What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?
You have to know the rules.
In the stray fourth installment of the Scream franchise, cinema club president Charlie Walker (played by Rory Culkin) describes the Stab movie in the making, as well as the aims of the killers in Scream 4 itself, saying they’re making “less of a shrequel and more of a screamake.”
Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) explains in Scream 5, “It sounds like our killer’s writing his own version of Stab 8, but doing it as a requel.” She adds, “Or a legacy-quel. Fans are torn on the terminology,” self-referentially explaining the existence of Scream 5 in the process. She continues:
See, you can't just reboot a franchise from scratch anymore. The fans won’t stand for it. Black Christmas, Child's Play, Flatliners, that shit doesn't work. But you can’t just do a straight sequel, either. You need to build something new. But not too new or the Internet goes bug-fucking-nuts. It has to be part of an ongoing storyline, even if that story should never have been going on in the first place. New main characters, yes, but supported by, and related to, legacy characters. Not quite a reboot, not quite a sequel, like the new Halloween, Saw, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, fuck, even Star Wars. It always, always goes back to the original!
In addition to one of the Meeks laying out the rules, in all of the Scream movies, the killer asks the famous question, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” In Scream 4, when the live-streaming vlogger Robbie Mercer (Erik Knudsen) asks Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), she answers, “Bambi.”
“How do you understand a thing by its shadow
when you don’t even know how shadows are thrown?”
– M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here
I was three-years old when went to see my first movie in the theater, and the movie was Bambi. Like the titular fawn in Disney’s cartoon, I spent most of my time as a child with my mom. As soon as Bambi’s mom was killed on the screen, mine had to drag me out of the theater, wailing my head off. My disdain for Disney has never relented.
In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino waxes nostalgic about the many adult movies he watched as a child. He accompanied his mom and stepdad to everything from Dirty Harry and Deliverance to Hardcore and Taxi Driver. Aside from a few autobiographical essays and a couple of critical homage, each chapter of the book is about a different movie, save the two chapters deservedly devoted to Taxi Driver, making Cinema Speculation a sort of memoir through movies.
In the introductory chapter, “Little Q Watching Big Movies,” Tarantino talks about being a grom in a grown-up world:
When a child reads an adult book, there’s going to be words they don’t understand. But depending on the context, and the paragraph surrounding the sentence, sometimes they can figure it out. Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie.
Now obviously, some things that go over your head, your parents want to go over your head. But some things, even if I didn’t exactly know what they meant, I got the gist.
It was fucking thrilling to be the only child in a packed room of adults watching an adult movie and hearing the room laugh at (usually) something I knew was probably naughty. And sometimes even when I didn’t get it, I got it.
Eventually he addresses the reader’s concern with his young mind consuming the mature nature of such films, writing:
Was there any movie back then I couldn’t handle?
Yes.
Bambi.
Bambi getting lost from his mother, her being shot by the hunter, and that horrifying forest fire upset me like nothing else I saw in the movies. It wasn’t until 1974 when I saw Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left that anything came close. Now those sequences in Bambi have been fucking up children for decades. But I’m pretty sure I know the reason why Bambi affected me so traumatically. Of course, Bambi losing his mother hits every kid right where they live. But I think even more than the psychological dynamics of the story, it was the shock that the film turned so unexpectedly tragic that hit me so hard. The TV spots really didn’t emphasize the film’s true nature. Instead they concentrated on the cute Bambi and Thumper antics. Nothing prepared me for the harrowing turn of events to come. I remember my little brain screaming the five-year-old version of “What the fuck’s happening?” If I had been more prepared for what I was going to see, I think I might have processed it differently.
Reading Tarantino’s account was definitely validating, even vindicating. I mean, I like scary movies, but not like that.
Knowing the rules helps shape our expectations. Knowing the rules might not take the scare out completely, but not knowing them can be devastating. Not even my in-depth study of the rules in the meantime has made me feel comfortable enough to see Bambi again.
What’s your favorite scary movie?
Halloween and Apocalypse: Richard Kelly's Alternate Timelines
At the height of my fandom of Richard Kelly’s first movie, Donnie Darko (2001), I attended a midnight screening of the director’s cut at The Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. During the trivia contest that preceded the movie, I was asked to sit out due to my long string of correct answers. The movie struck something in me at a time when I needed to be struck…
Happy Halloween!
Thank you for reading,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com