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Posted on August 8, 2026

Suburban Blandness and Visual Violence The Mise-en-Scène of the Opening of Scream

Guest Post

Gary Miceli

Scream (1996) centers on Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high school student in California who becomes the target of a costumed serial killer named Ghostface on the anniversary of her mother’s murder. Directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the movie also stars Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore. The opening scene of the movie is widely considered one of the greatest and most horrifying openings in the history of the horror genre. It completely subverted expectations by brutally killing off Drew Barrymore, an actress the audience expects to be the star of the movie, within the first ten minutes. This shocking narrative subversion mirrors a technique previously executed by horror legend Alfred Hitchcock in his classic 1960 movie Psycho. Ultimately, Wes Craven manipulates the stereotypical slasher rules that we all know, making his own rules – all of which we see in the powerful mise-en-scène of the opening scene.

Posted on November 20, 2025

Dying of Laughter: Exploring Horror Parody and the Scary Movie Films

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Nehir Orhon

A haunted house, an innocent girl possessed by the devil, or a group of teenagers that make foolish decisions to try and survive a masked killer… These cliché horror tropes can be found in famous horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Such storylines, figures and settings are elements that are commonly associated with the genre’s identity.

However, as Chris Yogerst argues, “repetition of genre tropes breeds familiarity, robbing once-shocking images and plot twists of the impact they originally had” (Yogerst 207). When these key tropes and patterns get overused in horror films, they become repetitive and lead to criticism, self-reflection, and parody. In the book Film Parody, Dan Harries defines parody as “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (Harries 6). In this instance, through twisting the lexicon, style or syntax, parody spoofs the familiar patterns, stereotypical and normative representation of marginalised groups, and cultural taboos displayed in horror films.

Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000), the first film of the contemporary horror parody franchise, takes Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) as reference. Whilst spoofing these movies, Scary Movie not only makes fun of the familiar horror tropes but also exposes how the “film technology and genre fictions” (Bailey 1229) are shaped by the hegemony of the white male gaze and “white ideological frames” (Yancy and Ryser 732). This essay explores the relation between horror, humour and social critique, and how parody functions within the Scary Movie films through analysing the used “methods of parodic coding” (Harries 39).

Posted on January 9, 2025

Brats vs. Splats: Who Really Defined the 1980s Teen Film?

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Cullen Wade

Recently, I watched Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary Brats (not to be confused with Bratz which is actually worth your time), in which a 60-year-old movie star grapples with the psychic toll of someone calling him a brat four decades ago, and it got me thinking about slasher movies. Let me explain.

“The Brat Pack” refers to a loosely-delineated group of young actors who starred in popular teen movies of the 1980s, generally in the orbit of John Hughes. In McCarthy’s documentary, authorities ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Rob Lowe repeatedly argue for the Brat Pack’s breakout as a seismic shift in the Hollywood profile of the teen movie. Gladwell calls it a “generational transition,” and, as McCarthy puts it, “Hollywood discovered the box office potential of a young audience … In the history of Hollywood, it had never been like this.”

Posted on August 4, 2024

Radical Slasher: In a Violent Nature

Dawn Keetley

Canadian filmmaker Chris Nash’s 2024 In a Violent Nature is an effective, pared-down slasher. It is also a commentary – and at times a rather brilliant one – on the slasher.

The killer’s perspective . . .

Ever since Vera Dika’s and Carol Clover’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s, it has been commonplace to talk about the way that slashers take the point of view of the killer. Dika writes about the slasher’s distinctive “moving camera point-of-view shot,” which allows for identification “with the killer’s look” (88), and Clover mentions the slasher’s “I-camera [used] to represent the killer’s point of view” (45). Slashers that famously deploy this I-camera include Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). (In the early 1980s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert offered a famous polemic against exactly this characteristic of the slasher.) In a Violent Nature made me realize, however, how limited this claim actually is.

Posted on July 30, 2024

Horror’s Effaced Protagonists

Guest Post

By JDC Burnhil

What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?

The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).

Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).

Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.