Professor Elam

Thursday April 13, 2011

It's been 10 years since Scream III. The third installment cost $40m but grossed 4x that at $160M. Scream I was made for a mere $15 M and grossed $160M, Scream II cost more and only did $101M. 

The timing for Scream III, released in 2000,  was perfect, the markets topped and then headed down destroying the this time it's different theme of the dot.com era. When the social mood turns negative, an outlet for digesting horror movies is created. There has been no lack of horror grist the last ten years  as vampires have become mainstream in Twilight and True Blood, both books and or movies and tv series. 

Here are Director Wes Craven's thoughts on Scream IV

But I think it's just the perfect time to turn around and look at the decade of the 21st century

That is certainly an interesting perspective on a slasher movie set  in a small California town!  In other words Craven does not see this as a mere slasher movie but a statement on the last century. Note he is not re-making The Sound of Music but a horror movie. Craven's view then of the last century would be one of horror not joy.  One reviewer sums it up this way.

There is a dark nihilism here that seems to appeal to Scream fans. No one deserves to die but so many do

What is happening is that the movie is a visual echo of what is happening in the world. The people dying in the revolts around the world do not deserve to die either, but they are.  Consider the conclusion of the review in today's SA Express News.

Scream 4 provides exactly what the audiences expect, one victim after another being slashed, skewered, stabbed, gutted, and sliced, with everyone in on the joke. Maybe that's your idea of a good time. 

While the reviewer does not realize the irony yes indeed that is the idea of the viewers, why else are they paying to see the show. Dark moods generate the desire for dark entertainment. This is why horror movies became so mainstream in the 1930s with Frankenstein, Dracula, and later Wolfman entertaining depressed masses as never before. 

Now that the markets are back up, every fund manger is bullish, the only way the markets have left go is down, don't believe me, what happened after Scream 3?  Protests are on full boil from Wisconsin to Greece to Libya to China. Yesterday the WSJ described the President's budget speech as

the most dishonest in decades. 

I cannot ever recall harsher words in a WSJ lead editorial. But the President was equally harsh, that is the whole point.  This collision of negative mood along irrational enthusiasm for markets  will  result in the markets turning down. A few posts back we linked Shiller's trailing P/E model which shows the same optimism which existed in 1929, 1966, 2000 and 2007. Here we go again.