Movies
Still Screaming (V)
” ‘Still Screaming‘ is well put together, the production values are as good as if not better than ‘Never Sleep Again‘, and most of the interviews are candid, affable and revealing. Even when someone isn’t being candid, or is trying to paint a rosier picture than what you suspect may be true, the doc is structured well enough that you can bounce that off of contrasting interviews and calibrate your own personal bullsh*t meter.”
Horror retrospectives are a big deal these days. I remember receiving Halloween: 25 Years Of Terror as a birthday gift a few years back and being pleasantly surprised that such a compendium existed. Even if I wasn’t a fan of the whole series (the original Halloween is the only one I legitimately love), I found the insight into their production and the fallout after each release captivating. Seeing how the creatives involved reacted to both failure and success, and how those reactions informed the creative process / mandate for the next installment, was easily more entertaining to me than watching just about any of the sequels.
After being horribly let down by His Name Was Jason my interest in these documentaries was re-emboldened by the holy grail of horror retrospective DVD’s, Never Sleep Again. Covering eight movies and clocking in at around four hours, I think I almost lost a girlfriend after suggesting we watch it a second time.
So how does Still Screaming stack up in this pantheon? The short answer is “very very well”. Of course there are variables, I mean, if you love A Nightmare On Elm Street but hate Scream then you probably already know if you want to spend 93 minutes learning more about the franchise. For Scream fans (or people interested in the development and production process in general) it’s a total delight. I’ve read a lot about the series over the years, Peter Biskind’s “Down And Dirty Pictures” devotes more than a few words to at least the first installment, but even when the information presented here overlapped with what I already knew, it was still engaging. Even better, more often than not I found myself learning something entirely new.
The doc opens with a brief intro that pays homage to the series by introducing two nubile young fans having a movie night and being interrogated by Ghostface on their Scream trivia. For a second I was nervous that this would be a recurring theme, that the flow of the documentary would be interrupted by these skits (a la the kind of stuff that almost ruined Red Letter Media’s Attack Of The Clones review), but it actually does a nifty job of settling us into the rest of the documentary and from there we’re off and running.
Still Screaming flows well from one installment to the next, even if many of the stories around the first film are well known there’s more than a few gems in the first 35 minutes or so. For example, I had no idea that Bob Weinstein had to outbid Oliver Stone on Kevin Williamson’s script – what the hell would that movie have looked like? But I actually found real meat of the documentary to be in the discussion of the sequels. The rushed schedule on Scream 2 would be intense enough, the film was in theaters exactly one year after the 1st was released and they weren’t even planning on making a sequel until several months into the theatrical release of part one. Compounded by the leaking of scripts online (something a lot of people wouldn’t have planned on in 1997) and Williamson having to relinquish writing duties on part 2 in order to attend to “Dawson’s Creek” with Wes Craven, among others, taking over to address issues on the day (Duane Martin literally improvs his way out of being killed and into a taxi cab) – it’s all fascinating. And it’s remarkable that Scream 2 works as well as it does.
The segment devoted to Scream 3 is even more revealing. Most of those involved more or less acknowledge the dip in quality on the third film. David Arquette comments, “it kind of became a caricature of itself”, but I actually found myself wanting to revisit it just to see how they were able to cobble ANYTHING together out of what they had. They only had Neve Campbell for three weeks. Kevin Williamson had to pass his treatment to Ehren Kruger, who in turn passed the baton of his admittedly rushed screenplay to Laeta Kalogridis for onset rewrites. Josh Pais even recalls everyone sitting in Courtney Cox’s trailer “talking about [trying to figure out] what we were going to shoot that day”.
Of course, one of the joys of these retrospectives is hearing all the good stuff from those onscreen. So I’ll stop with the recap (and trust me, I’ve left the best stuff unsaid). Still Screaming is well put together, the production values are as good as if not better than Never Sleep Again, and most of the interviews are candid, affable and revealing. Even when someone isn’t being candid, or is trying to paint a rosier picture than what you suspect may be true, the doc is structured well enough that you can bounce that off of contrasting interviews and calibrate your own personal bullsh*t meter. All of the major players are here, with the notable exception of Kevin Williamson who was perhaps not in the mood after history repeating itself on the set of Scream 4.
Initially I thought to myself that the only things that kept Still Screaming from reaching the level of Never Sleep Again were the fact that it only covered 3 films and that those films were newer (thus making participants perhaps less willing to dish dirt – especially since many were involved with the 4th). But after taking another look I actually appreciated the difference. The Scream films existed in an entirely different studio culture than Nightmare which presents its own set of challenges. And even if you can tell someone is pulling their punches or being political, there are plenty of lines to read between.
It’s also nice to see so many of the same participants move from one film to the next. While the production of the Nightmare series was fragmented, lurching from one installment to the next with different writers and directors, different budgets, different leads and different crew – the central alumni of first three Scream come across as kind of a graduating class that went truly went through a lot together. It takes place over a period of four years, some people left and some talent came in, but the whole overall arc is refreshingly linear.
Still Screaming is written and directed by Ryan Turek and produced by Anthony Masi. It is included in the Scream Trilogy Blu-Ray package hitting September 6th.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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