Scream 3 (Kristin's Review)

It's hard for me, when I've invested so much time in maintaining an amused distance from the horror movies I watch, to write about a movie I really really love. The Scream trilogy is thrice that movie, and as elaborately as the third movie mocks and comments not only on the first two, but on the lives of the actors, Scream 3 provides me with thrice the experience of unadulterated love in a single movie (which I guess technically makes the whole trilogy five times that movie, which means I should buy some sort of elaborate box set). Each progression in the trilogy is a stage more self-aware: the first had fun with horror in what seemed like a fairly predictable way, the second was a movie about a movie, and the third is so dizzyingly self-referential that most critics seem to have panned it as indulgent to the point of total collapse. As a fan, I can't bring myself to see the flaws. With Scream 3 I will always insist that everyone else's structural instability is my non-orientable form. The perfection of this always hits me as Sidney flees the killer onto a film set built in perfect recreation of her home from the first film. Running through the house she finds that all the old rules of survival still work: the halls turn in exactly the right place, the doors block one another at exactly the right time. It works, and a scene from the first movie is almost exactly replayed, but for Sydney's anxious awareness of the repetition, and for the final door that opens to the back of the set where the floor falls out from under her. In horror movies, everything works and the audience is effectively scared until the point at which they recognize the rules. Then the genre falls out from under us, and we become aware of ourselves as viewers. I watch Scream 3 as a fan not only of horror films, but of the process of re-watching to the point of indefensible excess. The movie seems to recognize that its core fans, those who will watch the movie more than once, are the same people who night after night are engaged in a ritual of repeated viewing that fundamentally redefines what movies are. The accessibility of media has transformed movies from a two-hour public spectacle that cannot be recaptured till the next showing that can be afforded into a product we can possess and explore at our own pace, at home, on the computer, on an airplane, anywhere and at our convenience. Movies don't just entertain us, the movies we really love we keep within our reach for an empty evening, as background when we do our work, as company on that really bad day. There's a fair number of us who don't just know the rules of horror films, we're embarrassed to admit there are movies we know inside and out, beyond the point of plot or personal continuity. Watching this trilogy once is, for me, like watching one movie three times, except for the first time the movie evolves as a piece just as I evolve as a viewer. Re-watching the trilogy is another experience entirely, or perhaps the same experience but exponentially fun. I love the first two, but the third is the best joke, both on itself and on me. As viewers we're laughing, but not so hard we forget that the best joke is almost always a love letter to its object.