|
If you are seduced by Scream's informed cleverness enough to enjoy the experience more than hate the smug backbone running through it then that's fair enough.
But you must understand that since it undeniably brought the horror (particularly, teen-in-peril slasher) film back to a new generation of previously Summer Romantic Comedy Blockbuster-fed teens, it has opened the floodgates and the genre has been drenched in carefully marketed safe/ironic horror movies aimed at the same audience. True horror films have now been pushed even further underground. Challenging, uncompromising ideas are a rarity, and seen by these "new" horror fans as too harsh, nasty and pointless like those dreadful 70s/80s exploiters they saw clips of once.
Can't blame Scream for inferior imitators? So instead we stand back and admire Craven's audacity at telling us all about horror movies, then lap it up and dodge the fallout.
As I said earlier this is cheapening, insulting and insufferably pretentious from the (now much richer) Craven - I wonder if he can make another successful movie without resorting to the film-within-a-film stupidity of New Nightmare or the masterful glib ironies of Scream?
Doubt it - I'm off to watch Shocker again...
|