Under the Spotlight: the darkly comic genius of Ghostface
After horror boomed in the 1980s, the genre lost much of its originality by the following decade. Remakes and tired old tropes came to define a once innovative genre, with many filmmakers relying on franchises and rehashing the same narratives without bringing anything new. Then, in 1996, Wes Craven teamed up with screenwriter Kevin Williamson to create a movie that blended horror and comedy, revitalising the genre.
Scream was a turning point for horror, using a meta approach to poke fun at horror tropes and explain the clichéd rules of scary movies. The movie spawned a franchise, although as the series has gone on, it has fallen into the same old tropes that the original movie stood in humorous opposition against.
The villains, who have all used the Ghostface costume to torment the characters, have progressed considerably throughout the series. Once a figure imbued with slapstick, Ghostface has now become more terrifying. Notably, the latest two films in the series, which feature a new main cast and were conceived by different writers and directors, demonstrate this change and slight tonal shift. The campiness that made the previous four Scream movies directed by Craven so good (three of which were written by Williamson) isn’t emulated as well here, and as a result, Ghostface loses almost all of its comic charm.
In the first movie, we discover that Ghostface is actually two characters – Sidney’s boyfriend, Billy, and his best friend, Stu. While Ghostface is certainly scary, both Billy and Stu play him with an underlying naivety – as the ending suggests, the duo are not as smart as they think. There are moments where Ghostface trips up and falls backwards, waving his arms, emulating a Charlie Chaplin-esque physical performance that you can’t help but laugh at.
When Ghostface tries to kill Tatum, she opens the fridge door in his face, leading him to fall dramatically on the floor and awkwardly stumble back onto his feet. She also throws beers at him while he gets soaked, jumping backwards as though he can’t believe she would have the strength to lob a few bottles at him. In retaliation, he charges at her, only for Tatum to duck, causing Ghostface to roll onto the floor behind her. We also see him wave his knife frantically through small open gaps in barricaded doors, as though his victim will be standing that close to a danger zone, clearly getting a little knife-happy rather than strategically thinking through his aims.
In Scream 2, where Ghostface turns out to be Billy’s mother on a quest for revenge, and Mickey, a film student wanting to gain notoriety and use movie violence as the blame, the killer’s depiction is still imbued with comedy. Ghostface gets his knife stuck in the wood panel of a door while trying to kill Derek, hijacks a police car and drives it terribly (ending up temporarily knocked unconscious), and falls over furniture like one of the Three Stooges.
Scream 3, written by Ehren Kruger, goes darker, with the movie exploring sexual abuse in the film industry as a major point of the narrative. The killer is Roman, a director who is revealed to be Sidney’s secret brother, born to Maureen after she was raped by a corrupt producer. Here, the franchise uses its penchant for exploring topical themes for good, addressing a major part of the industry years before the MeToo movement gained steam.
As a result, Ghostface isn’t as comical as he is in the other films, with some of his kills appearing more brutal. Still, there are many moments where he moves with a slapstick sensibility, as demonstrated by Cotton pushing him against a bookcase, which crashes on top of him. Meanwhile, Scream 4 has a weaker motive for Ghostface, with Sidney’s cousin, Jill, revealed to be one of the killers, jealous of Sidney’s fame. Her accomplice is Charlie, who she soon betrays so that she can appear to be the sole survivor of a brutal massacre. Ghostface is even less comical here, even though the motive is less poignant than the revenge-based ones that motivated Billy, Mrs Loomis, and Roman.
By the fifth and sixth instalments, Ghostface hardly retains the comedy that once made the villain such a work of genius. Ghostface stands tall and dominating, possessing a menacing sense of pure dread. Slapstick doesn’t work here, as the killer spares no one, not even the most beloved character in the series, Dewey. While the characters still fight back against Ghostface – Amber and Richie, Stab fanatics – they’re a lot more violent here, perhaps more than any other Ghostface.
The same goes for Scream VI, which reveals Ghostface to be Richie’s dad and siblings. Unforgiving and brutal, the movie ditches the campiness that made Ghostface such a multi-faceted character, giving him even more scare factor than before. In one scene, he even stalks around a corner shop with a gun, something it’s hard to imagine Billy and Stu doing when they were under the costume.
The progression of Ghostface from a scary character imbued with comedy and slapstick to one purely terrifying and devoid of personality, besides total aggression, is a sign of the franchise’s waning faithfulness to the original movies. Scream (2022) and Scream VI lose sight of what made the Craven-directed movies so good, and any attempts at humour come off more as cringey rather than campy and meta. While they stand as decent slashers in their own right, the fact that Ghostface loses his strange charm suggests that the franchise should now be put to bed.
