Scream

[Christian Slater]

The series on Netflix is pretty good, a few episodes in and it's binge watch material.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

It's really quite bad. I watched it all so I could train spot, but it's some achievement to have your human irony spouter say in episode 1 "it'll never work as a TV series!" and then go on to demonstrate exactly why.

Count the ways:
- Paper thin, archetype-type characters are tolerable for ~90 minutes. That's why slasher movies get in and out and do the job sharpish. Now we get so spend 450 minutes with them. Oy.
- A nice line in self-awareness and overt meta-stuff was pretty dudey in 1996. Now approx 50% of horror films traffic in it, so you need to raise your game a bit. Next to something like It Follows this looks like a early 2000s Rolling Stones album.
- The slasher was a cinema of spectacle and sensation. Visual and auditory pleasure, sex and viscera. The small screen makes the former paltry, and the latter are mostly inadmissible. So all that's out.

(three)

That said, the meeting in which they brainstormed all the zeitgeisty stuff that needed to be shoehorned in to bring it bang up to date must have been a doozy. Apps! Social media! Cyberbullying! Homosexuals! Serial! Lots and lots and lots of laboured jokes about pop culture than teenagers allegedly like!

And is the "now playing" on-screen tracklist wotsit new and peculiar to this show, or an actual Thing what happens now that had passed me by? Hypertextual annotated synergy.... Britney meets Brecht meets Baudrillard.........

 

[shane]

I bet Christian Slater feels silly now.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

 

[Christian Slater]

Finished it earlier. The killer reveal was a little obvious and some of the red herrings were too overt to be taken seriously. I liked the twist at the end though, it had me retracing the series in my mind for answers and has me intrigued.

Martino, the tropes of slasher and serial killer films were to be expected, as was the influx of modern technology. I thought they did a poor job in creating any emotional attachment to any of the characters, an own goal after having Noah's meta-reveal of the story being about the characters and their journey. The opposite was true, it was the plot that kept me watching. The beauty of stories like Scream is the intrigue of who the killer is, so a lot of leeway is given because viewers naturally want vindication of their suspicions, or to be genuinely surprised. I thought the ending delivered both.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

I never really care whodunnit (unless it's a priest, in which case I love it), so perhaps that's where we depart. But it's especially hard to muster up a crap to give when the characters are all so half-arsedly written.

 

[Christian Slater]

Yeah I'm a sucker for whodunnits, I enjoy working out the clues as the show progresses, especially when watching with someone else.

Agreed on the characters, they went for face value sympathy rather than any meaningfully built depth. Emma is given the only focus and she's completely unlikeable.