Word: screaming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Scream 2 seems destined to have no small success among the masses of moviegoers looking for a quick, all-in-one fix. First, it's something that we are led to believe by yet another media hooey-machine, plugs directly into our generational needs. Curled up in jim-jams and sipping Sprites, we supposedly affixed our gradually dried out eyes to horror movie after horror movie in the '80s, the genre's heyday, as parades of Jasons and Michaels, Freddies and Pin-heads ran off those screens and ripped out our hearts. So what's better than a history book...
...nostalgia is the condemnation, the forbiddenness that made it all so appealing in the first place. Set bed times and the presence of parents do not jive well with the horrible, horrible baby-stay-up-late mentality of a video marathon (the rise of VCRs contributed to many a scream-filled viewing of gruesome death or porn-induced first masturbatory fantasy...
...learned the problem with these early experiences and understood how it conditioned to accept violence, particularly towards women, and to grow up to be callous vidiots sensitive only to lassoing ad execs. We echo, of course, the blood-thirsty media vultures whose tabloid exploits also increased during the '80s. Scream 2 addresses this in the character of Courteney Cox, whose Gale Weathers is now a slimy reporter; in addition, throughout the film, people theorize about what motivated people to such gore...
Which is all well and good, but Craven doesn't seem satisfied with such commentary and fright-nighting; in Scream 2, he insists on going that one step more meta on our ass. Reenactments of reenactments of movies of movies. References to conversations about classes about sequels to movies existing in both our world and this alternative world that has the fictional slasher flick, Stab...
Like jaded cynicism applied to every-thing in the world 24-7, though, such meta-ness isn't really sustainable for long without wearing thin: expectations grow higher and higher, we're the rats at the cocaine drop bottle with the tap key, etc. Scream 2 can't go much beyond its first virtuoso scene, in which a woman is stabbed by a movie's fan(atic) in a movie theater raucous over the violence on the screen. We ourselves in the theater feel real fear that the same could happen...