Sidney Prescott Kills the Virgin
The thing that sets Scream apart from many of its contemporaries in the slasher genre, what it’s likely most remembered for, is its explicit self-referencing. Randy Meeks, who serves as the mouthpiece for the film’s meta-commentary, almost seems to taunt the audience by acknowledging the common archetypes and tropes within horror movies as they’re happening onscreen. It follows all the same beats as a typical slasher flick, but it acknowledges that it’s doing so, so that it’s operating on multiple layers at all times. That layer of self-awareness is Scream’s signature — it’s a horror movie that knows it’s a horror movie — and it’s what defines it as a franchise. On its own, that self-awareness could easily come off as gimmicky, because what else would it be accomplishing on its own besides asserting that it’s not a movie that takes itself too seriously? But as I re-watched it recently, after many years, I realized there’s a third layer to the movie I hadn’t caught before, one that makes the self-awareness even more substantial. Scream is not just a movie that drops easter egg references to its predecessors, it also aims to challenge the violent misogyny embedded in their subtext.
Released in 1978, Halloween is widely considered the start of the slasher flick, leading the pack of movies that would eventually become the starter pack of slasher franchises, including Friday the 13th (1980), Child’s Play (1988), and Nightmare on Elm Street (1980), the latter of which actually shares a director with Scream in Wes Craven. As the genre developed, its focus became the thrill of the kill, with the gore becoming more and more gratuitous and the kills becoming more and more creative. They really pushed the envelope on how much violence they could portray onscreen, and after 40 years of this progression, Halloween seems quite tame in retrospect. There aren’t that many deaths, most of which are packed into the final act of the movie, and none of them are particularly bloody, let alone gory. The central element of the movie is the suspense of the hunt, rather than the kill itself, as much of the movie’s first half is spent in Michael’s POV as he quietly stalks his prey. But, as Randy points out in his Rules for Surviving a Horror Film, a condemnation of sex and drugs as sinful behavior that must be punished is present in the subtext of many of these films, and that is Halloween’s driving force.
Everything leading up to the eventual massacre is meant to characterize Michael’s prey: three teenage girls who’ve each been tasked with babysitting. Each of his victims spend their time onscreen violating Randy’s Sin Factor: smoking and drinking and obsessing over boys and sex. Michael’s very first victim, his own sister, Judith, is murdered in the movie’s intro just after she’s finished having sex with her boyfriend. Similarly, Annie is killed after dumping off the child she’s supposed to be babysitting with Laurie so she can run off to have sex with her boyfriend, and both Bob and Linda are killed right after their sex scene. On the other hand, through visual and dialogue cues, Laurie is distinguished from the others as the “good girl”, or as Randy specifies, the Virgin. She brings her books home from school with her to finish studying, she actually gets along really well with the child she babysits, she doesn’t enjoy smoking at all, and not only does she not have a boyfriend, she doesn’t even attract boys. As she says, “boys think I’m too smart.” And that is a crucial element here. Because it’s not just pre-marital sex being condemned; more specifically, it’s female sexuality, and to get the real root of that, we have to go even further back to the movie that influenced it all: Psycho.
If Halloween is the father of slashers, Psycho is the grandfather. Even tamer by today’s standards, Psycho absolutely shook audiences when it hit theaters. Released in 1960, when Hollywood was still in the death grips of the Production Code, Hitchcock’s seminal film pushed the boundaries as far as it could. But more importantly, it established the thematic framework that horror movies would follow for decades to come.
Norman Bates is a very troubled man, but the crux of his violence comes from a shame of being aroused by women, a shame that manifests in violence. The women he kills are punished not for flirting with him, but for merely being sexually attractive to him, something they cannot control. The narrative of Psycho acknowledges this, but also enforces it in its characterization of Marion. From the very beginning of the film, she is marked as a “bad woman”. The antithesis of the Virgin, the movie opens right as she and a man she is not married to have finished having sex in a hotel room. She bemoans the secrecy of the affair, practically begging him to ask her hand in marriage so they can stop sneaking around, but he does not feel financially secure enough to care for her the way he believes a husband should. Her desire for marriage is what drives her to embezzlement, yet the narrative still condemns her for being unmarried. Of all the women around her, she’s the only one without a ring on her finger, and more than that, men are sexually drawn to her. Norman’s attraction to her is explicitly pointed out as what drives him to kill her, but even the man whose money she steals flaunts it in front of her as a way of flirting with her. Even the camera itself cannot help but sexualize her; she is shown in her bra several times throughout the film, something that was very risque at the time this movie was released, and the camera admires as much of her naked skin in the shower as it can get away with before she’s murdered. Much like its own villain, and in a structure that’d later be mirrored by Halloween, Psycho’s narrative spends as much of its first half objectifying her as it does illustrating the many ways she violates its moral code of sexual respectability. And for her sin of being an attractive woman who’s dared to exercise agency, she is condemned to a grisly death.
Psycho is the foundation that Halloween continues to build on in its self-contradicting characterization of its women. Psycho could only get away with showing Marion in her bra. By Halloween’s release in 1978, the Production Code had been dismantled, leaving it free to sexualize Michael’s female victims even further. All three of them are shown nude in the moments leading up to their deaths, and rather than scream in terror as they’re being murdered, each of them moan and whimper quite suggestively. Even Laurie mistakes the sounds of Annie being strangled over the phone as sexual and teases her about it, completely unaware that she’s listening to her best friend’s final breaths. Bob’s death, on the other hand, is not sexualized in this way at all. He has no characterization prior to his sex scene with Linda, and the camera does not highlight his naked body at all the way it does Linda’s breasts. When he’s murdered, he makes the choking sounds one would expect as opposed to moaning sexually. The women are condemned for their sexual agency and yet, both in life and in death, they are also sexually objectified. And Michael Myers, characterized merely as “evil” by Dr. Loomis, functions less as a character and more as an allegory for this punishment of sexual deviance. Unlike Norman, he is not driven by personal human motives; he is merely a vehicle for the narrative’s moralizing, the executioner to the narrative’s judge and jury.
This is the ongoing conversation that Scream inserts itself into. Much like Laurie, Sidney is not having sex like her peers, but her situation is a lot more complex than Laurie’s caricatured Virgin. The trauma of her mother’s death has left Sidney sexually “frigid”, though the narrative does not hold it against her. Billy may have told her that a year was enough time to recover from the grief, but her best friend Tatum is also there to remind her that Billy’s not entitled to her and that she can take all the time she needs to grieve, reinforcing her agency. She exercises this agency from the very beginning, where she allows Billy a little “on top of the clothes stuff” and even flashes a little boob, to the end, when she decides she’s ready to go all the way with him.
She’s not only allowed agency, but the room to be flawed as well. Part of her resistance to sex comes from a subconscious attempt to not end up a “bad seed” like her mother, who has long been rumored to have been having affairs with men around town, rumors that were swirling around Woodsboro long before her death. Refusing to accept her mother’s infidelity, she believes instead that Cotton, one of the men Maureen was allegedly sleeping with, raped her mother before killing her. She struggles to accept her mother as a dynamic person, capable of making choices she may not agree with or approve of, and it complicates her as a character, making her judgment seem unreliable at times. And who can blame her? She’s a teenage girl who’s grown up in a town illustrated to be rather sexually conservative, one that clearly still holds a grudge against her mother, and her by proxy, for what it perceives as deviant behavior. It’d be hard not to internalize that. But rather than enforce these puritanical standards, as the film’s predecessors would have done, the narrative challenges them instead.
The film’s final act sees Ghostface quietly tearing through the party guests as Halloween plays on the living room television, and this is where the film enters into direct conversation with its predecessors. Halloween’s score crescendos just as Ghostface appears behind Randy, Laurie whimpers in fear as Dewey investigates the house, and Randy uses plot points in Halloween as his model to lay out his Rules for Surviving a Horror Movie as Sidney breaks the cardinal rule upstairs. And in this way, the two movies are linked together on all levels: visually, sonically, and thematically. The intercutting of Randy’s rules with Sidney’s sex scene juxtaposes Laurie against Sidney, positioning them as thematic counterparts, as Sidney transitions out of the Virgin’s safety zone that kept Laurie alive. And Billy reveals himself as one of the killers with a direct quote from Psycho, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Anthony Perkins, Psycho.” linking him to Norman Bates. Billy’s mother left his father because of the affair with Maureen, who he accuses of “flashing her stuff all around town like she was Sharon Stone or something,” and, same as Norman, he violently lashes out at the woman for sexually attracting the man, believing that Maureen “seduced” his father, with none of the same smoke for his father’s decision to cheat on his mother. He and Stu both hold the Virgin trope over Sidney’s head, taunting her repeatedly about having sex with Billy as if it has condemned her. Her life is now being threatened by the same constructs of purity and chastity that killed her mother and condemned women like Judith and Annie and Linda and even Marion Crane to brutal deaths. And she fights back.
After Billy gets his time to rant about Sidney’s mother and “maternal abandonment”, Sidney turns the tables on him and Stu by adopting all the techniques they’ve used to terrorize their victims through the film against them. The predators become prey as Sidney taunts Billy and Stu over the phone using their own voicebox, even returning Billy’s constant taunts about her mother with her own jabs about him being a “Mama’s boy”, and when he goes to look for her, she even gets her first lick in with a jump scare as she pops out of the hallway closet in full Ghostface garb and stabs Billy with the umbrella. No longer being the Virgin does not strip her of her agency, which she throws back in her tormentors’ faces, quite literally. She kills Stu by crushing his head with the TV, on which Halloween is still playing, and for a split second before she pushes it off the stand, the composition of the frame places her parallel to Laurie, who is also fighting back against her tormentor, visually linking her to her thematic foil. She not only kills Stu when she pushes that TV onto his head, she also destroys the archetype that has been haunting her the entire film. And as Billy lay unconscious on the floor, Randy warns her that the killer always pops up for one final scare. Billy does just that, and she ends him quickly with a bullet right between the eyes. “Not in my movie,” she declares. That one line carries nearly 40 years of cinematic baggage behind it, and marks our Final Girl as taking full control of her narrative. Archaic tropes about female sexuality are not going to be Sidney Prescott’s doom if she has anything to say about it.
