Scream

Overview

Everyone wants a piece of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). That is, everyone wants her in pieces. In each film, a masked killer in a black robe stalks her -- first in her hometown, then in college and finally in Los Angeles.

Each time, the killer is revealed to be a different person, although all of the culprits have ties to each other and have a fondness for crank phone calls.All three films are director by Wes CravenScream (1996)Photo courtesy of PriceGrabberSidney has problems.

Her mother was just killed, a TV reporter named Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) is writing a tell-all book about the murder, her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is pressuring her to give up the whole virginity thing and to top it all off, she's being stalked by a homicidal maniac. She suspects that Billy is the culprit until he's stabbed in front of her after they FINALLY have sex. (They aren't around to hear their friends explain that having sex in a horror movie usually leads to death.) In the end, though, Billy is indeed the killer, but he had an accomplice, Stu (Matthew Lillard).

Billy also killed Sidney's mother for having an affair with his father. Sidney and Gale go all "girl power" and take out the psychopaths.Scream 2 (1997)Photo courtesy of

Price Grabber Sidney's enrolled in college and trying to put all of the murder and mayhem behind her. Unfortunately for her, Murder & Mayhem 101 is a prerequisite. Just as a movie based on the first film's murders, entitled Stab, is being released, a new set of murders begins around campus. Sidney is again the target, as her friends go down one by one. Again, her boyfriend, Derek (Jerry O'Connell), is a suspect, but this time, he gets stabbed and does indeed die.

The killer is in fact her old boyfriend's mother (Laurie Metcalf), who again has an accomplice: Derek's friend Mickey (Timothy Olyphant). Sidney gets the better of them, though, with the help of Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber), the man wrongfully accused of Sidney's mother's death. Awkward.Scream 3 (1999)Photo courtesy of PriceGrabberSidney lives a secluded life, seeing as every friend she's ever had is dead. She's drawn back into the limelight, though, when Cotton Weary is killed in Los Angeles. She's brought to Hollywood, where the third Stab movie is being filmed, by police officers who want her help solving the crime.

Soon, the Stab actors are systematically disposed of by the masked killer, blurring the line between movie and "reality." This time, the killer is Sidney's half brother, Roman (Scott Foley). He actually orchestrated the other two films' killings by manipulating Billy and his mom. As expected, he pays for his evil ways with a bullet to the head, courtesy of Dewey (David Arquette), one of the few characters to survive all three films.A fourth is scheduled to be on the way for the comming years and it is argued that scream revitalized the slasher genre in the mid 90s by using a standard concept with a tongue-in-cheek approach that successfully combined straightforward scares with dialogue that satirized slasher film conventions. Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'.

While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectivesPastiche is a work of art that mixes styles or copies the style of another artistIrony is a mode of expression that calls attention to the character's knowledge and that of the audience.Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.