“What has changed in 25 years is the appearance of the Internet”

The masked killer is back in a 5th film Scream, which hits theaters on Wednesday January 12, with all the survivors of the original cast. A quarter of a century after the release of the first part and its grand prize at the Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival, the images of massacres will certainly no longer have the same impact as when the film’s release was followed by controversy. .

When Scream released in theaters in France in the summer of 1997, the face of star Drew Barrymore occupies the entire poster. She was, at the time, the most famous actress of the cast. “She gets killed from the opening scene, recalls Marie Casabonne, co-author of the book Slashers, devoted precisely to this cinematic sub-genre of horror film. It was a shock to a lot of people who thought we were going to follow her the whole movie. “

This macabre game immediately rose to the rank of phenomenon. “Scream, it was reserved for an adolescent audience. There was this transgressive aspect of watching something that we weren’t necessarily allowed to watch because there were age restrictions “, considers the specialist.

Scream 2 and 3 each achieve more than two million admissions in France. In the lot, there are at least fragile spectators. This news item bears witness to this: a second-grader had killed one of his comrades with knives. Investigators had found a model of the mask used in the film at his home. The trouble then begins for the saga. “25 years ago, ‘Scream‘was part of a world where there was violence on one side and then a peaceful world on the other. Today, there is only one world of violence “, decrypts the sociologist Michel Fize, author of the book I help my teenager to grow up.

At the time, Ségolène Royal, Minister for the Family even ordered an expert report on the influence of violent images on adolescents. Unthinkable today according to Marie Casabonne: “Since time, there has been a wave of very gory and very graphic films. It is true that Game Of Thrones and quite a few other series or films push the boundaries a bit. ” Ségolène Royal will probably not be moved any more. And according to Michel Fize, it is not even this gory overbidding on the screen that is in question. “What has changed in 25 years is the emergence of the Internet”; he analyzes.

“To imagine the worst-case scenarios, you don’t need films as a medium.”

Michel Fize, sociologist

to franceinfo

And if the public can be jaded by the bloody images, it might not be worse. Nevertheless, “for horror movie lovers, [la sortie de Scream 5] remains an event “, considers Marie Casabonne. For Michel Fize, “what makes the interest, it is perhaps on the artistic level”. It is on this plan that one will judge if the 5th film, the first since the death of the director Wes Craven, is or not a success.