramatic effect.
Yet Scream 3 is most certainly in on the farcical aspects of itself, of dialling everything up to eleven. It understands that by the logic of a third part, the end of a trilogy, the tone transforms while the narrative circles back in on itself.
Even Randy’s next rule is one the film deliberately plays with: “You got a killer who’s going to be super human. Stabbing him won’t work. Shooting him won’t work. Basically in the third one you gotta cryogenically freeze his head, decapitate him, or blow him up.”
The person under the Ghostface mask this time ends up being just that – a person, but one who directly upends the entire mythology of Scream and Sidney’s history. It is groan-worthy, the secret brother born out of trauma and rejected returning to visit the sins of the past on the present, but it’s supposed to elicit groans in this context.
Scream 3 is directly commenting on conventions from films such as the aforementioned Return Of The Jedi and how it reveals familial aspects which alter the backstory of its main character. Many of the aforementioned trilogies do the same – Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade gives Indy a dysfunctional parental relationship, Die Hard With A Vengeance has the villain be the criminal brother of the original film’s terrorist, Back To The Future Part III explores the theme of ancestry. Trilogies are designed to alter the perspective of the protagonist while providing closure and catharsis.
Scream 3 does that for Sidney and, in some way, does have a super human villain. Roman Bridger represents more than just a murderer. He exemplifies a somewhat retconned, overarching series mythology which is thrown into question. The fact Craven and writer Ehren Kruger then literalise his super-humanity at the end is just part of the punchline.
Randy reminds Sidney, therefore, of the other connected rule: “The past will come back to bite you in the ass. Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it. The past is not at rest. Any sins you think were committed in the past are about to break out and destroy you.”
This feels particularly potent now when you consider Lance Henriksen’s movie producer impresario John Milton (a pseudonym used by Lucifer – see also The Devil’s Advocate), who’s surely a thinly-veiled swipe at Harvey Weinstein, one of the Miramax bosses who masterminded Scream’s success.
Milton is Weinstein; corrupt, toxic, harassing women and using his power to get them roles in return sexual favours, and hosting legendary wild parties of secret Hollywood excess in his lavish home.
It speaks to Weinstein’s confidence that he would never be exposed that he let Craven include such a character – someone central to the backstory revealed of Sidney’s mother, Roman and the entire motivations of the killers in the original movie – in the first place.
Scream 3 reveals the root cause of small town suburban trauma to be glamorous, secret and seedy Hollywood toxicity, and this surely can’t be coincidental. Scream 3 feels a little now like it was warning us, even if we didn’t know it.
It’s a shame it chickens out on Randy’s central rule. “Anyone, including the main character can die. This means you Sid. I’m sorry. It’s the final chapter. It could be fucking Reservoir Dogs by the time this thing is through. ‘Cause the rules say some of you ain’t gonna make it”.
Except nobody of import really does.
Most of the new characters of Scream 3 are massacred by Sidney, Courtney Cox-Arquette’s (as she was named at this point) anchorwoman turned exploitative writer Gale Weathers or David Arquette’s mild-mannered Woodsboro sheriff turned Stab 3 creative consultant Dewey Riley. The returning characters make it through unscathed. That could end up being Scream 3’s final subversion – back to tradition. No matter what Michael Myers throws at Laurie Strode, she survives. The heroes endure as much as the villains. Scream 3 ends not just unexpectedly with hope but also with the possibility of more, that the trilogy could morph into a franchise – which is precisely what happens.
2000 didn’t end up being a year full to bursting with sequels. It certainly didn’t have any more significant third part episodes of major franchises, so in that sense Scream 3 stands alone as a direct commentary and knowing, overblown subversion of a trope that would begin, as the decade continued, to build toward the advent of a Hollywood that expects 13 films in a franchise rather than three.
Scream 3 is perhaps a sequel, indeed a threequel, we don’t give enough credit.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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