Horror Week 2012: The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’

 

Guest post written by Jeremy Cornelius. Warning: massive spoilers ahead!!

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.

 

In the original 1996 Scream film, which Scream 4 constantly refers to and reconstructs, a masked killer known as Ghost Face begins terrorizing a predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood in rural Woodsboro, California. Sidney is the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who is dating a boy named Billy. Her mother, Maureen Prescott, is mysteriously murdered one year before these serial murders and the film starts in Woodsboro. And Gail Weathers (Cox), a TV journalist, covered “last year’s hottest court case,” and the fame-obsessed Weathers is in the process of finishing up a book on the murders entitled, The Woodsboro Murders. Meanwhile, Deputy Dewey Riley (Arquette) is the bumbling deputy on a (usually) failed mission to look after Sidney. Dewey’s character is in the tradition of Craven’s depiction of the two bumbling cops in his first film, and commonly known exploitation flick, The Last House on the Left. Drew Barrymore has a brief cameo at the beginning of the first film (she was the original pick for the character of Sidney) and is the first victim. The unseen killer calls her as she is home alone about to watch a scary movie. After much stalker-esque dialogue between the killer and Barrymore, she is viciously stabbed and hung from a tree outside of her house, where she is left for her parents to discover her body, leading to the first chilling scream as the title comes across the screen.

Sidney is constantly stalked by the killer and becomes an attempted target in her house, but she eventually manages to stop him and take refuge in her room. Time passes and characters develop a little more before the final scene during a house party at Sidney’s schoolmate, Stu’s house. The killer attacks the kids at the party, and Sidney is left alive to confront, who she discovers, are two killers: her boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu. They confess to having raped and killed her mother one year before. Gail comes in and briefly deters the two killers from killing Sidney, but in the end Sidney manages to kill both of them, declaring, as her surviving friend Randy comments, “Be careful, they always come back for one last scare,” and just as Billy sits up surprisingly, Sidney shoots him in the head, and she states, “Not in my movie,” claiming the construction of the Final Girl as a place of productive empowerment for girls and violent defense against women-hating men.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream 4

The gaze of Wes Craven’s Scream 4 intrudes on white girls’ domestic spaces. Technology facilitates the killer’s murderous rampage. The killer attempts to terrify them into panic and submission, but they resist this submission to fear such as in the first scene: two girls are alone in a house watching Stab 7 (a thinly veiled, meta-movie franchise with the Scream storyline within the Scream series). One girl goes upstairs because she hears a noise, but then prank calls her friend downstairs with the Ghost Face app on her iPhone. When she goes downstairs after the call is cut short and wanders around the house calling her friend’s name, she gets a call. Assuming her friends’ disappearance is her friend trying to get back at her for scaring her, she assuredly answers the phone, but the killer calls her on her iPhone and tries to scare her into terrified submission by saying, “you’re the dumb blonde with the big tits, whose part is about to be cut,” but she quickly retaliates with “I have a 180 IQ and a 4.0 GPA, asshole.” Of course, in the end, in the Scream tradition of the slasher theme, the killer prevails by stabbing the girl before the title of the film dramatically flashes onto the screen with the Swedish band The Sounds playing in the background. 

Carol Clover theorizes about gender in slasher films in her well-known book Men, Women, and Chainsaws and addresses the concept of masochistic gazing in horror films. Watching these films, though it could be read as sadistic to consume slasher films, are a mascochistic form of “perverse pleasure” through gazing and seeing what “should not” be seen. The audience can identify with the victim in the Scream films and feel the terror that they feel. The camera shows them reacting to the killer’s calls, and the audience sees and hears the same as the victim. So with every suspenseful moment for the character on screen, the audience feels the same emotion of fear. Carol Clover compares the affect of pornography to horror films, saying:

“Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.” 

The affect of terror and pleasure, though, seem to also be blurred when thinking about slasher films. Audiences are entertained by the desire to see violence that is unseen. They get a horrific glimpse into the pain inflicted between humans (mostly men killing women), but one productive element of the Scream series presents a productive feminist subversion of these elements of pleasure, pain, humor, and gender. Clover qualifies the commonly found surviving girl at the end of horror films in her essay, “His Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”:

“The image of a distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl.” 

And this position of the final girl in horror films is destabilized in Scream 4, as the final girl and masked killer are the same person. 

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes about the feminist potential in the first three Scream films in her book, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:

“According to the logic of realism, Scream might well be seen as endorsing violence in the hands of a teen girl. But when viewed in its cinematic context, the film, like the slasher genre in general, provides an opportunity to examine cultural and individual fantasies as they relate to gender and power.” 

The girl violence in the Scream films takes a new direction as Jill takes on the role of the killer and enacts violent murders against mostly white teenage girls, a black man, and her own mother in the film, symbolically, hyperbolically constructing post-feminist girl power gone horribly wrong. Jill’s performs a coy demeanor and unassaultive character at the beginning of the film, which is starkly contrasted after her unveiling to Sidney as the killer in the second to last scene of the film. She asserts her position as the “empowered” female remake of Billy as the killer and Sidney as the victim, saying “I don’t want to be like you. I want to become you,” right before she stabs Sidney, thinking she murders her. Jill then proceeds to stab herself, throw herself onto a glass coffee table (evocative of a scene out of Fight Club) as a way to bodily victimize herself. 

Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4

J. Jack Halberstam in his article, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” describes the temptation wrapped up in the symbol of Apple products in relation to the creation myth. Halberstam discusses cybernetics’ relationship to gender and deconstructs the symbol of the Mac apple, and he claims,

“We recognize the Apple computer symbol, I think, as a clever icon for the digitalization of the creation myth [. . . ] The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.” 

He discuses the temptation of biting into the forbidden fruit, which Eve does despite the prohibitions offered by God to her and Adam in Eden. Halberstam relates this Biblical story to the marketing of Apple products with the bitten apple logo on Apple products representing a capitalist seduction of consumer technology and information. Craven takes this concept one step further by having most every character in Scream 4 tote around some Apple product. The Ghost Face killer calls different characters on their iPhones before each murder. The killers use Apple technology to facilitate and capture the murders on film by using webcams to record each murder and post them onto their blog, reconstructing a do-it-yourself remake of the first Scream film within the sequel. The placement of Apple products throughout the film could be read as a synergistic business pursuit by the film makers, and in some ways, people probably were influenced to purchase a new iPhone after seeing this movie. The film also skillfully challenges the obsessive (mis)use of technology, and the Apple products, to use Halberstam’s analysis, symbolize capitalist seduction and female exploitation through violent murders. In “The Scream Trilogy: “Hyperpostmodernism” and the Late Nineties Teen Slasher” by Valerie Wee, she deconstructs the hyperpostmodernism in the Scream films:

“This shift to hyperpostmodernism was motivated by several factors: (1) the development of new media technologies such as cable, video, and an increasing range of digital media; (2) the emergence of a new teen demographic in the United States; and (3) the entertainment industries escalating commitment to cross-media promotional and marketing practices.” 

As Wee argues, the Scream franchise’s insistence on including new media, promotion, and adjusting to the “emergence of a new teen demographic” applies perfectly to Scream 4’s hyperpostmodernism as a next step in the evolution of the series.

L-R: Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) in Scream 4

The teenage girls in Scream 4 are constantly on their iPhones in the film and are connected to Ghost Face through their phones. In the first scene of the film, there is a comment made that there is now a Ghost Face app. for the iPhones so anyone can replicate the killer’s voice as a prank call to friends. Female bodies become fused with technology: they become as fused with it as it is their source of survival and simultaneously the killer’s invasion into their white middle-class spaces. Halberstam writes:

“The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable — at the site of the female body.” 

Viewers disidentify with Jill and see the violent masochistic pleasure in watching Scream 4. This poses an interesting dilemma of white girl power manifesting in violence and aggression targeted against other white girls, black men, and mothers. Jill symbolizes the ultimate pursuit of individual identity and separation from her community. She manifests her rage and expectant media fame by slaughtering her friends, her mother, and others in her community to escape it. Jill embodies the ideology of post-feminism and exceedingly demonstrates her white neoliberal pursuit of a murderous “girl power” at the violent expense and exploitation of people in Scream 4. 

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