The Scream slasher franchise is renowned for its self-aware meta comedy, rendering it a commentary on the slasher subgenre of horror as a whole. By 1996 when the film was released, the slasher had been subject to both academic and layman deconstructions of its treatment and depictions of violence against women. Scream faces the topic of misogyny in horror films head on by making misogyny itself the recurring villain of the franchise. In this piece I am seeking to make the case for how Scream utilizes the conventions of the slasher and the character archetype of the Final Girl to talk about sexual and intimate partner violence against women.
My thesis, that Scream utilizes – both through conformation and subversion – the conventions of the Final Girl archetype to talk about misogynistic violence against women, is an innately feminist claim about the narrative of the film, and therefor requires a close reading of the text of the first Scream film; engaging with narrative theory, genre theory, and feminist film theory. Primarily that which has already engaged with the horror genre.
For decades there has been a lot of debate, study, and opinion pieces about the complicated relationship that misogyny has with and in horror films. Many influential academic works have been produced exploring the depiction of women in the genre, through feminist and psychoanalytical theory most prominently. The most widely known and discussed archetype for women in the genre of course being the Final Girl in the slasher sub-genre.
The bulk of this essay will be utilizing Carol Clover’s feminist analysis of gender in horror films in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film as the primary lens through which I will be discussing the conventions and dynamics of the slasher, and analyzing how Scream’s use of those conventions fits into her claims about the Final Girl as a figure of survival. As well as how Scream subverts Clover’s analysis of how the Final Girl conforms to the psychoanalytic theory of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Otherwise known as the virgin-whore dichotomy, it is a need to categorize women into one of two categories, either as the flawless, pure, innocent, Madonna, or as the corrupting, filthy, whore.
I will also be in conversation with Professor Pat Gill’s 2002 entry to The Journal of Film and Video “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family” in which she catalogs the history of the golden years of the slasher sub-genre, and considers the socio-economic positions of the country that may have lead to the mass appeal of the sub-genre. This will be compounded by a utilization of Linda Williams’ theory of Body Genres in her entry for Film Quarterly “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, to discuss how Scream plays with genre conventions.
In discussing the active effort of the film to not fetishize the pain of its female lead, I will be referencing Laura Mulvey’s articulation of the male gaze in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. A noteworthy but under-discussed angle of Craven’s directing, especially in the context of the slasher sub-genre.
In terms of post-Scream resources, I will be responding to other feminist analyses of the franchise, including Valarie Wee’s article for The Journal of Popular Film and Television “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The Case of Scream”, in which she discusses Scream’s massive appeal to the teenage girl demographic, but fails to really articulate why the film had that demographic appeal. As well as Alexandra West’s book The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula. In her book West breaks down the broader impact Scream had on the horror genre in the late 1990s, including the direct impact on how female horror leads are written.
Background Information: Contextualizing The Slasher Genre in the United States -
Before we can examine how Scream weaponizes its genre conventions, we first must establish the history and status of the slasher genre prior to the film’s release in 1996. What can be truly considered the “first slasher” is ultimately a matter of subjective opinion, based on what elements of the genre are being weighed. What are the primary markers of a slasher? A man in a mask? The characters being killed off one at a time? Shots directly from the killer’s point of view, as the Scream franchise itself claims? “Peeping Tom, 1960, directed by Micheal Powell. First film to put the audience in the killer’s P.O.V.!” (Scream 4). The reality is of course that all these elements that define a slasher today were built over time. For our purposes here we will be designating the starting point for the genre as it was understood in 1996 as John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween – due to how it popularized all these elements – in concurrence with academic Pat Gill in her 2002 entry to The Journal of Film and Video “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family”; designating the contenders released prior as “proto slashers”.
The most important hallmarks of the slasher are best defined by Carol Clover in her foundational work, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film, “the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family, but still recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the location is not-home, a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than a gun; the attack is registered from the victim’s point of view and comes with shocking suddenness.” (23). This framework was established by Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the “appointed ancestor of the slasher film” as Clover puts it.
This framework provided the foundation for more proto slashers to build upon; the most notable arguably being Tobe Hopper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), in which a “sick family” of cannibals, primarily avatared by the psychotic but still recognizably human Leatherface, kidnap and cannibalize a group of sexually active hippies on a road trip through the impoverished desert of Texas. The film culminates with the final remaining member of the party of hippies, Sally Hardesty, escaping the family and fleeing in the back of a pick-up truck; covered in blood and laughing maniacally.
After The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other proto slashers further expanded the foundation of the subgenre, the defining feature that would become the template going forward came in 1978 with Halloween. Much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween maintained Clover’s defined framework; Micheal Meyers is a psychotic but still definably human shaped killer, the first victim of the film is a young woman murdered immediately following a sexual encounter, the climax of the film takes place with our main protagonist alone in a dark house that is not hers, and the primary weapon of choice is a butcher knife.
More importantly, however, are the aesthetics Halloween cemented as the hallmarks of the genre going forward. From Micheal Myers’ iconic mask to the primary pool of victims being a cohort of teenage friends, while Halloween was not the first film of its type to include these elements, it was certainly the blueprint going forward. The most important element of this blueprint being, Laurie Strode, Halloween’s Final Girl.
Coined by Carol Clover in her foundational work, the Final Girl (AKA “The Virgin” or “Female Victim-Hero”) is most simply the last person standing at the end of a slasher film. Almost universally a female character, the Final Girl is often assumed to embody “virtues” and good behavior, such as abstaining from sex, drugs, and alcohol use.
“The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and her own peril. [...] She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stave the killer off long enough to be rescued (ending A) or kill him herself (ending B).” (35)
As defined by Clover the Final Girl also suffers the most trepidation and trauma, being the sole victim to be aware of the imminent danger they are in for an extended period of time, and survives the attacks of her assailant with the advantages of this knowledge.
Following the astronomical critical and commercial success of Halloween, the 1980s ushered in the “Golden Age” of slasher films with a wave of imitators. Some were truly excellent and transformative, such as Wes Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street, and some were campy cult classics, such as Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre. Regardless of subjective categories of quality, the genre reached its commercial peak in this decade. A decade politically marked by neo-conservatism and a social push to re-establish the 1950s “American Dream” of white, heteronormative, suburban family dynamics.
There are many ways to interpret the vast success of the slasher in the 1980s. However, horror usually being the counterculture genre, a popular interpretation is an expression of anxiety towards the growing unsustainability of the so-called “American Dream” and the progressive deterioration of the nuclear family. “Teen slasher films both resolutely mock and yearn for the middle class American dream” (17), as Pat Gill described it. Freddy Krueger, Micheal Meyers, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface were large, lumbering, dirty cracks exposing the danger and instability of the world facing Generation X once they reached adulthood. This interpretation is further reinforced by the way the slasher genre positions authority figures, be they parents, teachers or law enforcement.
“Slasher films show teenagers in peril, with no hope of help from their parents. Mostly these parents are generally too busy or too involved in their own problems or pleasures to help. Even caring, concerned parents are impotent; often they are hapless and distracted, unaware of their children's problems and likely to dismiss or discount their warnings and fears” (Gill 17).
Figures of authority in slashers being wilfully incompetent at best and antagonistic hurdles at worst further speaks to the adolescent audience targeted by these films and their growing disillusionment with the myth of the “American Dream” at the time.
After a decade of slashers being a guaranteed way to print money at the box office, the genre started appearing to have outlived its welcome by 1990. With audiences becoming wise to the predictable tropes, more jaded towards the low budget set-ups, and of course, more critical of genre’s gender politics, even beloved legacy franchise entries like A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddie’s Dead, The Final Nightmare and Child’s Play 3 failed to turn a profit. If the sub-genre was going to survive it needed to re-calibrate to the sensibilities of audiences in the 1990s, and bring something new to the table.
Scream-
What Made Scream Different
When endeavoring to change or evolve forward, it is helpful to first look back at one’s roots. Scream is not just a slasher, it is a who-dun-it murder mystery, with suspects and clues and red herrings, the murder mystery being the earliest of inspirations for proto slashers such as Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho (1960), and Black Christmas (1974). In conjunction with that, the 1990s was an extremely popular decade for murder mystery style crime thrillers with the likes of Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Basic Instinct (1992) dominating both box office numbers and awards shows. According to Craven himself in his biography The Man and his Nightmares: Wes Craven by John Wooley “This wasn’t shot to be a slasher movie, really. Our approach was to do a thriller-whodunit, amongst kids who were completely immersed in slasher films” (189).
This shift in the structure of the classic slasher did not only mean an aesthetic change in elongating the slashing over several days rather than in a single night, it also required a change in the slasher itself. While the Scream franchise is recognizable for its Ghostface mask, much like Jason’s hockey mask and Micheal’s Captain Kirk mask before them, the killers in all six entries to the franchise are not lumbering, indestructible monsters. They are people, and not just any people: friends, romantic partners, family members. They are people the main, and recurring, cast of characters know and trust.
The crimes depicted in the Scream films – as in all slashers – murder, stalking, and sexual assault, especially against women, happen in real life; and in real life are most likely to be committed by someone the victim personally knows. The disconcerning reality that we are in more danger from the people we trust than we are from strangers was something the public was becoming more and more aware of in the 1990s, with the steady early rise of the social internet, the advent of the 24 hour cable news cycle, and the early kick off of the True Crime entertainment genre via programing like Dateline and Cold Case Files. Kevin Williamson himself was initially inspired to write the first version of the screenplay for Scream after watching a true crime news story about a college student who murdered five of his classmates.
Craven does a fantastic job of demonstrating this theme visually throughout the film, most noticeably in the famous opening sequence of Drew Barrymore getting murdered. Craven takes great pain to show the audience Casey meticulously going around her house locking and unlocking all of the literal glass doors that surround her, which ultimately fail to protect her when the killer just smashes them open. It’s a visual representation of the fragile illusion of safety we have from the people around us.
What also made Scream a stand out entry upon arrival was the way it tonally leaned in to the secret heart if both the murder mystery and the slasher genre, that being the melodrama. In an interview with USA Today Wes Craven described the film as “designed like a soap opera—secret loves, haunting pasts, snobs, nerds, and badly behaved boyfriends, twists that normally drive soaps.” Here is where we see the first seeds of the vital feminist turn Williamson and Craven took with these films.
In her 1991 entry to Film Quarterly “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, Linda Williams claims the melodrama is defined by arriving “too late” to an event or action – “Too late” to stop someone from leaving, “too late” to confess feeling, or “too late” save a life – (in contrast to horror in which people arrive “too early” and pornography where people arrive “right on time”). She also concurs with the feminist theory consensus of it being a “women’s genre” (Williams 4). Scream manages to meld together the horrifying ordeals of being “too early” and the emotionally crushing experiences of being “too late” largely through the primary internal character conflict of its Final Girl, Sidney Prescott; more on that later.
In her 2006 entry for the Journal of Popular Film and Television “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The Case of Scream,” Valerie Wee wrote that Scream “made the genre relevant to the adolescent female moviegoer – a demographic and consumer market traditionally ignored by the genre” (56). Wee backs her argument by citing the raw statistics of the box office demographics via USA Today that estimated 16% of female audience members under 25 returned to the theatre for repeat viewings of the film as opposed to only 3% of the male audience members.
Between the deliberate leaning into the melodramatic tone, and the casting of then up-and-coming teen heartthrobs Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, and of course Drew Barrymore in the lead roles, Scream set itself apart by setting its sights on the lucrative, untapped market of teenage girls.
Monsters & Misogyny: Scream’s Villains
It is one thing to dress up your movie with marketing and signifiers designed to appeal to female audiences. That may bring the audience in, but to keep that audience coming back requires follow through.
It is here that I must part with some of Valarie Wee’s assessment of Scream’s thematic attributes. Wee posits that the then-three films in the Scream franchise could be reflective of the senseless nature of the real-life violence in high schools, arguing that for all, at the time three, movies’ killers, “overt and apparent explanations [for their murders] are absent.” (56). While the broader point Wee makes is interesting, this statement is, with all respect, factually wrong. The killers in each instalment of the franchise expresses an incredibly direct, concrete, human motivation behind their killing sprees. While the specific details such as the inciting incident or the longevity of the plans are different each time the consistent thread is: the passionate hatred of women. Nowhere is this more overt than in the first film with Billy Loomis, played by Skeet Ulrich. Near the end of the film, Billy taunts Sidney about how he reveled in the rape and murder of her mother. When she pleads to know why, he tells her, “Your slut mother was fucking my father, and she’s the reason my mom moved out and abandoned me” (Scream).
Wee dismisses this declaration as “offered in passing and fail[ing] to account for the multiple other murders.” But, doing that ignores the actual meaning behind Billy’s words, as well as the franchise’s running through-line of violence against current or former female romantic partners. In five of the six entries into the Scream franchise a male Ghostface has murdered at least one woman he was at some point romantically or sexually involved with.
“Your slut mother was fucking my father” is hardly an in-passing statement that only conveys information about an extramarital affair. Billy’s language - the way he conveys this information – matters. His characterization of Sidney’s mother as being responsible for his parents splitting up -- take notice his father who actually did the cheating is not on the kill list -- and his use of misogynistic labels throughout this whole scene such as “slut” and “bitch” speaks to a deep and targeted rage. A rage that does not just appear to make Billy seem crazy at the end, it is woven throughout the whole film in Williamson’s writing, Craven’s directing, and Ulrich’s performance. In every scene where Billy and Sidney interact, Billy’s misogyny is displayed and weaponized to torment her. His very first scene in the movie features him successfully guilt-tripping Sidney for not having sex with him. Though he reassures her at the end that he is “not trying to rush her,” this is a running and ever-escalating thread in all their conversations.
Similarly, in the first direct interaction between Billy and Sidney after his arrest, Billy tactically makes Sidney feel guilty for “falsely” accusing him of being the killer. In this scene, he directly lays the groundwork for his primary motivation, comparing his parents’ divorce to the rape and murder of Sidney’s mother. Billy’s actions here serve several purposes. He is forcing a trigger response in Sidney, intentionally aggravating her trauma, making her feel guilty for letting said trauma affect their sex life, and foreshadowing at the connections between the events in his mind. Billy genuinely believes that Sidney’s mother being raped and murdered is equivalent to his mother leaving him. He believes that the punishment he is inflicting on the women he blames for his pain is deserved. Ulrich performs these scenes with a barely concealed sense of rage boiling under everything he says.
The key thing Billy is doing by continually guilting Sidney about their lack of sex life is forcing her to align her feelings with his. He is not just making her feel pressured to have sex; he is merging her survivor’s guilt over her mother with her internal guilt about her sexuality. By doing this, he is trying to make Sidney feel responsible for both her mother’s murder and for how he’s abusing her, because again, Billy believes they are the ones who bear the responsibility for his actions. In the broader meta context of the film, of course, there is a final, dual, purpose to Billy wanting to have sex with Sidney – it’s not enough to align her guilt with her mother’s. He needs her to no longer be a virgin so that he can truly see her as a “slut” like her mother, so he can kill her.
For all the preceding talk of melodrama, at its barest of bones Scream is a slasher franchise, and in 1996 the one rule audiences universally agreed upon to survive a horror film was “you can never have sex” as Jamie Kennedy’s character Randy famously states. “Jamie Lee was always the virgin in horror movies [...] that's why she always outsmarted the killer in the end, only virgins can do that!” (Scream). In that context, the only sure way to make sure your girlfriend dies in your elaborate slasher movie murder spree is to make sure she is on the wrong side of that Madonna/whore dichotomy. The weaponizing of the rules of the genre for extreme means of making Sidney emotionally and psychologically suffer is an additional way of violating her. Getting her to be in the most physically and emotionally vulnerable state possible before trying to completely destroy her.
This theme is not only present in Billy’s actions toward Sidney in the first film. The film’s two most elaborate death scenes happen to women: the opening scene with the death of Casey Becker, and the beginning of the third act’s death of Sidney’s best friend Tatum. Narratively these deaths occur as a means to further torment Sidney, but thematically both women were either in the past or present in a romantic relationship with the film’s second killer, Stu Macher.
It would be easy to dismissively apply Wee’s earlier quoted statement to Stu; after all, when pressed on his motive he half-jokingly says, “peer pressure.” However, Stu simply represents a misogynist of a different color. While Billy’s misogyny manifests in rage and abject hatred, Stu’s does so in objectification and dehumanization. Stu views his romantic partners as disposable, which is why he finds it such a big joke to murder them. Stu chose Casey as their opening victim because she had the audacity to break-up with him. The villains of this film are two men weaponizing the perceived misogynistic “rules” of the slasher to punish women, be they mothers or partners, for their choices.
The most intriguing way the film thematically weaponizes these rules, however lies in the weapon itself. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws Clover asserts that “In the hands of the killer, at least, guns have no place in slasher films. Victims may avail themselves of firearms, but like telephones, fire alarms, elevators, doorbells, and car engines, guns fail in a pinch” (31). Killers in slasher movies favor handheld weapons that require close physical proximity to their victims, and evoke Freudian, psychosexual actions when utilized. “Knives and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs and claws, are personal extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace” (Clover 32).
The rules around firearms initially play out exactly as Clover describes it, when Courtney Cox’s in-over-her-head tabloid journalist Gale Weathers attempts to foil Billy and Stu’s plan by stealing their gun, unaware that the safety is on, it fails. What is strange in and of itself is for Billy and Stu to hold and use the gun so much at all. As of their initial unmasking as the co-killers they all but abandon their knife in favor of a handgun. To which I say, they are cheating. Their heavy reliance on the gun, and its ultimate ability to foil them when Gale secures it a second time, is emblematic of their failure to live up to the supernatural boogeymen they’re patterning themselves on. Despite all their posturing, the killers in this movie are just men, angry, entitled, misogynistic, violent men. Their own disregard of the rules they tried to weaponize, “In the hands of the killer, at least, guns have no place in slasher films”, was their own undoing.
The New Final Girl
This essay has thus far worked primarily in conversation with Clover’s feminist appraisal of the slasher genre. The book that coined the now universally known term “Final Girl”, alternatively known as “The Virgin” or “female victim-hero”, examined many facets of women and their complicated relationship to the horror genre, most notably here are her examinations on the roles of women in the slasher film. Clover defined the Final Girl, first and foremost, as The Survivor. As someone with the strength and fortitude to withstand the danger that she faces. She is usually shown to be virginal, directly rebuffing sexual entanglements, she is often desexualized by having a sort of boyish name or appearance, she is smart and resourceful, and despite her smaller size or meek appearance, her fight against her attacker is, in Clover’s words, “energetic and convincing” (40).
Craven and Williamson talk a lot about the balance about which “rules” they did and didn’t break, so the balance with Sidney was coding her as the Final Girl in every way possible, to highlight all of the things that made the Final Girl an interesting and relatable figure, while breaking the rules that usually condemn other women. Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell, is the leading lady for the first four entries into the franchise, which in and of itself is almost non-existent in the slasher genre. You’ll notice a lack of the killer point of view shot slasher films are famous for, and that’s because the story of this franchise is not Ghostface’s, it is Sidney’s.
Sidney has the distinction of coming into the story as already damaged and traumatized from the extremely violent and sexual nature of her mother's death, which she witnessed the aftermath of, and on top of that she is in an extreme state of denial about who her mother really was; spending the bulk of the act one aggressively denying the town rumors about her mother’s sexual promiscuity. Sidney has to come to terms with the fact that she never really knew her mother, a character journey that plays out over the first three films. The key word here, however, is denial, and not ignorance. She’s heard the rumors, and she knows they are true even if she shoots them down. This is what makes sex a scary thing for her in this film, being sexually active leads to violence, it leads to pain.
Sidney is, explicitly, suffering from an internalization of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. She is both struggling to comprehend her personal image of her mother as the Madonna she knew, versus the Whore the town sees her as, as well as coping with the fear of having that dichotomy placed on herself. Sidney is afraid to have sex because she is afraid she will “wind up like her mother.” Which of course, is the point, Billy knows that. “If you hang up on me you’ll die just like your mother” “I’m gonna rip you up you bitch, just like your fucking mother” “Say Hello to your mother” (Scream).
In her book The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle, Alexandra West described Scream as “ultimately about the struggle of a young woman to control her own narrative in the face of misogynistic forces.” (69). And take control of her own narrative, Sidney does. The most important thing about Billy and Stu’s misogyny is how Sidney fights against it. The sex scene between Sidney and Billy is contextually subversive. Craven shoots the scene far less like the titillating, gratuitous sex scenes for which horror movies were infamous, but instead more reminiscent of a sensual love scene out of a romance, while pairing it with ominous music and the post-sex scene death of Lynda in the original Halloween, never letting the audience forget about the ever lurking danger of Sidney’s choice. Here, Craven strikes a delicate balance. He chooses to focus entirely on Sidney’s face and not show her bare breasts, while still showing her removing her clothes. This focus makes the scene belong to Sidney, not to Billy despite his attempts to manipulate her, and not to the fetishizing audience. In this scene, Sidney makes the choice to no longer be a virgin for herself, and no one else.
In her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Laura Mulvey described what would come to be referred to as the “male gaze” thusly,
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle” (10).
This phenomenon is one that is displayed almost to the letter in the original run of slasher films – a sub-genre famous for its graphic sex scenes, point-of-view shots of violent men stalking nude female victims, and virginal survivors. The lack of these elements in Scream can only be interpreted as an intentional choice by Craven and Williamson that preserves in narrative Sidney’s choice to have a sex as one of self determination, rather than something that cosmically de-values her life, as Billy believes.
Sidney’s decision to control the narrative of her life is explicitly present in everything she does after Billy and Stu’s reveal. Sidney takes over the entire situation at her first opportunity. No longer running around in fear of them, she takes on the Ghostface persona herself, calling them with the voice changer and even briefly dawning the costume. She uses the boys’ own tools of control against them, and has them running around like chickens with their heads cut off. This further enrages Billy, who shouts further gendered insults like, “I’m gonna tear you apart, bitch!” This is the first time in the film that Billy has been anything other than in complete control over the situation, and his misogynistic hatred of women is inflamed. The entire last five minutes of the film is Sidney taking control over the story.
Sidney’s final line “Not in my movie” is not just a clever one liner – it is a defiant declaration of control. This is Sidney’s story now, and she makes the rules. Clover wrote that despite their competent and heroic leads, in slasher sequels “the killers are the fixed element, and the victims the changeable ones,” (30). Scream rejects this possibility. Sidney’s final kill shot to Billy’s head is her denying her tormentors the right to the narrative. She is the fixed element of this franchise. This story does not end with their re-emergence. Not this time. Not in Sidney’s movie. Here, Wee and I are once again in alignment “Rather than build a series around an indestructible monster [...] Scream chose to highlight the strength, power, and resilience of the female survivors.” (59)
Conclusion -
Scream is a slasher film for women that takes the implicit themes of sexual assault and intimate partner violence inherent to slasher movies and makes them literal. Craven and Williamson’s film about a woman overcoming the patriarchal world around her spoke directly to the underserved female audience that consumes this genre of film. Scream is often praised for revitalizing the slasher genre, however what many critics and copycats missed was that that revitalization came not from the self aware comedy, but by shining a light on the feminist themes and female audience that were always there, just waiting for someone to notice them.
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