Scream 2 and Hollywood True Crime
The first Stab movie showed us the continuing divide between the real and the fabricated in true crime.
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This piece was originally published October 17, 2017 for the website Heard Tell (R.I.P.). Since that site's gone and it's Halloween, let's resurrect it!
Director Wes Craven rewrote the rules of the horror movie with his 1996 film Scream. The slasher feature had a healthy dose of meta-critiques against the genre that gave it life and inspired a horror movie sequel a year later that dives even deeper into audiences’ love of death and crime.
1997’s Scream 2 was the first to tackle the rampant consumption of violent cinema, as well as the burgeoning obsession with true crime narratives that continues to this day. Through its movie-within-the-movie, Scream 2 looks at the nature of authenticity in crime narratives, and how Hollywood uses the idea of the authentic to perpetuate stereotypes.
