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Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Ever had something you love dismissed because it’s “just” pop culture? What others might deem stupid shit, you know matters. You know it’s worth talking and thinking about. So do we. We're Tracie and Emily, two sisters who think a lot about a lot of things. From Twilight to Ghostbusters, Harry Potter to the Muppets, and wherever pop culture takes us, come overthink with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit.
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Scream: Deep Thoughts About Badass Final Girls, Self-Aware Pop Culture, and Why We Expect Morals from Horror but Not Comedy
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We're releasing this episode (108) four days early in honor of Halloween!
There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
In December 1996, teenaged Emily learned to love horror movies when she saw Wes Craven's Scream in the theater. Twice.
Unlike most pop culture specifically created for her demographic, Scream offered feminism, cultural commentary, badass women as protagonists and antagonists, a banger of a murder mystery, and plenty of comedy--all while simultaneously analyzing film tropes, leaning into them, and subverting them all at once. It's no wonder it lit Emily up so much she convinced her scaredy-cat big sister to go see the film, too.
But there's a reason Emily hadn't watched this film for nearly 25 years even though it had once been one of her favorites. The murder of peer while she was in college brought home to her the fact that pop culture makes violent death into entertainment. And despite the superb storytelling, rewatching Scream as a 46-year-old mother of teenagers only highlighted the tragedy behind the perfectly-constructed fiction.
But even with her misgivings about the film's violence, Emily is still grateful to director Wes Craven, screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and actor Neve Campbell for giving her Sidney Prescott as a pop culture role model for setting sexual boundaries. Sidney has complete bodily autonomy and agency, and neither the film nor any of the non-homicidal characters shame her for her sexual decisions--even when she trusts the wrong man. This was a message that millions of teenagers took in with the quips and scares without realizing it. Nice work, Scream team.
Listen in--but don't tell anyone that you'll be right back!
Content warning: Discussion of murder, serial killers, sexual violence, Harvey Weinstein, and other types of violence.
Mentioned in this episode
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We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.
We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com. For our work together, visit guygirlsmedia.com
We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.
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She has bodily autonomy. Sometimes that means feeling pressured or making a mistake or like even enthusiastically doing this. Maybe that is what she wanted, and she finally feels like, okay, I need to stop worrying about being my mom and just be the sexual being I want to be. It's not clear, but it doesn't matter in terms of who she is as a person, and that's phenomenal.
SPEAKER_00:Have you ever had something you love dismissed because it's just up culture? What others might deem stupid shit, you know matters. You know it's worth talking and thinking about. And so do we. So come overthink with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit.
SPEAKER_01:I'm Emily Guy Birkin, and you're listening to Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, because pop culture is still culture. And shouldn't you know what's in your head? On today's episode, I will be sharing my deep thoughts about the 1996 Wes Craven film Scream with my sister, Tracy Guy Decker, and with you. Let's dive in. So, Trace, I know that you've seen this movie only because you mentioned it last week, and I I don't think I realized that you'd seen it because of me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you told me it was worth my screwing my courage to the sticking place. And so I did. I mean, in 1996, I was I was in college, so I obviously didn't watch it with you, but yeah, I've seen it, but probably not since then. So what's in my head about it is I don't remember who the killer or killers were. I remember ghost face, like the mask. And I remember sort of being charmed by, like, we sometimes will say, like, if people knew what genre of movie they were in, they would make different choices. And in Scream, they do know what genre of movie they're in and sort of talk about it. And there's I remember being really charmed by that. I remember really liking the main character, the final, the protagonist, final girl, Sydney, I guess. I remember really, really liking her. That's all I got, really. So tell me, why are we talking about it today? What's what's at stake? So we'll well, we're talking about it because of Halloween.
SPEAKER_01:So that's why today. Right. What's at stake is this is the movie that made me love horror. We did an episode on Poltergeist, which is what made me terrified of horror as a small child. This film came out in December of '96. I was 17. And it was when I was so I was a senior in high school. So I was the demographic for the film. And it was when I was seeing pretty much one, maybe two movies every weekend. Like I I went to the movies. I remember I went to see it with friends. Over winter break, I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, like, I really got to go see it again. And so I went to see it in the theater twice within like a week and a half. And from there, I ended up becoming kind of a horror aficionado, which I I don't think I would have described myself that way, but that's that is what happened. Now, I there are certain things I don't do in horror. Like in the early 2000s, with like Saw and things like that, things went super gore heavy. And this is a very gory movie. I'm not gonna lie, this is very gory. But when things went super gore heavy and was like pornographically gory, I don't do that. But these kinds of films where there's a bit of a mystery to it, there are true scares to it, and there is humor to it. And all of those I think of as classic horror, Wes Craven style horror, became one of my favorite genres. This is one of his movies. This was Wes Craven's like return to the genre. And it is, it's a phenomenal movie. So it's an important film to me. Re-watching it, I realized I have not seen it in nearly 25 years. And it was for a little while one of my favorite movies. And there's a very specific reason why I haven't re-watched it, and it is something that made it very difficult to re-watch. When I was a senior in college, sometime around 2000, 2001, a young woman from my school, which is very small, disappeared. She was missing for several months. It was known that she was depressed, and it was thought that she had gone somewhere to take her own life. On the day that we discovered that she had, in fact, been murdered, I had not been feeling well and had decided to take a break from studying and was going to watch a movie. I ended up watching, I think, X-Files or something instead, but I had Scream on VHS, this is how long ago it was, and had almost watched Scream. And I was horrified that the day that I found out a peer had been murdered, I was considering watching a film where murder is entertainment.
SPEAKER_00:And just to be super, super clear, you thought about watching Scream before you knew. Before I knew Peer. Yes. So And so it was after the fact that you were sort of horrified by murder as entertainment. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I'm not feeling well in my dorm, put on a movie. I had been thinking about it, but I was like, nah, I feel like, you know, drooling over David DeCoveney instead. And then we get the notification, which I think was via email where like they sent something out and, you know, like here's counseling and all of that. And I crying and feeling sick to my stomach. I haven't touched the movie since. And watching it now, now that I am no longer the demographic of the people of the people in peril. I am the parents of the people in peril. It's a very, very different experience. Although it is just as phenomenal a movie. It is a very odd experience watching this. I have to say, I am so grateful to this movie still, even as I feel many kinds of ways about Murderous Entertainment. And the movie even talks about that in some ways. But I am so grateful for giving me Sydney Prescott as a role model. I didn't get Nancy Thompson because I was so afraid of Freddie Krueger, but I got Sydney Prescott at a point when I think it was important for me to have her. And I really am hopeful that is true of lots of other young women like me. That's what's at stake here. Let me give you a couple of postcards from the destination, like we say. So this is actually a very feminist movie in a lot of ways. So I'm gonna want to talk about that. It's very funny and like witty, and I don't mean that in like the like bon mo. I mean like witty in the way that it is constructed, smart. And so like it names horror tropes and deconstructs itself, and it's just tight. It's really, really well done. And what's impressive about it is how it's well done in multiple levels. There is something very prescient in it about angry young men and kind of incel culture. There is also something in it that I think is prescient about Harvey Weinstein and Rose McGowan, who is a major character, plays a major character in this. Harvey and Bob Weinstein were producers of this film. Bob was the lead producer, so, but Harvey Weinstein was involved. So all those are things that I think I'm gonna want to talk about. And then this movie also is part of the reason why I am a big believer that comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin. So, so those are all things that I'm gonna want to talk about. Since it has been 30 years since you saw the movie, I'm gonna give you a reminder of what happens. I'm kind of gonna, I'm not gonna go blow by blow. We get the setup of who the killer is and what what's going on with an introduction with the murder of Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore. Now, one of the things that was very fascinating about this, and actually I think Barrymore was part of the decision in doing this, she was originally tapped to play Sidney Prescott, like the main character. And she was like, wouldn't it be more interesting if I'm killed off in the first 10 minutes? So kind of like Marian Crane in Psycho. Sorry, I kept thinking Norman Bates, Bates Hotel, I couldn't come over the name of the movie. And they leaned into that where with the because she was a known actress and they leaned into it with all the advertising, we thought she was going to be in the film. And so she with the fact that she dies in the first 10 minutes is shocking and very, very smart filmmaking. So we see how the killer operates. He calls, he uses a voice changer modulator. Although I just found out today that's actually a guy. That's an actual guy who has that voice, which is like, damn. Holy crap. So calls starts kind of flirtatious and acting like he's calling with the wrong number, then starts being sadistic and scaring her, ends up killing her boyfriend who he has like tied up and kills her just before her parents get home. We then meet Sydney Prescott, played by Nev Campbell. Sydney Prescott's mother was reportedly raped and murdered about a year before. Her mother, Maureen. Her father is Neil. Cotton Weary was put away for that crime, is the name of the man who was put away for that crime. He claims that it was a consensual sexual relationship. And Sydney was the primary witness. She saw Cottonweary leaving with a bloodstained jacket, which we later learn she saw someone leaving with the jacket. We claims that he left it behind and that someone else was wearing it. And there are rumors all around town, this is a small town of Woodsboro, uh California, that Maureen had affairs left, right, and center. When we meet Sydney, her dad is telling her is it's late at night. Her dad is saying, like, hey, I'm going to be out of town until Sunday. There's cash on the kitchen table. My flight leaves in the morning. I'll be at the Hilton by the airport, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just then her boyfriend Billy Loomis, played by Skeet Ulrich, climbs in the window. I don't think it's a coincidence that he looks a little bit like Johnny Depp. He's got a very similar kind of look to Johnny Depp, who would climb into Nancy Thompson's window in Friday the 13th. Oh, the other one. The Freddy Kruger movies. Well, the first one. They have a conversation where he talks about how they've been together for two years. For the first year, things are pretty hot and heavy, but since her mother died, it's been kind of more PG or edited for television. So it's made clear that Sydney has some reasonable hangups.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, yeah, I think the girl's got a right to them.
SPEAKER_01:So the other thing we learn is that the way that her room is set up, if her closet door is open, her her door won't open. The door in her bedroom won't open. But you know what? I'm not doing this beat by beat, so it doesn't matter. Next day at school, she finds out about Casey and her boyfriend Steve's murder. The police interview everyone. We meet Sydney's best friend Tatum Riley, who is played by Rose McGowan. We also meet Tatum's older brother, Dewey Riley, who is deputy, he's played by David Arquette, as kind of like lovably incompetent. He's deputy Dewey. And we also, in addition to the friend group, includes Tatum's boyfriend Stu, played by Matthew Lillard, and then their friend Randy, who works at the and he's played by Jamie Kennedy. Their friend Randy, Jamie Kennedy, who is movie obsessed, he works at the video store.
SPEAKER_00:For younger listeners, you used to have to go to a store to get movies to rent a movie.
SPEAKER_01:You couldn't just pick it out on your on your phone or your TV. Yeah. We meet all of them. And we also meet the principal, Himbri, who is played by the Fonz. Hosh, what is that guy's name? Wink Winkler. Henry Winkler, thank you. Played by Henry Winkler. So we kind of see and hear people around talking about how messed up Sydney is and how her mom was like a slut all around town. Like we hear people talking about her mother that way. People use that word. We also end up meeting Gail Weathers, who is the reporter for Top News, played by Courtney Cox. She is kind of a bit of an opportunist of a journalist who has written a book about the murder of Sydney's mother. But she believes that Cotton Wherry is innocent and is working to try to get him off of death row, which she is doing partially to save his life, but also because it'll sell so many books.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So Sydney is going to spend the night at Tatum's house after, you know, learning about the murders since her dad's out of town, but she is at home, she doesn't drive, and so she's taking the bus home and she's waiting for Tatum to come pick her up after practice. And the ghost face killer comes and tries to attack her there at her house. Billy shows up as she's like freaking out and a cell phone falls out of his pocket. Now, this is 96 when not every teenager had a cell phone. It was actually relatively unusual for a teenager to have a cell phone. And so she freaks out and thinks that he he is gonna face it. Well, we don't have that name yet, but yeah. Okay. So he is arrested. She at the police station, they are unable to reach her father. And again, this is before, you know, everyone had a cell phone. Everybody has a call. So he is he has not checked in at the hotel where you're supposed to be. And so when she gets to Tatum's house, there's a phone call for her. When she answers, it's the killer calling again with the voice. So since Billy is in jail, it can't be him. The next day at school, she is attacked again by someone in the bathroom. And so Tatum says to her, like, you go where I go, I go where you go. And because of that attack, they close the school and they put everyone on curfew. And so after the school is closed, the principal is killed, and they all go to Stu's house. He has a party. His parents are not home because he throws a party with a killer on the loose?
SPEAKER_02:What the hell?
SPEAKER_01:The their thinking is safety in numbers. And then also Stu's parents aren't home. So So he wants people around him. Yeah, but also he he they're they're uh like they have beer and and stuff, and they're like, these are 17, 18-year-olds. Like they shouldn't be doing this, but okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01:So Tatum tells Stu, do not let Billy come over because Sydney will be there and she's still feeling really uneasy around him. He had spoken to her at school and said, he said something like, you know, like, I understand that you're upset, you have trauma about your mom, but like, you know, my mom abandoned us and I got over it. And she's like, this is not the same thing at all. Yeah. So what a fucker. Jesus. So Gail Weather shows up at the party, Deputy Dewey. That's the Courtney Cox. Courtney Cox character. Deputy Dewey is there as well. He's there to keep an eye on his sister and on Sydney. He goes in and like takes a look around. He lets the kids keep drinking, which is uh now he's supposed to be 25, and these kids are like 17 or 18. So I don't know. Anyway, Gail drops a camera in the in the living room so she can keep an eye on what's going on in the uh the house. And then she goes back out to her uh TV van where her uh cameraman is, and the killings begin first. And this is also when Randy goes through the rules, like don't have sex because only virgins live to the end, don't drink or do drugs, because it's the same thing as the virgin rule, like it's about moral purity and never say I'll be right back. And so Stu asks Tatum to go to the garage to get him some more beers. She goes out there, she is cornered by someone wearing the costume, she assumes it's Randy and is like just kind of like knock it off. And then he uh approaches with a knife. She tries to get out of the garage through a cat door, and the killer like just puts has the door go up and that kills her. Oh, the a garage door, a cat door in the garage. Then many of the kids leave when it actually is curfew because it's 9 p.m. But several, there there's still like about a you know, half a dozen there. When they get a phone call that the principal has been found dead, hanging from the goalposts. And so everyone leaves except for Randy. And you know, they don't no one knows that Tatum is dead. At around that time, Billy comes in and Sydney, Stu suggests, Billy, Sidney, why don't you go up to my parents' room so you can talk? And and Billy's like, real, real subtle. And Sidney's like, no, it's okay, let's talk. So while they're up there, they have a conversation. She's like, I'm really sorry that I accused you. And he's like, No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that about your mom and my mom, blah, blah, blah, blah. She said, like, you can't choose the movie you're in or choose the genre of movie you're in. I wish it could be a Meg Ryan movie or maybe a good porno. And then like her suggestion being like, Okay, I'm ready. So they're having sex upstairs. Randy is by himself downstairs. We don't know where Stu is. We see the killer comes in on Sidney and Billy after they're getting dressed again. And she's asking him, like, you know, who did you call when you got the one call after getting arrested? Like, because that would be a really smart way to like throw me off the scent if you were the killer. And he's like, Well, what do I have to do to prove that I'm not the killer? And then the guy comes, the ghost face killer comes in and stabs Billy. She runs away. She manages to get away by going through the attic, basically falling down, like onto the onto a boat that's parked on the driveway. Driveway, thank you. Sees Tatum, runs to the news van. Meanwhile, Dewey and Gail Weathers are like trying to investigate a car that's been found, abandoned, and they realize it's Neil Prescott's car, Sydney's dad's. The killer comes and kills Kenny, the cameraman.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, you hadn't seen the cameraman.
SPEAKER_01:And there's Sydney is like trying to get away. The deputy is stabbed in the back on the porch. Gail gets into the van and discovers that her cameraman is on the roof, and then she swerves to avoid Sydney and ends up driving off the road and is knocked unconscious, might be, or possibly dead. Randy, who has been like knocked out by Gail because she's freaked out, finds Sydney and she doesn't trust him. She doesn't she doesn't know who to trust. Stu shows up and so she knocks, she's like, fuck you both, and locks them both outside and goes inside to call 911. And Billy comes downstairs and she's like, Oh my god, I thought you were dead. She now has, I think, the deputy's gun. I don't remember how she got it, but and he's like, Give me the gun, it's okay, it's okay. And he unlocks a door and lets lets Randy. Stu and Randy. I think it's just Randy in and shoots him. And that's when you discover that Billy is the killer. And then he lets Stu in the back door, and it turns out that they have been working together, which is why the killer has an alibi because there's two of them. Find out the Sidney's like, why are you doing this? And he's like, Well, you know, why do you need a motive? But then turns out it's because her mother had slept with his father, which is what led to his mother leaving. And so Stu and Billy have a plan that they're going to stab each other, so it looks like they're the only survivors, and they have her father there, and they have cloned his phone so that he will be the one who is blamed for it. Like he'll kill, and then they're going to have him shot in the head and make it look like a suicide, and so they'll be the only survivors. But Gail has had woken up, she took the gun, and there's tussles, things happen. Ultimately, Sidney is able to subdue, with the help of Randy and Gail, subdue both of the killers. At the end, we have those three are still standing, and actually we see Dewey being loaded onto a stretcher at the end, and Gail is giving the story at the end, still all bloodied and everything, without her original cameraman.
SPEAKER_00:Randy got shot just in the shoulder.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yeah. Nobody's a good shot here. Okay. Except for Sydney, because at the end they're looking over Billy, who nearly like he's gotten up several times, and they're the three of them are standing over Billy, and Randy says, This in a movie, this is where the killer would come up for one final scare, and like his eyes open, and Sydney shoots him in the forehead, and she's like, Not in my movie. Wow. Okay. So I was trying to do blow by blow. It's hard. Where do you want to start? Let me start with like what this movie is known for. That's the way it names her tropes and the way that it subverts them by naming them while at the same time using them and what it does so well with that. Like Kevin Williamson is just brilliant, this author. He's a screenwriter. Yeah. He wrote the script and Wes Craven turned it down several times. He wanted Wes Craven to direct, and he turned it down several times, and then finally, like, was like, no, this is really good. I'm gonna do this. And there was, there's definitely some collaboration within there. But it's a like it's a really masterful mystery, which is part of what I love about it because I like mysteries. Like the first time I saw it, I had absolutely no idea who'd done it. Whereas, like, and you know, I was 17, so who knows if I saw it for the first time now, if I'd have I'm such an avid consumer of mysteries, it's hard to surprise me. But even at 17, you were already in the I was already an avid consumer of mysteries. And they do a lot of things to like, they give you red herrings. So for instance, when Sydney is attacked in the bathroom at school, she's in the bathroom alone and she's like looking under the stalls because she's because they're going sit in a way that she's like, Am I actually hearing that or not? And then a feet come down from the bath from the toilet, and they're wearing like these like really like not Doc Martin's, but like work boots, and then with jeans, and then the robe from the costume like kind of comes down. And then in the next scene, you see the chief of police smoking a cigarette, and Dewey's like, I thought you quit. He's like, I did, but he's overwhelmed. And then when he he stubs out the cigarette, you see he's wearing the same kind of work boots. So, like those kinds of like little misdirections, and I have no idea if that was written into the script, if that was Wes Craven or what, but just brilliant. Those are so good because they keep you off balance at every moment in terms of the mystery aspect of it. Cause like prior to that, like, oh no, I don't what the sheriff be doing with that? But then, like, right, why wouldn't it be?
SPEAKER_00:You know? Yeah. And why did they show us the boots if not? Right. So even the way that you named it, like Sydney says, like, who did you call with your like and then they so she's right. But then immediately it's countered by the killer stabbing Billy. So yeah, yeah. I hear that.
SPEAKER_01:So like it's just a it's a this is a gorgeously written story. And some of it is like Kevin Williamson. The majority of is Kevin Williamson. And then you have Wes Craven bringing his just incredible direction to it. And then you have things like Drew Barrymore being like, kill me off in the first 10 minutes. That it all keeps you off balance.
SPEAKER_00:Which is kind of meta, like doing that with the actor. Because you think, especially if they advertise that Barrymore was in it, then you think that character's gonna have plot armor. So to subvert that immediately, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so that is why I fell in love with horror, because it was like I didn't really do horror. This introduced me to all of the horror tropes. The fact that I didn't know them, subverted them while also leaning into them. Even like the the like in a movie, he'd wake up one last time and he does, but he doesn't. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00:Uh-huh. It's also the case that like the way you're naming being kept off balance, it was challenging intellectuals in the best way. In a way that one doesn't, if one doesn't know horror genre, one doesn't expect, right? I kind of expect to just be scared. Yes. And that's it. But so to have the scare actually be paired with this sort of intellectual challenge is titillating for smarty pants like us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And the fact that so one of my favorite moments, the first time Sydney is called, she's at home alone. She'd been asleep. She wakes up, like she fell asleep after school, and she wakes up. Tatum has called saying, like, hey, because Tatum was gonna supposed to pick her up at 7:15. And she's like, Hey, practice ran long. I'm on my way. And then she hangs up, and then the phone immediately rings after and she thinks it's Tatum calling right back. And she's like, just get here, don't worry about it. The killer is talking to her and doing the like kind of flirtatious kind of thing. He starts by saying, like, I'm on your front porch right now. And so she's like, All right, I'm calling your bluff, because she like looks out and there's nobody out there. And so she goes out. That's one of the things that's truly frightening about the first 10 minutes with Drew Barrymore. When he's flirtatious, he's saying, like, I what's your name? And she, you know, you still haven't told me your name. And he she's like, Why do you want to know my name? And he's like, Well, I just want to know who I'm looking at, which freaks her out. And then he later on calls her blondie because she's blonde and and so like, oh my god, he can see me. So she goes out onto Sydney when she she's calling the bluff, she goes onto the porch, she's like, You can see me right now. I'm like, All right, what am I doing? And she sticks her finger up her nose. What am I doing? Tell me what I'm doing. And part of the reason why I love that moment so much is it's just a it feels like like it's right after she says, I don't like horror movies because it's a big breasted bubblehead who's going up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. You know, what's the point? She is like pushing back against these tropes, and that is such a funny way to do it. Like, you know, like, oh, you think you say you can see me? Tell me what I'm doing right now, and I'll believe you. And so and she does something like this, you know, yeah, absurd and and yeah and like not ladylike and gross and not sexy, and not like because it would be easy to be like, you know, middle finger, because that would be an easy one to guess. Right. So like it it's spitting in the face of the expectations of like the low expectations of teenage girls.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and also the person who started. Trying to menace her, literally in this case. Like at the just the surface level, it's spitting in the face of the person trying to menace her. And at the meta level, it's about, yes, I see that. That's really nice. Yes. So I talk to me like while we're here with spitting in the face of people who would diminish teenage girls. You named in your postcard, you named that this is a very feminist movie. Explain to me what you mean by that. So Sydney's a badass.
SPEAKER_01:Sydney has very specific boundaries with her boyfriend. So when he comes to see her at the beginning, and he's like, you know, we were hot and heavy, and then your mom died, and now we're like edited for TV. And she's like, Did you come over for something specific? And he's like, No, no, no, I would never, I would never wouldn't dream of violating your underwear rule. So like, she's got a rule. And he says all the right things. And this gives a I I feel like this gives a very reasonable look at what it looks like for quote unquote nice guys to push the boundaries. In our very first episode, I talked about how in Twilight, if that's a chastity parable, it doesn't actually tell girls how to handle when they're being pressured. Whereas this, I feel like it does. Because she it's also it like it's tough and it's realistic. But she has this rule.
SPEAKER_00:He claims to be respecting it, and yet he keeps pushing and keeps acting like it's like it he says, I won't violate your underwear rule while he's sticking his hands down underwear.
SPEAKER_01:Well, not quite, but he's not literally, but he's he's he's pushing the boundaries. He's tap dancing on her on her boundary line. And she stops him. She says, No, stop, get out. And we know her father is in the next room and he had heard her, like, when she was surprised when he came in the window, he'd heard her like go. And so we know that she has at this moment, she has a way out of this. Right. So she can call her back. She can call her back up. But as he's leaving, she says, like, look, I understand that you're frustrated, and how about a like a PG 13 relationship? And so she flashes him. And so it's uncle, like as a 46-year-old woman watching this, it's harder to see if that is like, does she actually want that or is that want to? As a 17-year-old watching it, I saw that as like I kind of want to push my own boundaries a little bit too. She does end up sleeping with Billy. She has this lovely conversation with Tatum. Rose McGowan's Tatum is my favorite character. And I hate that she dies in this movie, and always have, because she very gently says, Is it possible that you were wrong about your mom? There have been these rumors about her having affairs. And Sydney says, like, do you believe them? And the way Tatum says is like, well, you you hear that Richard Gere gerbil rumor so many times, and you start to wonder. And it's very gentle, and then Tate and Sidney is like a little bit upset, and Tatum's like, I'm sorry I mentioned it. And they're clearly friends. And Sidney says, like, well, if that's the case, then there's a killer still at loose, and I was wrong, and blah, blah, blah. And Tatum's like, that's that is not on you. That's not on you to worry about. And they are later grow grocery shopping for the for the party. Sorry, did so did Billy kill Sydney's mom? Billy killed Sydney's mom.
SPEAKER_00:Yuck.
SPEAKER_01:Sorry. Okay. They're grocery shopping for the party. And Sidney says, Well, like, I feel like Billy does have a point, you know, because of my post-traumatic stress, like I'm like sexually anorexic. Tatum says, You are too good for Billy and his penis. Yeah. Like, that is nothing to do with anything. And so she ends up telling, Sydney ends up telling Billy, like, I'm afraid I'm gonna turn out just like my mom. And that's part of the reason why I'm like nervous about having sex. So it is unclear to me, watching this as an adult, if Sydney's decision to sleep with Billy is really what Sydney wants. It's unclear. And I'm not gonna say it doesn't matter, but because it does. But what I absolutely adore about this film is that Stu and Billy try to shame her for it. Because when they are menacing her and telling her, like, you know, they're doing the villain plan thing and all of that, you know, this is what happened, this is what to expect, blah, blah, blah. She says, fuck you. And Billy says, No, we already played that game. And Stu says, Yeah, you gave it up. That means you have to die. And that doesn't phase her at all. And it is clear that from the movie, like the movie makes it clear, she may have made a mistake in trusting Billy with that intimacy. But that does not in any way detract from who she is as a badass, as a good person, as worthy.
SPEAKER_00:It's interesting that that is that we have Randy sort of say the rules, and one of the rules is not to have sex, right? So but all of the rules end up getting broken in this movie. So it's interesting that we actually like get it explicitly. Yes. And then the bad guys try to reiterate the rules, but they're not writing the rules in this movie. Sydney's writing the rules in this movie. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she even says it, not in my movie. Right. Like, so there's like this interesting sort of meta commentary that's sort of saying, like, yeah, this is a horror movie, but Sydney's writing the rules. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:So, and I just want to reiterate how grateful I am to Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven for giving me that framework with Sydney. Like, there is no shame whatsoever for having made that mistake. It does not detract from her in any way, shape, or form. This is not like the one false note that I had, because I so enjoyed Nightmare on Elm Street, but the one false note was the fact that Tina seemed to be like deserve to die because she had sex, which I think West Craven grew from. You know, this is 12 years later. And this is making it clear. No, absolutely not. This is she has bodily autonomy. Sometimes that means feeling pressured or making a mistake or like even enthusiastically doing this. Maybe, maybe that is what she wanted, and she finally feels like, okay, I need to stop worrying about being my mom and just be the sexual being I want to be. It's not clear. But it doesn't matter in terms of who she is as a person, and that's phenomenal. That is phenomenal.
SPEAKER_00:So I think I just named, you know, that this movie that through Randy, we hear like the name, like we name the rules of horror movies and then we break them. So I you before we hit record, you were telling me about sort of this movie and like Roger Ebert's take on the deconstruction. Can you like do that for our listeners a little bit?
SPEAKER_01:So so the movie, the way that Roger Ebert describes it, and I'll I'll include his review, his contemporaneous review in the show notes, is he's like, very rarely in movies do you have characters who go to the movies. You know, sometimes you'll have characters who go to the movies, but these characters know movies. And so like they name the tropes and they deconstruct them, and not in an academic way, but in a how to survive this way. And he described it as like this movie deconstructs itself in the it like a self-heating can of soup.
SPEAKER_00:I don't remember that as a phenomenon, but you assure me that that was a thing in the 90s.
SPEAKER_01:And that is like that is part of what's going on there. This film is self-aware and winking at the audience in some ways, but also not.
SPEAKER_00:It's aware of what it is, but it doesn't actually ever break the fourth wall. No, it never breaks the fourth wall. Which I think that's that's sort of what's interesting. Because I I love fourth wall breaking. I love it. I it delights me. This is a different sort of self-awareness without actually ever breaking the fourth wall. So we are in on something and can delight in the way that Randy like knows what genre they're in, but then have Sydney completely subvert it. Like there's something like it's akin to that, but actually, but a different, it's a different realm of sort of delight at that subversion that's not fourth wall breaking, but is sort of awareness of what genre we're in, you know, or awareness of the like even the way that that final moment in the movies, he'd wake up for one final scare and he does, but then she kills him immediately and says out loud, not in my movie. I wish I want a word for that self-awareness, that like meta commentary, because it's not fourth wall breaking, but it's like adjacent.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and what I find really interesting is that I feel like the movie, if you are willing to be self-aware as an audience member, is also asking you to think about what you're doing. Yeah. Which is why I haven't seen it in 25 years. So since Gail Weathers is judged by the movie for profiting off of murder, that kind of for the introspective viewer is going to get you thinking, like, well, what am I doing? I'm watching it for entertainment. Right. Not even profit. I'm not I'm not e it's not even profit, and it's not even like journalism.
SPEAKER_00:Right. It's just for fun.
SPEAKER_01:It's just for fun. There is something that I think is really interesting because this came out in '96. It was right in the midst of the like violent video games, violent movies causes kids to be violent. Right. Even though it was before Columbine and the first the beginning of mass shootings in schools, which is when, you know, like that was like when we were really hammered home, like, oh, it's Marilyn Manson, it's violent video games. But there were we were already saying it was violent, violent movies. Sydney, when she's confronting Stu and Billy, says she's what says to them, because they're they keep referencing movies, she says to them, You've watched too many movies. And Billy says, movies don't make people killers. Movies make killers more creative. There's like also that kind of pushback against that idea that like it's the film industry, it's the entertainment that is causing the violence. So that's also interesting because it's like, okay, well, this is in some ways a safe outlet for uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00:Whatever that is. Whatever that is. Yeah. There are two things that come up for me in terms of that, what you just said. One is we've talked about before, and you named comedy and horror as being two sides of the same coin. The other actually is the meta-meta commentary about Harvey Weinstein and Rose McGowan. Yeah. So I want to make sure we could cover both. Let's do comedy and horror first and then go.
SPEAKER_01:So apparently, this film, they had to fight the MPAA to get an R rating. They apparently cut instead of like instead of like NC17s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Apparently, like they they cut quite a bit of gore already and they kept coming back. Bob Weinstein finally got the MPAA to agree to it when they had wanted to like cut even more gore, when he told them, look at this as a comedy instead of a horror. And then they said, okay, our rating is fine. Huh. Which, whoa.
SPEAKER_00:Weird. What do you think that's about? Like, unpack that for me.
SPEAKER_01:Now, I think some of that has to do with the fact that there is a sense that horror needs to be moralistic in some way.
SPEAKER_00:And comedy does not.
SPEAKER_01:Comedy does not.
SPEAKER_00:If you have that kind of gore, there has to be a And the moral of the story is a horror, if it's gonna have that much gore, has to like there has to be equal darkness and light for horror for the NPAA, maybe. I think that's so if it's gonna be gory, there has to be some sort of moralistic lesson. Yeah. Whereas comedy can just become comedy can just be, yeah. It doesn't need to be a social commentary.
SPEAKER_01:I think that is what happened. I think I mean I buy it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. Now, the thing is, like I have long said I think comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin. Now, the essence of horror is tragedy. The essence of comedy is tragedy. Like that they will talk about comedy is tragedy plus time. As much even as a 17-year-old, as much as I delighted in this film, it's also tragic. You know, a lot.
SPEAKER_00:There's a high body count. There's a huge body count and the psychological trauma of Sydney, who not only lost her mother, but then it ended up being her boyfriend who did it, who then tried to like that is that's just trauma on top of trauma. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, exactly. Now, part of the reason why I say, like, so that's part of why I say they're two sides of the same coin, is because they they are both a way of dealing with trauma. They're a way of dealing with tragedy. The other reason is because there is a kind of like laughter and like that kind of scream scare response, scare response are both they feel similar in the physiological similarity.
SPEAKER_00:I agree. I agree. There's also a way like like we talk about comedy as being sort of subverting expectations. And that scare is also a subvert, like, even if you're expecting it, that like a jump scare or whatever is a subversion of expectations. It's a it's an interruption. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:And so, you know, the best horror is funny because you can't help but be funny because there is They're adjacent in the body.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. In the body and and and in the sort of platonic ideal. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:This film leaned into it. It leaned into the humor. And some of that has to do with the screenwriting, some of it has to do with the actors. So Matthew Lillard in particular is he That's Randy? Uh no, he's uh Stu. His delivery is like this kind of manic. Even watching it this time, where I had a very hard time watching it. There is a line that made me laugh so hard, even though it is awful. So after Sydney has confronted them, she calls using her father's phone and the the voice modulator. It's Stu on the phone who and he's bleeding and not doing well. And she she says to him, like, So we know, we know Billy's doing this because he's a mama's boy. What's your reason when you don't have a motive? He goes, peer pressure. I'm just too sensitive. And like it's so funny, even in this like horrific moment. Yeah. And like I like, I'd forgotten about that, and I laughed. And like I remember really liking his performance as a kid. You know, yeah. Even though it's the kind of like charming blowhard.
SPEAKER_03:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. He's that kind of like manic, charming blowhard. And that actually, like, I do want to get a little bit into this film, it is a little bit prescient about like Inseldom, because that's not exactly what's going on with Billy and Stu. But we find out at one point that Stu had dated Casey, Drew Barrymore's character, and that she dumped him for her boyfriend. And so there's a motive there for that first killing.
SPEAKER_00:For that very first murder. There's also, even if it's not sort of about in involuntary celibacy, there is sort of a just deep control of women's sexuality. Not just Sidney's, but her mother's. Yes. And entitlement. I mean, even like naming the rating, like, why are you entitled to an X-rated film with your girlfriend? That's not a thing that you just get. Yeah. You know, there are two people here and like, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I found Billy like I wish again, I wish I could watch this for the first time as an adult, just to see. Like, I found him greasy and awful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, just your description is reprehensible. I haven't seen nothing endearing about him whatsoever.
SPEAKER_01:I cannot remember. If you found him charming. If I yeah. I just can't remember. I can't remember how I saw him the first time I saw it. And then and since then, every time I've seen it, I know he's the killer. So like I just I don't know. Right. So it's very hard to say. I do want to, like, we mentioned like just the meta commentary of Harvey Weinstein and Rose McGowan. Like it's known that he raped her. Oh god, yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01:And then ruined her career. Because she didn't. Because she would, she wouldn't shut up about it. Yeah. Quote unquote. Right. Um, which is what he wanted her to do. And I see that there's something there's some a weird parallel, I feel like, in what happens to her character, in that it is made relatively clear that she she and Stu are sexually active. It's not explicit. We don't know for sure. But the way that she talks to Sydney, the way that she dresses, the way that she acts, the way that she and Stu act together, it seems reasonably clear. She is also outspoken, strong. She takes no shit from anyone. And she's killed trying to escape. And she's killed trying to escape. She is alone in the garage because Stu says to her, Hey, can you get me more beer from the garage? And she actually says, like, what am I, the beer wench? And instead of like, and that's one of the things that that I actually this time I was like, instead of being like, no, get it yourself, which is what today Rose McGowan would say, what today me would say, 17-year-old Tatum Riley and 20-something Rose McGowan wanting to get along and be like, okay, yeah, okay. Like, what am I the beer wench, but all right, you know, because she is a badass, but she wants to have a career. And so that puts her in a place to be vulnerable and then punished for being outspoken for taking shit from no one. And that's horrifying.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I don't know, like, I don't know where to put that. Like, is this commentary on that? Like, obviously, I I'm certain Kevin Williamson had no idea of that. And like, mm-mm.
SPEAKER_00:Like No, it's not, it's just one of the ways that life that art imitates life and life imitates art, I think. Rather than being like an intentional commentary. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I have always been saddened by the fact that this like badass character who I love, who drives a Volkswagen Beetle, by the way.
SPEAKER_00:And do you want to tell the listeners why that's important to me? Listeners Emily saved up and bought herself a Volkswagen Beetle when she was uh 16 16? So 17. This was 16. Yeah. She saved up and bought it with her own money. It was a very big deal. It was a very big accomplishment.
SPEAKER_01:At the time that I went to see this, I would have driven my yellow Volkswagen 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle to the theater to see this movie. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So we are at time. There's so much here, so I'm not surprised. But I wanna like, is there anything that we didn't name that you want to make sure that you say before I try to see if I can reflect back some highlights at you.
SPEAKER_01:I wish the film franchise hadn't continued as long as it did. I haven't seen Past Scream Three or Four again because of that experience in around 2000, 2001. I have no idea where it's gone. Like it I know they continued to have metacommentary. I remember when I saw whatever the one I saw was, I think it was four. I was thinking, like, actually it would be fitting and kind of interesting if Sydney were now ghostface, even though I don't want that for her as a character, but just like if you're gonna continue with the trope subverting and the metacommentary, that would be interesting. But like it's like what happens with long-running sitcoms. You end up pushing the characters to the point where they're caricatures.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. You move that window of what's acceptable. It just keeps moving until it's totally absurd. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Listeners, if if you have continued to watch this franchise. Scream franchise, y you might be able to tell me if it's Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Let us know, please. Yeah. Find us on socials. We're on Instagram and Facebook. We'll put links, make sure the links are in the show notes to our socials. All right. So just in time for Halloween, we are talking about this original Scream movie, which my sister has complicated feelings about because it is the film that made her fall in love with horror. But also then she was horrified several years later when a peer was murdered in college and she realized that she was being entertained by murder. There's a lot, like it's kind of right, rife, ripe, whatever. Complicated. So this movie, like one of the things that's really cool about this movie is the way in which it winks at the audience, not through fourth wall breaking, but through something that is adjacent, whereby the characters kind of know what genre movie they're in. They say out loud what the rules of the genre are, and then they break those rules. And there's something really delightful about that. There's also like a constant like misdirection and sort of subversion of expectations beyond the scare that keeps the intellectual viewer on their toes and is like a good kind of challenge, which for SmartyPants like us is titillating in the best way. So that included like killing off the like big name actor character in the first 10 minutes with Drew Barrymore. It also included like misdirection with the sheriff's boots and other things. So that even though, even as an avid consumer of mysteries, Emily didn't know who done it the first time that she watched it. And I heard several times you sort of saying, like, now I wonder if I watched it for the first time now about various things, not just the mystery, but also sort of the way that you kind of perceive some of the characters. Notably, this very feminist character of Sydney. She's a badass, she's tough, she like subverts expectations, like in the moment where she's like, I'm calling your bluff and sticks her finger up her nose rather than giving the middle finger, which would have been kind of expected. It's like it's she's so unexpected in like really like spitting in your face kind of ways, not only of the person who's menacing her, but of the society that would shit on teenage girls. And that's really like a beautiful thing. You expressed actual gratitude to Kel Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter, and to Wes Craven, the director. And I would expect, like, also the Nev Nev Campbell, the actress, who embodied this character for this character of Sydney, her framework for sex, her relationship with sex, right? She has boundaries, which she defends. Ultimately, she does have sex. It's a mistake. The man did not deserve her trust, but she is not punished for it. At least not with her life. The movie does not sort of make a moral judgment of Sydney for having had sex. And there's something that you're grateful about that.
SPEAKER_01:I also just want to say, like, like Nancy Thompson, she is vulnerable, but that doesn't take away from her strength.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Right. Nancy Thompson being the last girl standing from the Freddie, the original Freddie Krueger movie, which is called Nightmare on Elm Street, and I always forget. So some of the ways that it like talks about the tropes and then subverts them, Roger Ebert said, like, this is deconstruction, but not in an intellectual way. It's like in a very practical way, like the self-heating soup can, which who knew that was a thing in the 90s, I guess Roger Ebert did. I still don't really get the metaphor, but that's okay. I'm gonna leave it. So we talked a lot about, or some about comedy and horror, and we talked about it in the abstract and the ways in which comedy and horror occupy similar spaces, both physiologically in the human body, but also like in the intellectual or psychological space, emotional space of comedy is tragedy plus time. Horror is tragedy immediate. And so the ways in which those two things travel together, I find it really fascinating that the producers were able to get the rating that they want when they invited the ratings board to look at it as comedy rather than a horror. Like tragedy in the immediate, apparently, our society believes needs to have some sort of lesson, but comedy does not, which I also find really, really fascinating. I think we could probably do a whole show about that. We spent a little bit of time talking about the way that life imitates art with Rose McGowan's character, who is a total badass. She's outspoken, she takes no guff. And she has sex with the wrong dude. And Rose McGowan, the actress, who had non-consensual sex with the wrong dude, and both the character and the actress were attacked trying to escape. So there's something really poignant and just heartbreaking about that, and that you saw that heartbreak as a 17-year-old without knowing the story of the actress and the producer who preyed upon her. I think that's everything that we talked about. What did I forget?
SPEAKER_01:I think just the tidiness of the film in terms of like tidy writing, like which I always delights me. Always appeals to you. Yeah. But one of the things, and I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the things the reason why they ended up killing off the principal was because they realized that there was like uh 30 minutes of the movie where nobody died. It wasn't originally supposed to, but they realized, like, oh, they killed him off. And then that gave an excuse for the remainder of the party to leave because they went to go. And so at like that kind of thing just delights me with that kind of like behind the scenes into storytelling because it gets to human nature because it's horrifying that the kids are like, oh, let's go see him before they cut him down. But at the same time, yeah, it sounds about right. And it also makes the final confrontation like it makes it make sense rather than just like, all right, well, better get going, which is the only other reason why like six kids would be leaving. Right. So that's just it's phenomenal. It's amazing. And I just I love hearing those stories about how a story comes to be cool.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Next week, Em, I am going to bring you my deep thoughts about the Steve Martin film The Jerk. Ah. I was born a poor black child. Exactly. Exactly. And we are going to talk about that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yes. All right. Well, I'll see you then.
SPEAKER_00:This show is a labor of love, but that doesn't make it free to produce. If you enjoy it even half as much as we do, please consider helping to keep us overthinking. You can support us at our Patreon. There's a link in the show notes. Or leave a positive review so others can find us. And of course, share the show. With your people. Thanks for listening. Our theme music is Professor Umlaut by Kevin McLeod from Incompotech.com. Find full music credits in the show notes. Thank you to Resonate Recordings for editing today's episode. Until next time, remember pop culture is still culture. And shouldn't you know what's in your head?