[Editorial] The Terrible Place: Visiting and Revisiting Hollywood in Horror

Contains spoilers for Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3 and Mulholland Drive 

In recent years since the inception of the #MeToo movement, we have seen a turn towards discussing the abuses rife in the Hollywood system and the wider media landscape. Films spanning a range of subgenres explicitly dramatizing these abuses, films such as Bombshell (2019), She Said (2022) and Tár (2022), centre these stories as inciting incidents driving their plots.

In thinking about these overtones of abuse within the apparatus of media and filmmaking, I am inclined to look further back at how the darkness of Hollywood has been explored in more oblique ways due to the nature of their conception and the era in which they were made. 

The late 1990s saw a turn towards a more self-consciously postmodern approach to horror filmmaking. In the Scream franchise, Wes Craven and the writers’ (Kevin Williamson and Ehren Kruger) use of certain narrative devices such as intertextuality, metadrama, deconstruction, and metatextuality, call attention to the trilogy’s position within the history of the horror genre, and their nature as media artefacts in their own right. In weaving these elements into the original trilogy, Craven is free to play with audiences’ expectations, drawing attention to the nature of film itself as a construction which goes on to serve and fuel the narrative of the franchise. This self-referentiality and acknowledgement of itself as a piece of Hollywood-generated media allows the filmmakers to engage with its thematic and narrative content in new and different ways to films that came before. Scream 3 is overwhelmingly considered as the weakest link in the original Scream trilogy, however in its forward and inward looking narrative I believe its ambitious themes deserve further exploration in the context of what we can learn about Hollywood’s positioning as a Horror setting and ‘Terrible Place’ of trauma in film.

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

To compare, possibly the definitive film about the darkness behind Hollywood’s shiny exterior, Mulholland Drive - though vastly different to Scream 3 in many aspects - shares some overlap in its use of postmodern narrative devices and how these serve the film thematically and narratively, which are worthy of exploration in conversation with Craven’s film. Lynch’s disillusionment with the Hollywood system has been documented throughout his career, but perhaps is most clearly and directly engaged with as subject matter in 2001’s Mulholland Drive. 

Scream 3’s specific use of postmodern elements allow for its creators to engage on multiple levels with the history of the Scream franchise as a successful horror property and its particular context of the Hollywood system’s involvement in this creation and success. The particularities of Scream’s production development and marketing, much of which is often attributed to Bob Weinstein and Dimension Films, a subdivision of Miramax at the time, are engaged with throughout the trilogy, most overtly through the use of metadrama in the in-universe ‘Stab’ franchise, which is never as present and key to driving the narrative as it is in Scream 3. 

The reveal of Scream 3’s killer not only skewers the entitled ‘nepo baby’ stereotype, with the ‘Stab 3’ director Roman Bridger (Scott Foley) being revealed as Ghostface, but the revelations surrounding his backstory reveals the Prescott family as deeply entangled with the abuse within the Hollywood system.

Referencing back to its predecessor by setting much of the film’s action on the set of ‘Stab 3’ - a set built to mimic the town of Woodsboro - we directly confront the action of the original film through a new lens. Sidney is forced to follow the motions of the traumatic events she originally experienced in her home, now reimagined as a film set, though ultimately uncannily crashing through a doorway only to find an empty space where a room should be. 

The film utilises themes of doubling on both a micro and macro scale. The Hollywood imitation set,  ‘Stab 3’ as a double being made within the film itself, the original characters all encountering their doubles in the actors playing them in ‘Stab’. Even the dual nature of the source of horror itself - Bridger is hunting down and killing the cast of ‘Stab’ and their real-life counterparts, but a deeper level is revealed in the twist of Maureen Prescott’s (Lynn Mcree) rape and pregnancy in the Hollywood studio at the hands of his father John Milton (Lance Henriksen) long before Sidney was born. Bridger mirrors back the horrific nature of his conception and birth, the cyclical nature of abuse and trauma is neatly demonstrated through his character motivations and actions, reflecting both to Sidney and to an audience an alternative, but now a more real reality.

Throughout the trilogy, we are consistently tasked with reassessing the events of each film after the ‘killers monologue’ explanation which marks the climax point of each film. The filmmakers constantly misdirect the audience by playing on their assumptions which become increasingly complex with each film, due to each previous instalment in turn becoming part of the history of the genre upon which the success of its intertextuality depends. In Scream 3 it is easy to guess that Roman is the killer, perhaps similarly to Scream 2 with the double reveal of Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) and Nancy Loomis (Laurie Metcalf). However, in Scream 3, it is not another killer that is revealed to be the ‘real’ generator of horror, but his explanation which uproots our - and Sidney’s - assumptions about the whole nature of the franchise - and Sidney’s life and family itself. 

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

The use of the ‘Stab’ actors in Scream 3 enables the ‘real people’ to interact with foils who accentuate notable aspects of their character through showing heightened or oppositional traits to highlight those present in their counterparts. Gale’s double Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey), reflects back to us a version of Gale more similar to the one we first encountered in the original Scream. Through Gale's interactions with Jennifer, we are able to observe the change and growth she has been through as a character over the course of the trilogy. In depicting Gale confronting an imitation of her former self, the film reinforces its themes of confronting and overcoming the trauma of the past to truly be free. 

In Mulholland Drive we are confronted with multiple strands of a story which converge with the double narrative of Betty/ Diane (Naomi Watts), only through experiencing the film in its entirety (potentially multiple times) do we begin to piece together the fragmentary nature of its story as a whole.

While it still teeters on the edge of comprehensibility - as Lynch is wont to do - the nonlinear narrarive contributes to an overall atmosphere of unease and the thematic storytelling, which doesn’t rely on straightforward logic but rather ‘dream logic’, positions the film as the ultimate ‘poisonous valentine to Hollywood’¹. Lynch reflects back the dark underbelly of the Hollywood system, within the dual narrative of the young seemingly naive ‘starlet’ Betty/ Diane, as well as concurrently showing this within the narrative of director Adam (Justin Theroux) becoming mixed up in a mysterious noir-esque crime narrative within which he appears powerless. The mirroring and coming together of these narrative strands allows Lynch to explore the dark side of the machinery of Hollywood from both in front of and behind the camera, powerfully demonstrating how the abuse and misuse of power in these spaces reinforces a system which can have harmful and - in this case - deadly consequences. 

The doubling of characters in Mulholland Drive is depicted through the narrative shifts in the film, the acting and writing are nuanced in ways which show the differences between the characters that exist within multiple narrative threads. Lynch emphasises the dark and horrific reality of Diane’s situation through depicting its double in the dreaminess of Betty’s story with such sharpness and precision. 

Naomi Watts’ ability to portray the multiple sometimes conflicting and contrasting elements within and between Betty/ Diane throughout the narrative also complicates the straightforwardly dichotomous dream/ reality lens that may be applied to the film. Betty begins the story as the naive, ‘fresh off the boat’ starlet, but quickly we see cracks in her fresh-faced exterior as she is drawn into the mystery of Rita/Camilla who can also be read as a microcosm of the Hollywood dream Betty/ Diane is chasing. She is a blank canvas upon whom she can project her fantasies, but when the fantasy of her perfection is shattered for Betty/ Diane, both her sanity and the film-reality around her begins to crumble. 

A direct point of comparison between Scream 3 (as opposed to the preceding films in the trilogy) and Mulholland Drive is the use of mystical elements and/ or dream sequences. Scream and Scream 2 are positioned squarely in the space of the ‘real’, this is accentuated by their engagement with the news media as a significant plot element. Whereas, in Scream 3 Hollywood and the creation of the Stab films takes this place - the killer is a director as opposed to a journalist. While elements of the ‘Stab’ franchise as a Hollywood-isation of events appear in Scream 2, Scream 3 takes it to the next level and engages with Hollywood as the major setting and basis for the plot. The engagement with film as a medium allows for the surreal qualities to be mixed into the narrative in a more organic way. Sidney is shown to have dreams or visions of her late mother which encroach upon her now secluded life. We can read the film’s falling into a kind of dream-scape or fantasy-space from a vaguely psychoanalytical angle: before we are fully aware of the extent of the trauma being repressed the film gives us glimpses into Sidney’s psyche, her anxiety over her mother within whom the secret of the ‘original sin’ of the franchise is contained. 

In Mulholland Drive the dream-space and fantastical elements are integral to the tone and narrative. ‘Club Silencio’ as a central and climactic part of the narrative functions as a place where the apparatus of film is deconstructed and along with this comes the collapse of Betty’s Hollywood dream life. The emcee draws attention to the artifice of the music, declaring ‘there is no band [...] this is all a tape recording’, ‘it is all an illusion’, Betty reacts in horror before he disappears in a puff of smoke. This space allows for the illusory and fantastical to exist in conjunction with the almost direct verbal communication of the ‘reality’ of the film, and the fact that the club itself is a façade. It is a place of liminality in which people disappear and break down. Within the surrealness and artificiality of the space, our central characters experience clarity beyond that which they have been able to comprehend within the artificial space of Betty’s projected fantasy up until this point.

WATCH HORROR MOVIES WITH US!

What is perhaps most interesting about the way Scream 3 handles its traumatic history is how centering Sidney’s experience and choices throughout the franchise pays off in its ending. While Sidney’s experiences and active choices as a character are prioritised throughout the franchise, the final instalment chooses to end the film on a different note to its predecessors. Rather than succumbing to the bleakness and darkness of Hollywood as the site of trauma and being consumed figuratively or literally by the monsters of the film, Sidney is granted victory not only over Roman as the killer, but receives an ending in which she has overcome the trauma of the film and the previous instalments. She is not unable to trust her partner, for which she is taunted by Scream 2’s Ghostface, neither is she locked away in a remote location as we first encounter her in Scream 3. The camera doesn’t centre on Gale or Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) and draw attention to the media as a force retelling and redefining Sidney’s story. We instead leave her having made the decision not to lock the door, and to join her friends in a scenario not motivated by a horror pursuing them, away from Woodsboro and away from Hollywood. 

The proximity of Scream 3 to the real darkness of Hollywood it is portraying has only become more apparent in the last few years, particularly since the #MeToo movement took hold. However, this depiction on screen of Hollywood’s latent darkness is hardly a new phenomenon. I would argue that a more overt critique of the dangers inherent in the Hollywood system has become more popular in recent years in Hollywood at large as well as in the horror genre more specifically, with films such as Starry Eyes (2014) and The Final Girls (2015). However, we can trace thematic influences on films within this niche as far back as Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). I would argue that the particular construction and sensibilities of Scream 3 and Mulholland Drive as leaning into the postmodern as a method of filmmaking and storytelling perhaps allows a particular way of confronting the trauma and horror that lies at the centre of their narratives and within the Hollywood system they draw upon as their source material. 

References
¹ J. Hoberman, ‘Points of No Return’, The Village Voice, 2/10/01, https://web.archive.org/web/20080719172617/http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0140%2Choberman%2C28631%2C20.html

RELATED ARTICLES

---