Reframing Parody and Intertextuality in Scream: Formal and Theoretical Approaches to the ‘Postmodern’ Slasher

Abstract

As a pivotal slasher film of the 1990s, Scream (1996; dir Wes Craven) is distinctive from earlier productions of the genre in its multiple allusions to other films and art forms that had preceded it. Its uniqueness arises from the fact that even as it is composed of fragments of previous ‘texts’, these are reframed to generate a set of revised aesthetic and narrative characteristics for the genre, which, in turn, provide a template for subsequent slasher films (though the genre underwent further change following the September 11 attacks [see Wetmore 2012]). Moreover, although these often-blatant intertextual references are directed towards a knowing audience, the film is genuinely horrific because its gruesome scenes of death not only offer homage to the conventional slasher but also accentuate to the extreme the genre’s abject aspects. In short, it displays both visual and intertextual excess while its numerous cross-references signal a more pervasive cultural shift from authorial perspectives to one that privileges other texts as source material, and, even though the names of directors associated with the horror genre crop up regularly throughout the film, these are for reasons of self-referentiality. Further, as Valerie Wee points out, while the use of intertextuality reflects an already firmly established postmodern trope, it occurs to such an extent in Scream that it becomes the film’s text.