The “brilliant” horror movie Melissa Barrera called “mortifying on every level”
Despite exiting the Scream franchise under controversial circumstances, Melissa Barrera didn’t fail to leave a seismic impact on the series, emerging as one of the true modern ‘scream queens’ of the contemporary horror genre
While every sequel to Wes Craven’s 1996 masterpiece has benefited from the star power of Neve Campbell, Barrera showed that there may have been a future for the saga if she had been allowed to reprise her role as Sam Carpenter.
However, regardless of her absence from Scream VII, the actor has managed to put together an impressive lineup of horror-adjacent projects, including the vampire thriller Abigail and the supernatural romantic dramedy Your Monster, as anticipation for new horror films is higher than ever before, especially among the young crowd.
This indicates an interesting shift that has occurred within the last decade, where, once it was common for reviewers like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel to dismiss the genre altogether, such films have now begun to be treated more seriously by critical pundits. Even though the term ‘prestige horror’ has been a controversial one and the film industry has been shot on originality for some time, the popularity of horror does indicate that well-crafted scary films are being assessed as serious works of art.
In this, if we are to pick a singular film responsible for this new trajectory, it may be Hereditary, the terrifying demonic thriller from Ari Aster that starred Toni Collette in what may be the greatest performance of her entire career. Aside from containing some of the most striking and upsetting imagery of any recent film, it’s Collette’s brave performance as a grief-stricken mother that made it such an instant classic.
Her performance clearly had a massive impact on those coming up within the horror genre, including Barrera, as she told Polyester that Hereditary was “brilliant because it’s genuinely mortifying on every level” and praised Collette for how she defied gender archetypes.
As great as Collette’s performance is, it comes from a long line of iconic horror films that have featured a dominant female survivor, including Alien, Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and in Barrera’s eyes, it’s an archetype that she is keen to keep playing into.
“I love the ‘Final Girl’ trope in horror films,” she said, “It’s always a woman who gets to survive, be triumphant and defeat whatever evil forces are in her way.”
“I’m always attracted to women who are warriors in film, who get thrown obstacles and have to find a way to survive, usually on their own”, she explained, “I don’t know what that reveals about me, but if you look at my filmography, most of my characters are like that. It’s not something I was conscious about until very recently when I was interviewed by someone who pointed that out to me.”
Regardless of what happens with the Scream franchise in the next few years, Barrera seems interested in pursuing the spooks, whether she is facing off against Ghostface or some other menace. It’s easy to forget that Hereditary was a film that took everyone by surprise because of how no-holds-barred terrifying it was, but with how things are rolling, the actor will certainly find an opportunity to join a project that could be similarly subversive and haunting.
