Horrific Catharsis
Greek Tragedy in Modern Horror
“Pathos could have its perks!” So says Tatum Riley (played by Rose McGowan), a character in Wes Craven’s 1996 horror film Scream, the first in a tetralogy of slasher films all lauded for their metacommentary on the horror genre. Tatum’s sentiment offers a glimpse at the often darkly comedic nature of the trilogy’s self-awareness, since she is blissfully unaware that she is about to be brutally murdered. She will become one of a number of victims of a twisted killer terrorizing the small town of Woodsboro in pursuit of one young woman, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell).
The films’ metacommentary sets them apart in the world of horror — not only do they focus on and manipulate the standard tropes of modern horror, they also explore their roots in a process that connects them with Greek tragedy. Through formal parallels and direct allusion, the Scream tetralogy positions itself as the inheritor of the Greek tragic tradition.
Throughout the horror genre, recognition scenes abound; violence flows through generations; gore practically bathes the viewers. And when the Scream films, quintessential examples of the modern horror genre, are analyzed next to Greek tragedy, it becomes apparent that horror is not just a form of ancient tragedy — it is the most direct descendant of Greek tragedy in modern cinema.
Although suspense and violence are aspects of nearly all ancient literature, there is no ancient genre specifically dedicated to frightening the audience. Yet tragedy, as famously remarked by Aristotle, is characterized by its interest in the pity and fear of the audience (Poetics 1452a1) — something the genre shares with modern horror.
The opening scene of Scream epitomizes the film’s (and genre’s) use of both emotions. Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is a teenage girl at home alone. She is making popcorn, preparing to watch a movie, when she receives a call from a stranger. The caller terrorizes Casey with psychological games before appearing in person to pursue her throughout and outside her home. Hope appears — the headlights of her parents’ car shine through a distant field as they return home — but is dashed as they find their daughter’s disemboweled corpse already hanging from a tree. Both hallmark elements of tragedy are present in this episode: fear (when the killer, brandishing a large hunting knife, chases Casey) and pity (for Casey’s parents when they discover the mutilated body of their daughter).
Casey Becker’s death and the emotions it elicits has parallels in many ancient Athenian dramas — consider the murder of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the blinding of Oedipus at the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, or the horrific demise of Hippolytus at the end of Euripides’ Hippolytus. In each play, the audience is aware from the start that tragic generic conventions dictate they will be witnesses to some terrible ruin befalling a character — although calling the Greek audience witnesses is somewhat misleading. The most violent portions of Greek tragedy often happen offstage and are later reported in grim detail by a messenger. Tragedy makes up for its lack of graphic displays of violence through its use of the ekkyklema, a mechanism used to wheel dead bodies onto the stage.
The ekkyklema is often used to evoke an emotional reaction from the Chorus, the internal audience of Greek tragedy. But the thrill and shock of seeing the gruesome bodies is clearly also aimed at the theater audience. The sight of Cassandra and Agamemnon’s bodies at the end of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon shocks the Chorus and prompts them to rebel against Clytemnestra, the murderer. The external audience, however, already knows that the characters are dead. The effect the ekkyklema produces for them is revulsion at the butchered bodies.
Sudden scene changes or camera focus in Scream serve a function similar to the ekkyklema. After a victim has been murdered, the corpse is used as a prop for shock by appearing unexpectedly in a different scene, spurring the internal audience to action (usually flight), and repulsing the external audience through its graphic depiction of gore. For example, the external audience sees Tatum Riley get crushed by a garage door while attempting to escape the killer. Her body, however, is left dangling from the (presumably now broken) garage door. Much later in the film, Sidney Prescott is running from the killer. She falls out of a window, and lands just below Tatum’s body. Sidney, thinking herself momentarily safe, opens her eyes to see her deceased friend. We’re treated to a close-up shot of Tatum’s body, showing its dangling bloodied limbs and clearly broken neck — horribile visu.
Echoes of specific tragic type-scenes and performative features pervade modern horror. Every Athenian tragedy has a prologue, choral songs, and episodes (what we might consider “acts”). The prologue is generally used to explain the mythic background of the tale, situating the plot at a fixed setting and point in time and raising themes that will recur throughout the play. But these prologues are often self-contained: the character(s) frequently will not reappear onstage after the scene.
The prologue of Euripides’ Hippolytus is representative of this tragic type-scene. Aphrodite explains the background relevant to the plot (Hippolytus does not sufficiently worship her), lays out the themes of the play (moderation and reverence of the gods), and sets the scene of the play (Troezen, a suburb of Athens). She states in no uncertain terms that Hippolytus will be punished onstage before the play is over. When her speech is finished, she departs from the stage and doesn’t appear again; Hippolytus, the protagonist, enters and the main action of the play begins.
Every Scream film has what amounts to a dramatic prologue before its credits: a self-contained scene that establishes the setting and time and signals the programmatic themes of the film. The prologue of Scream, involving Casey Becker, occurs at her house in Woodsboro, where the rest of the film and a number of its sequels take place. But Casey Becker effectively disappears after the prologue just as Aphrodite does in Hippolytus, mentioned only a handful of times. Her death only gains tangential importance because her killer proceeds to antagonize the film’s true protagonist, Sidney Prescott. Casey’s death has no effect on the course of the plot. Instead, it establishes the audience’s expectations through demonstration of two of the series’ themes: the ringing phone motif and metatheatricality.
The first sound the audience hears in the scene is a phone ringing, a sound that leads directly to the conversation that ends Casey’s murder. The series’ first scene establishes the ringing phone as a harbinger of death; throughout the series, what should be an innocuous sound regularly precedes a ruthless murder. The telephone call becomes such a symbol of terror that by the second Scream, Sidney is reluctant to answer the phone without first looking at her caller ID. By the third, she’s effectively incommunicado. Every ringing phone strikes terror in the audience.
The prologue of Scream 4 is the best illustration of how the tetralogy foreshadows its own metatheatricality. The film opens on two women about to watch a horror movie (just like the external audience is doing). The women lament the state of modern horror, criticizing actual films (like Saw 4) for their overabundance of gore and lack of character development. This metatheatrical discourse (that is, their discussion of the very thing they are playing roles in) illustrates the film’s awareness of itself and of its generic traditions. The self-awareness deepens when this entire scene is revealed to be the prologue of a movie within Scream 4.
After every prologue, the scene abruptly changes to black, the title suddenly appears, the film’s thematic music begins, and credits roll. This transition is redolent of the choral parados (entrance song): both divide the prologue from the main action and feature a sudden visual and aural change. Only after does the main plot begin as we finally (re)encounter our protagonist.
Recognition scenes are a specific type of episode, identified by Aristotle. They are stock scenes where two characters, often relatives in disguise, gradually discover each other’s true identities. At the beginnings of these scenes, the characters are suspicious of one another’s purported identity. They question and demand evidence until they are each forced to recognize that they truly are who they claim to be. At the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus, after being confronted with a litany of evidence, is forced to recognize that his wife, Jocasta, is also his mother. This recognition scene leads directly to the tragic climax of the play: the horrific realization of incest, Jocasta’s suicide, and Oedipus’ self-blinding.
The recognition scene is integral to most modern horror in the climactic moment of disclosure of the antagonist’s identity. Clues are dropped throughout the film — a potentially damning piece of evidence appears, a character acts inappropriately, or characters are suspiciously present (or absent) at notable times. But the final removal of the killer’s mask confirms his or her identity, often a friend or relative of Sidney Prescott. She — and by extension the external audience — is compelled to recognize them for the dual role of friend and killer he or she has been truly playing throughout the film.
One of the most recognizable aspects of the Scream franchise is the “Ghostface” mask — an overly exaggerated version of a human face, inspired by Edvard Munch’s Der Schrei — used in each of the four films. The Ghostface mask clearly indicates the role for each character who wears it: the killer. Masks are also a performative feature of ancient drama. While the specifics of what an Athenian tragic mask looked like and the dramatic function it served is debated, it is possible that dramatic masks were not meant to mimic the human face, but to exaggerate its features to indicate the character’s role in the play.
The similarity between the Ghostface mask and ancient Greek dramatic masks is exploited in Scream 2 during a production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. During a rehearsal, Sidney, playing the role of Cassandra, is performing onstage with the masked Chorus. Amongst the Chorus’ masked faces, Sidney sees the Ghostface mask. However, due to similarly distorted facial features, sizes, and colors, it blends in with the Chorus’ masks. Sidney becomes distressed, so the Chorus surround her and remove their masks. The Ghostface mask is not present, nor is any of them the killer. Sidney is left confused. Was Ghostface there or did she imagine it?
By including a production of Agamemnon in the film, we are compelled to think about the relationship between Aeschylus’ play and the film. Sidney adopts the role of Cassandra not only on the internal stage, but throughout the films. Both try to warn others of their impending doom but go unheeded. Sidney often warns other characters about the danger of the killer, but she is ignored by friends, family, and police, who think she is deluded and seeking attention. Likewise, Cassandra’s multiple warnings about her and Agamemnon’s impending death are misunderstood and ignored by the Chorus.
The conflation of Cassandra and Sidney points toward the conflation of horror and tragedy, as the confusion about the masks serves a higher-level generic purpose. Tragedy is popularly symbolized by the tragic mask — a colorless and distorted face. The Ghostface mask has arguably become a symbol for the horror genre in a similar way, like the iconic masks of Jason or Michael Myers. Scream 2 presents both the tragic and horrific mask together on stage and then minimizes the distinction between the two. Neither the audience nor Sidney can tell which mask is which, and consequently, which genre is which.
The two genres are also similar in their manipulation of mythological frameworks, especially those involving families. The Scream franchise gradually develops the mythology of Sidney’s mother, Maureen Prescott. The first film presents Sidney as the only daughter of a single father; the audience learns eventually that Sidney’s mother had been involved in an extramarital affair and is thereafter a victim of rape and murder. Over the course of the following films, sordid details are added to the basic story (mythological framework) of Maureen Prescott: her accused murderer is exonerated, she is implicated in extramarital affairs with multiple men, her attempt at a career in Hollywood was cut short by an unexpected pregnancy and subsequent surrender of the child.
Much of the drama in the Greek tragedies stems from a particular house, or family, and the cyclical violence that pursues its members. The House of Atreus, for example, of which Agamemnon and his family are members, has constituents that throughout its generations have murdered, committed incest with, and cannibalized each other. The catalyst of all of these crimes is from one man, long ago. Agamemnon’s grandfather Tantalus served human flesh to the gods, a crime so heinous that its miasma, or social/religious pollution, persists even generations later. Miasma of such an order drives much of the action for ancient tragedies. As successive generations assume the task of avenging or paying the penalty for the previous generation’s crimes, they perpetuate an uncontrollable cycle of violence, which can even extend outside of the House.
Maureen Prescott’s infidelity is arguably the catalyst for the series of violent crimes and retributions that the whole series contains. Her infidelity is the reason she is murdered and, in Scream, leads to attempts on her daughter’s life by the same killers. In Scream 2, the wronged wife of one of Maureen’s lovers attempts to avenge herself on Sidney. Scream 3 involves the attempts on Sidney’s life by her surrendered half-brother. In Scream 4, the murderer is Sidney’s maternal cousin.
The miasma of the House of Prescott extends throughout the films to taint the whole town of Woodsboro, and to the guest-friends (xenoi, the Greek term for a social contract of friendship) with whom Sidney surrounds herself: friends, roommates, boyfriends, and colleagues. These external players become victims in the stead of any blood relatives; in the final film, the violence extends into the next generation. Just as Sidney inherited the guilt of her mother and became a surrogate victim, the new generation inherits guilt and ardor for revenge. The violence doesn’t dissipate — it continues to affect characters, communities, and generations.
Both the structural and the thematic similarities between tragedy and horror suggest that horror films are inheritors of the tragic tradition. The Scream franchise reveals its interest in this inheritance through its occasional direct references to the classical tradition and its clear familiarity with the tropes of the tragic genre. The films present themselves, and the genre of horror along with them, as descendants of tragedy. We might even consider them the most closely related descendent of tragedy of modern cinema.
The pervasive violence and gore in modern horror films are considered defining trademarks of the genre. But that focus is in no way unique to horror, or modernity. As modern readers of Classics, we perhaps underemphasize or underplay the horrific nature of tragedies — not just their plots, but their vivid descriptions of violence: a dramatic aspect that modern horror shifts to the forefront. Most extant tragedies are horrific to an almost traumatizing degree.
Viewing modern horror as tragedy indicates that we should perhaps have a greater sensitivity to the tragic potentiality in each death: each death is capable of the production of further deaths, continuing or creating a cycle of violence. This is the case with Scream, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Saw — almost any modern horror film.
The proliferation of sequels within this genre certainly points to its commercialization: why not double (or triple, or quadruple, etc.) down on a successful film? Sequels, however, necessitate continuity, which is easily done through the reappearance of characters within the same House, or others avenging themselves on the House. Consequently, as the number of sequels grows, the mythology (and, necessarily, the violence) expand as well. Horror is compelled to provide us with developing mythologies, as twisted, disturbing, frightening, and pitiable as any Athenian tragedy.
As Classicists, the texts we encounter — including all of the tragedies we refer to above — are fraught with millennia of academic discussion and debate. Their intellectual history imbues them with a sense of sanctity; nineteenth century translators and uncomfortable schoolteachers have sanitized their grotesque features. With all this cultural baggage, it’s easy to forget these plays were originally written, at least in part, as pieces for mass consumption and entertainment that do not avoid the more sordid aspects of life and death.
What if we read these texts with an emphasis on their less intellectually refined successors? What if, instead of viewing them alongside Renaissance drama (too often considered the only true heir of the classical tragic tradition), we analyze them next to modern horror, a genre that clearly shares a number of their formal and thematic concerns? Searching for these answers may reshape how we view ancient tragedy in the modern age.
E.D. Adams and T.J. Bolt are graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. Adams received her B.A. from Scripps College and M.A. from University of Kansas. Bolt received his B.A. from Lafayette College and M.Phil. from the University of Oxford. While they’re not slogging through coursework, they like to find unusual ways to connect the ancient and modern worlds.
