‘Scream 3’: Wes Craven’s bold yet underrated take on Hollywood abuse
The Scream franchise, for better or for worse, has always tapped into relevant trends, and at least with the first few instalments, it did so in a way that feels fresh and enduring even after all these years.
Take the first Scream film, with its meta acknowledgement and subversion of horror clichés, which was completely self-aware, with director Wes Craven, who’d already made hits like A Nightmare on Elm Street, lovingly poking fun at the flaws to be found in the genre. Meanwhile, Scream 2 played into the same vein, but this time it poked at potential problems that arise with sequels and managed to become just as exciting as the first, with suspenseful kills and frequent jokes about franchise issues, where you just had to strap in for a bit of silliness, but the reward was certainly worth it.
Then came Scream 3 in 2000, where a new millennium welcomed a new era of potential for horror, but the question was about how the franchise would move with the times, and upon release, many fans found it to be the weakest entry. But now, four Scream movies later, I’d argue that it has always been unfairly treated, because Scream 3 is actually really ahead of its time, for using its meta slasher set-up to comment on the exploitation and abuse at the heart of Hollywood (spoilers ahead).
The way that the franchise has dealt with pressing topics has varied over the years; Scream 4 has some surprisingly succinct ideas about technology and the rise of social media, while Scream 7 deals with AI and deep fakes with as much depth as you’d expect from the seventh entry into a franchise, which is not much at all. Scream 3, though, has something a lot braver and necessary to say, using the film’s in-universe Scream franchise, Stab, to look at the kinds of corruption that would later become the subject of the #MeToo movement over a decade later.
Interestingly, Scream 3 featured executive production credits from Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax company, with the producer also having significant involvement in the first two movies in the series. Of course, Weinstein would later find himself at the centre of a major Hollywood scandal, which was first officially reported in 2017, although it was no secret in the industry before then, as people had long heard rumours or knew of his bad behaviour, but his position of power forced many into a state of silence.
That same year, Rose McGowan, who played Tatum in Scream, accused Weinstein of raping her shortly after the release of the film, so, looking back at the third entry, which was written by Ehren Kruger, choosen specifcally by Weinstein to pen the script, it’s interesting to see a corrupt film producer at the heart of the narrative, whose rape of Sidney’s mother, Maureen, then a budding actor, results in the birth of Roman, the Stab director who turns out to be Ghostface.
Maureen’s hidden history as a promising young actor who tried to make it in Hollywood unlocks the key to Scream 3, with Sidney knowing nothing of her mum’s previous endeavours in the limelight. Evidently, her traumatic experience, resulting in a child she wanted nothing to do with, led her to keep this period of her life a secret, even from her own daughter.
This depiction of Hollywood abuse is so blatant: when you look back at the film with the knowledge of Weinstein’s reign of terror over the industry during this time, there’s no way that Kruger and Craven didn’t purposefully allude to Weinstein by creating this domineering and exploitative figure. Perhaps it was their way of calling out a man who used his power to completely destroy anyone who tried to speak up against him. It’s crazy, when you think about it, that he gave this narrative, one so closely mirroring his own crimes, the greenlight at all.
Years on, and few films have so powerfully condemned the dangers of abusive and power-hungry Hollywood men like Scream 3. It might not have as memorable moments as the first or second film, but it certainly doesn’t get enough credit for using the franchise’s meta elements to comment on a topic that few would dare to explore with such vehemence.
