I scream, You Scream, We all Scream for Murder?

Scream 2. The movie starts out in a movie theater. It is a movie titled Stab; it is based on Gale Weathers book. Phil and his girlfriend Maureen are at the theaters to see this movie. During the movie the people in the theater watching, are dressed like the killer in the movie. Phil goes to the bathroom and gets stabbed. The killer comes out and sits next to Maureen, and she thinks it is Phil. Maureen gets stabbed and everyone in the movie theater thinks that it is just an act until she goes up to the screen and actually dies. Later there is an investigation but the police don’t think that is a serial killer. Through out the movie other people are being stabbed and killed. No one knows who the killer is but the killer calls people on the phone and then winds up in their house or where ever they are and kills them.  At the end of the movie the last girl, Sidney is in a movie theater with the killer. The killer tries to convince her that her boyfriend was in on it and he pleads with her that he wasn’t. The killer says that he had a partner. The killer who we find out is Mickey then shoots Sidney’s boyfriend, Derek. Gale walks out from behind stage and Sidney at first thinks that Mickeys partner is her but then Mrs. Loomis walks out and reveals herself as the killer’s partner. Mickey gets shot and everyone thinks he is dead. Mrs. Loomis and Sidney go at it fighting and Sidney ends up killing her.

           

            In this film when a female dies the camera shows us something different from when a male is dying. When Maureen dies in the beginning of the film the camera is focused on her and the camera makes us look at all parts of her death. When Maureen first knows that something is wrong the camera is focused on the blood that she is looking at on her hands. Then she gets stabbed with a knife. The camera is focused on her mouth. Her mouth is wide open, her lips are parted, and she has a look of despair on her face. She then stumbles through the crowd as blood is dripping from her abdomen. As she is walking she is repeatedly stabbed. She is whimpering as she is being drug through the crowd. She then crawls up on stage and the camera is focused on her trying very hard to get to the stage. When Maureen gets up on stage she stands up and lets out a very feminine scream. The camera watches her and focuses on her as she is slowly falling to the ground. The camera gives us a close up of her as she is on her knees and falls the rest of the way to the ground backwards. The camera wants us to watch her slow death, and after she is dead the camera stays on her for another few seconds and shows us (as the audience) her dead bloody body laying on the stage. When a male dies in this slasher film the camera gives us a little different picture. When Randy dies the camera is a little less focused on him. He is pulled into a van by the killer and he is stabbed. The camera doesn’t actually show him being stabbed, but in the background while it is going on you see a lady on the news reporting on a small TV in the van. Also while Randy is being stabbed we see the bloody knife that he is being stabbed with over and over again. When the killer is done stabbing him we see the killer look up at the camera and we see his mask, then the killer exits the van. The only thing we see of Randy is his blood at the end of the scene dripping from the bottom of the van. The camera shows male and females dying in different ways. The camera likes to focus on the death of the female and show her dying slowly, but males aren’t necessarily shown while they are dying and the scene isn’t as long.

            In Carol Clover’s article “Her Body, Himself” she talks about how the weapons used in slasher films are usually knives because they are “personal extensions of the body.” In this film the killer uses knives to kill his and her victims. The killer gets the victim very close to his/ herself and that’s when the killer is able to stab them. It gives the kill more meaning that to just shoot someone with a gun from far away. The knife gives the killer and the victim a close connection. The knife penetrates the victim and violates them.

            In scream two there is the inevitable “final girl.” There is no one there to save her, she has to fight for herself. In one scene Sidney, who is the final girl, is in a house when the killer calls and she tries to get out but the door locks. She screams for her boyfriend to come help her but he is unable to. Sidney is on her own to fight for herself. At the end of the movie Sidney is the one who fights back against the killer and wins. While she is fighting back against the killer she is hiding so the killer can’t get to her but she isn’t waiting for anyone to come save her. Sidney is fighting back against the killer by trying to use things on stage to knock her down. In the end she is successful at evading the killer. One

thing that Carol Clover points out in her article is that the last girl is neither male nor female gendered. In the movie Sidney has both characteristics of being male and female. For starters she has a name that can be male or female but it is spelled with the male spelling. She wears clothes that are gender neutral. Pants, a t-shirt, and a jacket. It’s not very feminine but its not totally masculine; it’s a mix of both. She has a boyfriend so she is heterosexual. The females who got killed in the movie were more feminine that she is. They dressed more feminine with more revealing clothing and they were more sexual than she is. For example Cici was a female killed in the movie, she wore very feminine clothing, a pink tight shirt and tight pants, showing her feminine body. Where as Sidney wore clothes that were gender neutral colors and they were more lose fitting so it was harder to see the shape of her body.

I think scream 2 represents most of the elements we should see in a slasher film. In this movie when a female dies the camera makes us look at her death and it really focuses on her as opposed to when males die it happens very fast and we don’t always see them being killed. The movie uses knives to make a personal connection between the killer and the victim. The movie also has the element of the final girl that is very well represented for how the final girl scenes should go. I think this was a very good movie for representing elements of gender is slasher films.