This post contains spoilers for the following films: X, Pearl, Scream V and Scream VI.
I’ve watched quite a few horror films this summer, and one of the clearest (though not at all groundbreaking) takeaways I had — especially after Barbarian and X — was: wow, horror filmmakers really hate (in no particular order) women, aging, women aging, and female pleasure (see, for example, the “slut” getting killed off in every single film).
But then I watched Pearl (prequel to X, only this one’s co-written by a woman and it shows), and the two most recent additions to the Scream franchise, and found them refreshingly different in both theme and approach.
From the outset, Pearl is an ode to early American cinema, paying homage to The Wizard of Oz as much as it does to Psycho (the characters of Pearl and Norman Bates clearly belong to the same family). Set in 1918, Pearl lives an isolated life on a cornfield-surrounded farm with her strict German immigrant mother and nearly comatose father, sneaking off to the movies and dreaming about being a star in the pictures. Her loneliness and her desire are heavy burdens burning away inside of her, becoming more dangerous and uncontrollable the larger they grow and the longer they’re denied.
Although Pearl waxes on about her absent husband, overseas fighting in the first world war, and has dalliances with both a scarecrow and a city sleaze/traveling salesman type, it’s clear that none of these men (or hay-filled substitutes for men) can fill Pearl’s gaping hole. Pearl is not looking for love, then; what she is looking for is a Way Out.
Pearl is, in some ways, a morality tale. It’s a cautionary one, too, illustrating what happens when old world Protestantism, infused and cultivated generationally in white Anglo-Saxon women who are raised to be meek, obedient, and decidedly unambitious — for whom wanting is the worst sin and everything messy and human is, at best, “not nice,” and at worst, damning — breaks. It’s the fallout when all that is natural (hunger, thirst, lust, and need — our innate urges to express, create, explore, and belong) can no longer be suppressed.
The role handed to these women — particularly in America’s past — has been one of both rigid lines and pedestals. I won’t deny the privilege in the pedestal, but I also won’t deny the cage. It’s a cage I’ve heard my own farmland family verbalize when talking about their youth, frustration and longing thick in their voices. It’s the giant roar I felt building up in me from the time I was a child, raised in a fundamentalist religion to believe my worth was based solely in my innocence and my (controlled) sexuality, my ability to be good and please others, with the sole conclusion on offer being to one day provide for a man the following holy trinity: a caretaker, a body, and a litter of babies, all in one.
The roles offered Pearl to play are few: doll, wife, dutiful daughter. So Pearl grins and bears it, until despair overtakes, and the giant impulses she’s been told to bury spill over into too-muchness. When the hunger that is a heart becomes too big for the small town that contains it, lust for a life — one that’s alive, stimulating, and above all, real — brews too hot and inevitably bursts. Through suppression, though, what once was natural has twisted into something altogether different and comes springing out in the shape of demons.
When the fantasy Pearl has built up in her own mind (of the future and what it can contain, but also the lie she’s been conditioned to believe is the only thing that makes her worthy of a life) crashes up against reality and falls apart, she snaps. When the love she offers is rejected, when her innocence is tarnished, when the doors of opportunity close, and when she repels others with her openness, her honesty, and the impossible gaping wideness of her want, darkness overcomes. And when the myth breaks, her psyche fractures along with it.
In Scream V and Scream VI, Sam, new final girl on the scene and inheritor of previous Scream heroine Sydney Prescott’s crown, is, per usual, on the run (always) from a masked killer — or killers — with a knife. What makes Sam different from her predecessor, though, is her history. Turns out she’s the daughter of Billy Loomis, psycho serial killer (and Sydney’s boyfriend) from the very first film, responsible for starting this whole diabolical mess and its ensuing, ongoing torment.
Throughout both films, Sam hallucinates conversations with her murderous dead father and attempts to reckon with the legacy he’s left her. It’s a legacy she fears might live within her, and not for nothing: we see her fears incarnate when we witness her euphoria as she finishes off the latest batch of murderers in the most recent installment of the franchise, lifting the knife and stabbing, over and over again. She’s almost giddy with it, even; the relief of giving in to a long-repressed urge.
I don’t know whether the filmmakers intended this as allegory, but watching it, I can’t help thinking of America’s own gruesome past and how desperately we attempt to run from an acknowledgement of the grisly instincts that make up our darkest corners, haunting our own legacy. But where Sam is approaching acceptance, situated in a post-modern world of independent, liberated women who are never saved (only tortured) by prince charmings, Pearl is the version of us that stays in place, pining for an illusion of perfection we’re determined to believe was real in the first place, even if it kills us. No matter how bad things get, we’re stuck yearning for that longstanding American promise of utopian contentment and starry-eyed success.
But if America is the land of opportunity, it’s also the land where opportunity dries up, dead-ends, gets handed to some but not to others. In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie A. Fielder asserts that “the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror,” and I wonder if the same could be said of our cinema. Whether in a slasher film or Oscar bait, we feed off of trauma plots, mad women in attics, violence (particularly against women), and carnal impulses. From The Godfather to Jurassic Park to Thelma & Louise, our narrative landscape is frequently defined by horror, and the pushing up of some lone character or pair against the disillusion and dissolution of that facile optimism marketed to us as the American Dream.
Norman Bates: You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.
Marion Crane: Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps.
Norman Bates: I was born in mine. I don't mind it anymore.
Marion Crane: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.
Norman Bates: Oh, I do...
[laughs]
Norman Bates: But I say I don't.
(from Psycho)
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we repeatedly watch with a thrill as America’s ideal personified — blonde, buxom, sexed — comes to bloody, violent ends. She symbolizes that just-out-of-reach pinnacle we’ve all been led to believe we can possess or embody — if we just try hard enough — yet somehow, despite our efforts, can never attain. The blonde, simultaneously pure quixotism and elevated sex symbol — i.e. virgin, Madonna and whore wrapped into one — has to die, because deep down we all know the story we’ve been sold is a lie, and the options laid out before us are not the freedom we were once promised.
In each of these films, Pearl and Sam step outside the usual final girl role. They are vulnerable victims of circumstance, yes, but they are neither helpless nor virginal. Instead, they too contain the dark edges and rotting impulses of the villain, tainted by the very landscape and histories that made them. They too are capable of becoming the thing they are trying hardest to escape.
In the end, then, the new generation of final girls become the killers. The only way out, they discover, is to take matters into your own hands.