Ghostface Needs a Hug – Self-care and the Return of the Repressed in Scream (2022)

Abstract

How does the combination of remake and sequel (requel) affect narrations of trauma and grief in the 2022 movie Scream? The film’s positioning as an inter-generational transition with the goal of targeting new horror audiences highlights the need for developing complex and yet gripping story arcs in a media climate marked by serialization. In my analysis, I examine how the 2022 instalment revolves around explorations of an unresolved past, which re-erupts in violent ways. In particular, I focus on the movie’s investment in a modified cyclical narrative, which offers detailed insights into how the requel formula builds on the engagement with traumatic memory and combines it with strategies aimed at reviewing and reframing the past. Robin Wood’s concept of the “return of the repressed” offers key anchoring points for this analysis through its focus on the mutually reinforcing dynamic between social oppression and deadly energy. By highlighting the personal dramas visited upon the key protagonist of the film, Sam Carpenter, I embed her struggles with the past in a broader societal context, showcasing how engaging traumatic memory is also nested within a larger communal consciousness. The strategies employed by the protagonist connect with the requel format in significant ways, as they offer avenues for modulating and emulating the past. Through this analysis, it is shown that the repressed can itself be channeled toward self-affirming strategies, which revolve around the renegotiation of gendered concepts of authority and agency. A further takeaway are the limitations of neoliberal self-care, which is shown to be an inadequate approach in the film, as the monstrous resides in the communal and cannot be fully evaded through strategies aimed at individualization.