Scream Queens

Abstract

The series follows the sisters and new pledges of a fictional college sorority house, Kappa Kappa Tau, who are being stalked by a serial killer dressed in a red devil costume (known simply as the 'Red Devil'), determined to wreak vengeance on the sorority for events that happened twenty years previously. In spite of how unrelentingly offensive the show can be, the fact that Scream Queens has garnered a major cult following says a great deal about contemporary American sensibilities and anxieties surrounding political correctness.

Scream Queens (Fox, 2015-present)

Wickedly funny, irreverent, and at times patently offensive, Ryan Murphy's darkly comic horror series, Scream Queens (2015-present) has a dramatically different tone from his other well-known creations. It is neither as saccharine nor as immediately accessible as Glee (2009-2015), the most recognisably mainstream of Murphy's works, while managing for the most part to sustain a structural coherence and critical focus that is otherwise lacking in American Horror Story (2011-present), an exhausting anthology of hyperbole and horror pastiche. Along with regular collaborators, co-writers, and co-executive producers Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, Murphy eschews the excesses of American Horror Story and transposes (with reasonable success) the conventions of the cinematic horror-comedy into the miniseries format. Scream Queens offers up a caustically witted, overdressed slasher mystery that apes most major classics of the horror genre (Psycho (1960), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and even the recent true-crime podcast, Serial (2015-present)).

The show's title is a conscious allusion to the ways in which female characters (and indeed the actresses who play them) are traditionally victimised in slasher horror - usually by phallic-symbol-wielding male assailants. Scream Queens is overtly aware of its status as meta-horror, and builds on the successes of its predecessors, most notably the Scream series (1996-2011). While Scream Queens certainly celebrates its heritage and revels in postmodern self-reference, the series' self-awareness is rarely overplayed, and it avoids the pointed, selfindulgent meta-horror of Scream 4 (2011), for example, which utilises the horror-narrativewithin-a-horror-narrative trope to an infuriating degree within its first ten minutes alone. (The film opens with a series of filmic mise-en-abymes that leaves the viewer unsure of whether the scenes they are watching are part of the film's diegetic narrative or of a narrative ruse designed to unsettle audiences' expectations of what they are watching). Nonetheless, in one episode of Murphy's series, the original scream queen, Halloween's ingénue Jamie Lee Curtis, recreates shot for shot the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which starred her real-life mother, Janet Leigh. The show therefore teases but ultimately rewards fans of the horror genre, and Murphy and the writers play with certain recognisable, classic tropes in a way that is readily understood by the initiated viewer.

The series follows the sisters and new pledges of a fictional college sorority house, Kappa Kappa Tau, who are being stalked by a serial killer dressed in a red devil costume (known simply as the 'Red Devil'), determined to wreak vengeance on the sorority for events that happened twenty years previously. The sisters are presided over by Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts), the spoilt, entitled, and fiercely vitriolic head of the sorority. Swaddled in haute couture, she is an unholy amalgam of Heather Chandler from Heathers (1988) and Mean Girls' (2004) Regina George, all the while addressing her friends as 'minions', 'dumb sluts', and 'idiot hookers'. The sisters of Kappa Kappa Tau must contend with a new decree by the college's Dean Munsch (Curtis), which allows any incoming female student to become a pledge - a decision that the wealth- and fashion-obsessed clique of young women (who the show appears, at first glance, to lambast) consider to be a travesty of what they believe a sorority should be, making a mockery of their beloved elitism. Munsch certainly serves as a counterpoint to the unchecked capitalist hedonism of the sorority girls, and she is very much Murphy's mouthpiece for the show's satiric derision of contemporary female youth culture, and its tendency to inculcate passive-aggressive and manipulative behaviour, and unbridled competitiveness, within young girls' relationships. As self-interested, fashion-conscious, high-consumerist products of twenty-first century reality television, saturated in the vainglory of social media, the 'Chanels' (the collective term for Chanel and her minions) 'represent everything that is wrong with young girls nowadays'.1 They represent a damning indictment of the superficial, jaded millennial culture against which Murphy and the show seemingly rail.

Scream Queens' aesthetic blends horror with a darkly derisive critique of these millennials, and the show's humour is problematically and frequently linked to images of imperilled young women in particular. For example, in a casting coup for Murphy, American music starlet Ariana Grande plays Chanel Number Two, one of the sorority sisters, who is stabbed by the Red Devil in the show's pilot. With her dying breath, the character uploads a status update about her own murder to an unnamed social-media website highly reminiscent of Facebook. The scene is parodic in nature, emphasising the overreliance of youth culture on social media to document seemingly everything that happens. Yet the threat to the female body (a consistent trope in horror, especially slasher horror) remains ever-present: from the very first episode, the show encourages us to laugh at and mock both stupidity and female beauty, and the horror of this scene - in which Grande's character is repeatedly stabbed/penetrated - is couched in darkly humorous terms. In this way, Scream Queens is painfully unoriginal, as the show does very little to update the trope of the victimised and objectified young woman in horror.

In spite of the show's very subtle, sometimes very clever satire, Murphy seems to sanction for his (probably young) audience a spurious belief that the Chanels' wildly exaggerated, inappropriate, juvenile, and aggressive behaviour is justifiable - precisely because, it is largely implied, those whose economic and social livelihoods are imperilled by the Red Devil are attractive, wealthy, upper-class, young, and, for the most part, white women. The appalling behaviour of most of the young female characters is seemingly endorsed by the show precisely because these women are rich and pretty - certainly a questionable moral ethos. Indeed, Roberts' character, in particular, is so one-note in her function as satirical cypher that she becomes a veritable simulacra, both the vehicle through which the show critiques the horrors of capitalist youth culture and the un-ironic mouthpiece of that very culture. So hyperbolic is her portrayal of Chanel, and so outrageous is the character's behaviour, that the audience hardly fails to recognise her for what she is - an overblown indictment of fashion-conscious, cut-and-thrust, over-privileged millennial culture.

However, given that it ultimately falls to the audience to understand Chanel's significance as a satirical figure, the show runs the decided risk that many of its viewers will be unable or unwilling to discern its subtext. Murphy's evident fascination with college sororities seems to function as a rather shallow pretext for examining issues of class and female identity politics within American society (two issues that are firmly entwined within Scream Queens). It becomes apparent that, for everything the show wryly observes about the prescriptive authoritarianism and militant rigour of some strands of contemporary feminism, and the ways in which girls and young women are encouraged to behave, to dress, and to treat one another, Murphy nonetheless glories in the competitive backbiting, the duplicity, and the high-stake fashion wars of his characters, and in the superficialities of his own creation. As such, the satirical power of Scream Queens is lost in the show's more superficial interests.

More generally, the series is not really about who the killer is; the identity of the Red Devil is the show's MacGuffin. Scream Queens is about the perils of female relationships, and the ways in which those friendships presented in the show are frighteningly comparable to the paranoia experienced within traditional horror narratives, where the characters never quite know who to trust (a common feature of the Scream series (2015-present), for example). Indeed, when one of the sisters of Kappa Kappa Tau rams a stiletto heel into her own eye in order to incriminate her supposed friend and sorority sister, Murphy underlines the duplicitous extremes to which young women can go in order to compete for one another's friendship. Here, the high heel is used as a tool by which the character mutilates herself: the phallic symbol and a symbol of both female sexuality and oppression are conflated to the point where they literally damage the character's own view of herself, linking the horror of this act to the series' implied wider social and cultural fears - namely, female paranoia about self-presentation and social status, and the simultaneous fear of/desire for penetration.

For all this, the show's use of horror is purely functional: by putting these women in mortal peril, and all but ensuring that none of the less stereotypically attractive or less obviously entertaining characters meet their end at the hands of the killer, the show's 'final girls' (pretty rich white women) are those who, for the large part, endorse an extremely problematic set of politics. The show's ostensible moral message (that sororal bonds are good) is all but glossed over, as Murphy's evident obsession with the Chanels suggests that what is ultimately more important for a woman is the ability to undercut someone with a tart and efficient one-liner, all the while wearing a drop-dead-gorgeous dress - an impulse that clearly runs contrary to some of the series' more genuinely enlightened insights into sororal relationships. There are, after all, only so many times that the writers can have Chanel stomp around looking fabulous without the audience, too, glorying in the excess of her world.

While the show's writing is tremendously sharp in places, the writers make little attempt to conceal a troubling inclination towards (among other things) casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, classism, and the ill-treatment of those with mental-health problems. In one of many such scenes, Chanel forces the older, overweight sorority housekeeper, Mrs Bean (Jan Hoag) - whom she calls an 'obese specimen of human filth' and 'white mammy' - to ape Hattie McDaniel's line from the 1939 film, Gone With the Wind (1939), about 'birthin' babies'.2 Hattie McDaniel, of course, played the African-American house slave in that film, which makes this a particularly uncomfortable comparison not least because of the writers' irresponsible disregard for issues of class and race in American history, but also because of the downright nasty relish with which Mrs Bean's physical appearance is insulted.

As the series progresses, there is a disturbing trend towards body shaming women, which amounts to the veritable ridicule of Chanel Number Five's body shape for no other purpose than malicious entertainment. (Abigail Breslin, who plays Chanel Number Five, was the only regular cast member who was still a teenager at the time of filming, and whose body is in fact the most realistically proportioned of these women.) Admittedly, all of these scenes are pointedly exaggerative and in line with the excessive, provocative nature of the show's aesthetic. However, it would be a mistake on the part of viewers to imagine that, just because the show delights in its status as a black comedy, the wilfully inappropriate attitudes displayed towards African Americans, homosexuals, poor people, and curvaceous women merit no objection. Indeed, it may be argued that the true horror of Scream Queens is not so much the traditional elements of the slasher thriller, but the horror of the cultural attitudes and ideologies defining contemporary North America that are represented in the show.

In particular, Scream Queens is painfully aware of the destructive psychological effects that ritual bullying and humiliation have on young women - indeed, this forms part of the show's central message. It acknowledges these effects and goes to great lengths to drive home to the viewer (albeit parodically) its other central theme: the absence of parental figures and the psychological effects that a misplaced sense of loving approval can have on the young (a well-known horror trope, illustrated, for example, in The Orphan (2009)). Ultimately, the show's awareness of itself neither prevents nor excuses the writing from being unqualifiedly hateful. In Chanel, Scream Queens presents a version of 'femininity' that is problematically indistinguishable from satire. Chanel is both a critique and a vindication of certain tendencies within female youth culture towards bitchiness, capriciousness, and self-centredness. We want to hate her because she is despicable, but we love to watch her because she says despicable things that, arguably, few people in real life could get away with saying - and she is consistently glamorised while doing so. Most troublingly, this reviewer fails to see how the young women who might watch this show can distinguish with confidence between subtle satire and the glamorised, underweight characters/actresses who peddle the series' smothered moral message amidst its horror.

In spite of how unrelentingly offensive the show can be, the fact that Scream Queens has garnered a major cult following says a great deal about contemporary American sensibilities and anxieties surrounding political correctness. The series is entertaining and hilarious for all the wrong reasons - a troubling contradiction that perhaps speaks to popular culture's unquestioning blindness as to the damaging effects of language, and the comfortable bigotry which remains a consistent feature of post-reality broadcast media. The show is certainly worth viewing, if only to allow one to recoil at the sheer deluge of bad taste, for there is certainly a limit to how effective its satire is. Scream Queens' content, as suggested above, adds very little in the way of original material or tropes to the horror genre, and while its presentation of contemporary female youth culture is the most noteworthy element of the show, it is also the most worrying. The horrors of real-world female peril, which include both the social pressures of female competition and the threat of unwanted penetration by masked men, are mitigated somewhat by the narrative's hyperbolic comedy, which ultimately transforms the show from relevant social satire into something considerably less palatable.

Although far from the best example of new-wave horror television (represented by shows such as Hannibal (2013-2015), Jordskott (2015), and Penny Dreadful (2014-present)), Scream Queens certainly does advance further possibilities for serial horror television - particularly in regard to those shows that delight in paying homage to the greats of the genre, but without allowing their own inter-referentiality to become stifling and distract from the main narrative (such as American Horror Story). However, much like Scream: The TV Series, the second season of which is currently airing on Netflix, Scream Queens will need to rely more on scenes of innovative and original horror for its upcoming season, and much less on its ailing satirical qualities, if it is going to sustain itself. Horror has entered a new phase - becoming serialised, episodic, and prolonged - but if this new format is going to survive, writers of horror television are going to have to devise new and believable ways of sustaining these narratives without descending so indulgently into self-parody.

Ian Kinane

Footnote

1 'Pilot', Scream Queens, Fox, 26 October 2015.

2 'Pilot', Scream Queens, Fox, 26 October 2015.