By Emma Bogue 

When meaning is lost, emotions overpower. The latest installment of the franchise, Scream 7 is due to hit theaters on February 27th. While you might roll your eyes and wonder why Ghostface returns for yet another slightly trashy Hollywood slasher reboot, there’s probably a good reason for it.

The horror genre is a lab rat when it comes to post-cinematic affect. It doesn’t wait for you to adjust to your surroundings and understand what’s really going on, it instead overpowers you with emotion and unease, pumping your nervous system full of adrenaline and suspense that you just can’t seem to get enough of. When Scream was released in 1996, it mocked our expectations of classic horror tropes and its cliches, and reinterpreted this mode of new film making.  

Steven Shaviro argues in Post Cinematic Affect (2010) that ‘the structure of feeling’ or ‘post-cinematic affect’ is where we become in tune with our sensations and feelings before we can even interpret what is going on. A croaking voice down the telephone taunting Casey Becker, a feeling of anticipation and trepidation before we’re met with the iconic antagonist, Ghostface. 

Scream has all the basic elements of horror, but amplifies it to a chaotic and emotionally overpowering level. In Shaviro’s, Post-Cinema: Theorising 21st Century Film (2016) he explains that compared to classic filmmaking where scenes were long and brooding, and emotion slowly builds, ‘post-continuity’ does the opposite and incorporates fragmented scenes, shaking cameras and an immediate affect on your senses. This also comes in tandem with the rise of ‘chaos cinema.’ 

I think Scream is the ultimate ‘guilty pleasure’ of new horror. Ghostface is memorable. We already know what is going to happen when we see the mask and become vis-à-vis with the killer. In the films, there’s no real sense of solving a mystery, rather that we’re constantly left on the edge of our seat and Sidney Prescott’s trauma never really seems to end. 

References: 

Denson, S., & Leyda, J. (2016). Perspectives on post-cinema: An introduction. In S. Denson & J. Leyda (Eds.), Post-cinema: Theorizing 21st-century film (pp. 1–19). REFRAME Books.
Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film Philosophy 14.1, 2010