1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 44: (a) The Canterville ghost; (b) The craft; (c) The Simpsons, “Treehouse of horror VII”

This month, three jolly horror pics: an episode of The Simpsons, and two movies with Neve Campbell.

Scream also came out in 1996. That movie made Campbell famous, but I didn’t mention her in my review of it.

The Canterville Ghost

I think Campbell is better in The Canterville Ghost, a pretty negligible piece of filmmaking. Wilde’s tale has been redone for cinema or TV at least twenty times. A British version was broadcast just one year after Campbell’s was shown on ABC.

Wilde’s material is too slight for ninety minutes. Thirty or forty-five would have been all right. This could have been a chapter in an “anthology” series, paired with some other nice story like “A Christmas Carol.” (The ghost, a wicked old man, ultimately repents and becomes a “friendly” ghost.)

Anyway, Campbell. She’s in little-rich-girl mode, very pouty and naïve. Her character is sixteen; in Wilde’s story, she is thirteen. It’s transparently an act – by 1996, Campbell is well into her twenties, and she looks her age – but the mimicry is good. Campbell gives nary a “wink.” Well, maybe just one. She yells out Sooorrriee with a Canadian accent after the script has mentioned thirty or forty times that her character is from Indiana.

Campbell is Canadian. The actors who play her family are mostly British or Irish.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the story’s satirical purpose, which is to make fun of U.S. citizens who come to live among the English.

Patrick Stewart is the ghost.

The Craft

I said “three jolly horror pics,” but this one gets less and less jolly as it goes along. Basically, it’s Mean Girls before there was Mean Girls, only with better performers (Campbell, Fairuza Balk, Rachel True, Robin Tunney) and with impressive special effects. And these mean girls are high school outcasts, not high school socialites. And they’re witches. They don’t wreak havoc through gossip, social betrayal, etc., so much as by casting spells.

Is anything gained by supernaturalizing the Mean Girls template? I think so.

The witches receive power from a benevolent deity but then use it for vengeful, banal purposes. This isn’t just meanness: it’s blasphemy. I doubt that the movie set out to teach any lesson, but this one is worth noting.

I don’t think viewers would get any vicarious social pleasure from observing the clique in The Craft. This is not a circle anyone would wish to belong to. It is almost contractual: the girls need each other because their magic is stronger when there are four of them. Each girl has her own agenda; none seems to care much for the others, or even to aspire to be accepted by the others.

What is compelling is the fantasy of gaining power over one’s enemies – and over one’s friends.

“Treehouse of Horror VII”

For me, this is the most memorable episode in the “Treehouse of Horror” series. It contains three mini-episodes. (1) Something strange lives in the Simpsons’ attic. (2) Lisa’s science fair project takes on a life of its own. (3) Space aliens abduct Homer. It would ruin these little stories to describe them further. But I will say that the third story is ultimately about U.S. politics – and that it reflects what in 1996 was a common belief: that, regrettably, the two major parties are indistinguishable from each other.

How different things seem today.

P.S. I grew up listening to the show in Spanish, and even then I understood how excellent the translating and voice acting were in that language. Here is a video about the voice actor who played Homer. He seems to have changed a lot of the dialog for his audience.

P.P.S. Look out for the space aliens, who appear briefly in the video.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 8: Scream

Tonight is Halloween, and so this month’s essay is about Dead Teenager movies in general and Scream in particular.

Though it came out in 1996, Scream seems to belong to the later 1990s or early 2000s. Surely this is because of its many sequels, imitators, and parodies.

I’m not an authority on Dead Teenager movies. I haven’t seen very many of them, and my understanding of the genre must be old-fashioned. Nevertheless, I’m going to present my view of its artistic merits and limitations.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The theme of a Dead Teenager movie is punishment. Gruesome death is meted out for misdeeds.

Misdeeds in a Dead Teenager movie may be terrible or innocuous. If they’re innocuous, then the punishment is for sin as such.

Thus, a Dead Teenager movie is a like a morality play.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This interpretive framework is more flexible than may initially appear. Consider that it accommodates:

(1) The terrifying It Follows – the best Dead Teenager movie of recent years – although, in that movie, there’s no singular punisher. (It Follows is more like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” than like a paradigmatic “slasher” tale, e.g., Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.)

(2) The Virgin Suicides, in which teenagers punish their parents by punishing themselves.

Scream follows the traditional “slasher” pattern.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The theme of punishing teenagers is especially urgent to those obsessed with the niceties of teen conduct – I mean, the teenagers themselves. It’s less important to those who’ve outgrown that stage of life. We forgive a person’s youthful acts once we notice that he or she has learned to behave like an adult.

Whenever I view the scything down of a movie teenager, I lament the prematurity of it. I regret that this person never will have the chance to outgrow the teen stage. To my adult eyes, it matters little whether, in that moment, the teenager deserves to be butchered with a knife (or crushed by a garage door, or impaled upon a fence).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

So, I think that the Dead Teenager genre is, at best, compelling to a teenaged (or teen-minded) audience – whose members probably shouldn’t be watching the sex and violence anyway. And if a certain movie is no better than a fine specimen of that genre – which is the usual assessment of Scream – then it’s subject to the same criticism.

All right: I’ve lowered Scream down into a hole. Now, I’ll try to lift it out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Scream is thought to have occassioned a paradigm shift for the Dead Teenager genre. It’s often noted that the teenagers in Scream are well-versed in horror-movie conventions. They’ve all seen Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street countless times. Thus they know which characters in their own social circle “deserve” to be killed and which “deserve” to be spared.

That is, unlike their cinematic forerunners, they’re able to apply the earlier movies’ lessons to their own lives.

(The guru in Scream who articulates much of the horror-movie “wisdom” is a geeky video store clerk. But the other characters share his worldview. All judge their lives by the same horror-movie laws.)

Ever since Scream was released, movies have depicted teenagers as living, breathing encyclopedias of popular culture. And this depiction is accurate. I don’t know to what extent Scream helped to make teenagers this way; maybe it just documented something already in full bloom. Indisputably, though, other movies followed Scream in depicting teenagers as culturally hyperaware.

Scream is hardly the first relentlessly allusive screenwork. Other examples from the same decade include The Simpsons and the movies of Quentin Tarantino. In those works, however, the allusiveness is ornamental (or else it’s the whole point, which makes the work not much different from a quiz show). Scream’s allusiveness has a more interesting purpose. Its teenagers cite previous horror movies in the manner of Puritans citing the Bible, as if those movies were sources of practical wisdom. Pop culture and, especially, recent horror movies are what make up these teenagers’ canon.

And this is the crucial fact that makes Scream more than an exercise in a largely irrelevant genre. Scream is a commentary on the flaw that defines teenaged immaturity, which is this:

Teenagers, despite their lack of experience, are supremely confident in the “wisdom” they glean from the culture in their immediate vicinity.

This flaw is imperceptible to teenagers. Only adults can see it.

Why do the teenagers in Scream kill and die?

Because horror movies tell them to.

Why do they obey the horror movies?

Because they haven’t lived long enough to acquire wisdom anywhere else (and, at this stage, their parents seem useless to them as sources of wisdom).

Nor, in their youthful zeal, are the teenagers able to question whether horror movies contain all the wisdom there is.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One character in Scream is not like the others. This is Dewey (David Arquette), the twenty-four-year-old deputy sheriff. Dewey is shy and self-effacing. He’s no genius. He makes mistakes. He’s barely an adult, as he repeatedly points out.

But compared to the teenagers, he’s a model of clear-headedness.

Another character – Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore – is a cutie-pie brimming with teenaged zest.

A lesser Dead Teenager movie would have made Casey its heroine. But, as we all know, Scream disposes of her after just one scene.