Intertextuality in the Scream trilogy

ream
Tina Hansen

This article is based upon a longer exam paper I did on the intertextuality and
metafictionality in the Scream trilogy. I have boiled my paper down considerably
and only maintained brief presentations of the theories of Umberto Eco and Gerard
Genette concerning the aspect of intertextuality. I have left out any theoretical
discussions as well as discussions about the functional modes of intertextuality, and
only presented the mode relevant to an intertextual analysis of the Scream trilogy.
The analysis in this article takes practically the same form as it does in my original
paper, as this is the most essential part of any paper or article.

Intertextuality
Prior to presenting the intertextual theories of Umberto Eco and Gerard Genette, I
find it important to present the reader with a brief quotation that illustrates what
intertextuality is, and how important it is not only to literature but to non-literary
works as well,
“Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists
as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now
call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network
of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is
to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between
texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the
other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text
into a network of textual relations.”1
This quotation illustrates well the function of intertextuality in the Scream trilogy, as
well as it points to the fact that it is not only to literature that theories of intertextuality
prove relevant and important. Thus, it is a broad concept of ‘text’ and ‘work’ that is
used in this article, a concept that covers everything produced, a text can as such
both be a literary work and it can be a media production, such as for example a
movie.
I will begin this article with a presentation of Eco’s definition of intertextuality,
followed by a presentation of Genette’s definition of hypertextuality. Throughout
both theoretic presentations I will analyze sequences from the Scream trilogy in
order to illustrate the arguments. I will then proceed to a brief comparison of the

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theories and in this segment I will also offer the final categories of intertextuality to
be used in the following segment, which is a continuation of the analysis of the
Scream trilogy in terms of its intertextual and metafictional features. Lastly, I will
briefly collect the conclusions made through the article in an over-all summary.
First, a presentation of Umberto Eco’s theory of intertextuality.

Umberto Eco’s Intertextuality

Eco’s
Umberto Eco has in different articles written about the nature and functions of
intertextuality in movies. In this article it will be his thoughts in the paper “Innova-
tion and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics” that will be
presented. In this article Eco begins his discussion of repetition and iteration in the
postmodern era by saying,
“I would like to consider now the case of an historical period (our own) for
which iteration and repetition seem to dominate the whole world of artistic
creativity, and in which it is difficult to distinguish between the repetition of the
media and the repetition of the so-called major arts. In this period one is facing
the discussion of a new theory of art, one that I would label post-modern
aesthetics, which is revisiting the very concepts of repetition and iteration un-
der a different profile.”2
In his definition of this new postmodern aesthetics Eco embarks on explaining the
way iteration and repetition are displayed, and he does so by presenting five categories
into which they fit. It is, in the present discussion, only two of the categories that
prove relevant, so therefore I have left out the remaining three in the outline presented
below,3

Figure I:

Categories Definition

The Retake This is the type of production which reuses previously

used characters from a successful story and explains what
happened to them after the end of the first story

Intertextual Dialogue Intertextual Dialogue is defined as “the phenomenon by

which a given text echoes previous texts”4

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The retake applies to the Scream trilogy in that Scream 2 and Scream 3 both reuses
characters from previous successful movie/s, only with the exclusion of those
characters that were killed in the previous movie/s. This category will not be explored
any further as it does not seem to have relevance to the topic of intertextuality, and
therefore the following will examine the category of intertextual dialogue according
to Eco’s presentation of it. Eco emphasizes that there are many types of intertextual
dialogue, most of which he is not interested in and therefore does not exemplify.5
Therefore the focus will now turn to the explicit and recognizable intertextual
quotations as Eco terms them.6
Eco presents the terminology ‘topos’, which refers to intertextual expectations
that the viewer can have. Topos refers to expectations based on previous genre-
knowledge that a viewer may have of character, situation, event, plot, etc. An example
of a topos in relation to the Scream trilogy, as part of the horror movie genre, would
be when Stuart, in one of the final scenes of Scream, leaves the party to get beer
saying “I’ll be right back”. This statement, moreover, constitutes what Eco calls
‘the ironic quotation of the commonplace’ – the viewer, through his/her intertextual
encyclopedia, recognizes the topos and does not expect to see Stuart alive again. In
this incident, however, the viewer is helped along in recognizing the topos, and
thereby activating his/her intertextual encyclopedia, because prior to Stuart’s rem-
ark Randy has enlightened the crowd at the party about topoi of the horror movie
genre. But as is also evident in this scene from Scream the topos does not always
hold, the movie can choose to break the topos. This topos is broken when Stuart
returns safe and sound.
Eco then advances to talk of ‘intertextual knowledge’, which is the reader’s ability
to recognize direct references to other movies.7 An example of the necessity of
intertextual knowledge is in Scream 3, where one of the actors in the movie production
of Stab 3 is rehearsing her lines over the phone with who she believes to be the
director. She is complaining about her role and the fact that it has all been seen
before in other scary movies, and she then mentions the, to her recollection, most
obvious example of where it has been seen before and says “Vertigo, hello”. The
viewer possessing intertextual knowledge will immediately recognize this naming
of the Hitchcock movie as the wrong movie, and smile realizing that, because it is a
shower scene she is discussing, she instead is referring to Psycho also by Hitchcock.
The fourth category is that of ‘extratextual quotations’, which Eco defines as the
viewer’s knowledge of elements external to the movie. By this is meant the necessity
for the viewer to hold knowledge of general information conveyed by other media.8
This is where the borderlines between the different types of intertextual dialogue
begin to crumble making the categories difficult to identify as separate entities. Eco

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also admits this by suggesting a broadened intertextuality concept embracing

everything in the text that refers to anything outside the text, whether it be to other
texts, genres, characters, situations, events, media etc.9 With this Eco omits using
the term ‘intertextual dialogue’ as the main terminology containing all the sub-
categories, and simply replaces it with ‘intertextuality’.
The last category Eco introduces he does not offer a name to, he merely defines
it as a work that speaks of its own structures and of the way it was made. He ascribes
the function of self-irony to this practice, as the work has an ironic stance to its own
production, and this is the focal point of this type of movie.10 Nevertheless, his
description of this category of intertextuality appears to be the same description that
the writer, Patricia Waugh, ascribes to the literary form of ‘metafiction’ in her book
Metafiction. The brief version of the definition offered by Waugh to the term is,
“Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions
about the relationship between fiction and reality. […] What connects not only
these quotations but also all of the very different writers whom one could refer
to as broadly ‘metafictional’, is that they all explore a theory of fiction through
the practice of writing fiction.”11
In this connection Scream 3 is interesting as it, among other things, is about the
production of the movie Stab 3, which again of course is based on the events in the
Scream movies. As such it seems that there is a terminology from the field of literary
studies that can be applied to what Eco is talking about in relation to mass media
productions, namely that of ‘metafiction’. The argument that the Scream trilogy is a
metafictive movie production will be presented and illustrated later.
In summing up what has been presented as a definition of Eco’s account of inter-
textuality, it appears possible to collect all the above categories under three headings,
namely ‘intertextual references to other texts’, ‘extratextual references to elements
outside the text’, and ‘metatextual references to the texts own textuality’.
Now a move from Eco and his definitions of intertextuality to another theorist in
this field, Gerard Genette, and what he has to say about intertextuality.

Gerard Genette’s Intertextuality

Genette’s
Gerard Genette has written several critical books about the practice of reading lite-
rature and about the relationship between literature and critique.12 In this article it is
his book Palimpsests, published in 1982 and translated into English in 1997, which
will be in focus. Palimpsests is a massive work about, what Genette terms, trans-
textuality,
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“By architextuality I mean the entire set of general or transcendent categories –

types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges
each singular text. Today I prefer to say, more sweepingly, that the subject of
poetics is transtextuality, or the textual transcendence of the text, which I have
already defined roughly as “all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious
or concealed, with other texts.””13
According to Genette transtextuality covers all aspects of a particular text. In order
to illustrate this point and clear it up somewhat, Genette proceeds to present four
subcategories of transtextuality as he defines them. With this categorization the
subject of this article, ‘intertextuality’, becomes quite interesting because Genette
presents this aspect of textuality as merely one narrowly defined category of elements
belonging to the umbrella terminology of transtextuality. How this will influence the
remaining part of this article, as well as the definition Eco has given of intertextuality,
will be explored after the presentation of the subcategories in Genette’s terminology
of transtextuality.
The first subcategory is termed ‘intertextuality’, which Genette defines as the
presence of a text within another text. He lists three types of intertextual elements,
namely ‘quoting’, ‘plagiarism’, and ‘allusion’. According to Genette’s definition of
quotation and plagiarism only the use of quotation marks distinguish the two forms.14
Especially in analyzing movies identifying the two forms as different types of
intertextuality becomes practically impossible, as quotation marks are obviously
not visible in screenings. Therefore, in the scene in Scream where teenagers are
gathered in the video shop discussing the possible identity of the murderer, and
where the movie Frankenstein is playing in the background on a TV, it is hard to
determine whether the presence of the Frankenstein movie should be analyzed as
an element of quotation or of plagiarism. As will be evident later this is not the only
instance of direct quotation or plagiarism in the trilogy.
The third form of intertextuality is that of allusion, which Genette describes as,
“[…] allusion: that is, an enunciation whose full meaning presupposes the per-
ception of a relationship between it and another text, to which it necessarily
refers by some inflections that would otherwise remain unintelligible.”15
Then the opening scene in Scream 2 where a crowd of young people is gathered in
a movie theatre to watch the premier of Stab, and where a young girl ends up being
killed in front of the audience, would constitute such an allusion according to the
definition above. This scene most surely refers to the movie Scream where teen-
agers were killed in the same manner the young girl is, and without knowing about
this relationship the viewer will not grasp the absurdity of this scene.
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The next element Genette presents is that of ‘paratextuality’, which are matters
in the text important to its reception with an audience. Paratextual elements are
matters such as: titles, subtitles, intertitles, prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords,
epigraphs, illustrations, covers16, but it also includes things such as: mentioning of
the text in the media (TV, newspapers, magazines etc), on posters, in reviews, and
in dossiers published in connection with the text itself. An interesting example in
this connection is the title of the Scream trilogy – this could be meant as a referent
to the painting by Edward Munch entitled The Scream, as the mask worn by the
killer most certainly resembles the contorted face in the painting.17
The third element in Genette’s outline is a brief presentation of what he calls
‘metatextuality’. He defines it as a form of commentary linking one text to another
without necessarily citing it.18 According to this definition the scene in Scream,
filmed at the school, showing the janitor wearing a green and red striped sweater
and an old hat would qualify as a metatextual element, in that the janitor’s clothes
are the same as those worn by Freddy Krueger in the movies A Nightmare on Elm
Street. Even more interesting is the fact that Wes Craven has directed both the
Scream trilogy and A Nightmare on Elm Street,19 and the alert viewer will recognize
Wes Craven in the role of the janitor. Genette does not link the term metatextuality
to the literary concept of metafiction, the description applied to self-conscious fiction,
and therefore the two terms should not be confused here.
The last element, number four in the outline, is that of ‘hypertextuality’, which
Genette defines,
“By hypertextuality I mean any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call
the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon
which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary.”20
When reading Palimpsests it becomes apparent how similar Genette’s descriptions
of the functions of hypertextuality resemble his previous definition of transtextuality,
and the overall broader definition of intertextuality as argued by Eco.21 So the outcome
appears to be that it could be argued that Genette’s definition of hypertextuality
amounts to a return to his definition of transtextuality; and with the broad definition
of what constitutes hypertextuality it may be suggested that what Genette has done
is replace the terminology of transtextuality with the terminology of hypertextuality.
Furthermore, it could be argued that the prior and broad definition of intertextuality,
as presented in this article by Eco, covers the same as Genette’s term of hyper-
textuality, and as such it now seems possible to present the idea that the broad
definition of intertextuality constitutes the same as Genette’s term of hypertextuality.
With the blurring of the differences between Eco’s broad definition of intertextuality
and Genette’s definition of hypertextuality it now seems appropriate to turn to what
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the functions of intertextuality/hypertextuality in a work could be. Genette presents

a variety of hypertextual/intertextual functions, but in this article it is only the mode
of ‘pastiche’ that will be presented, as this is the function the intertextuality/
hypertextuality in the Scream trilogy seems to have. Genette defines ‘pastiche’ as
follows: “Pastiche is a playful imitation of the hypotext, which has the primary
function of pure entertainment”. 22 The references in the Scream trilogy to the different
hypotexts seem to be playful and entertaining, which is exactly what categorizes the
mode of pastiche. The purpose of references in the movies and their function as
pastiches will be the topic of the following segment, where a further analysis of
selected intertextual/hypertextual elements in the trilogy will be presented.
Before this, however, the following will constitute a comparison of the theories
of intertextuality and hypertextuality as presented by Eco and Genette, and a clea-
ring up of terminologies for the remaining of this paper.

Combination of Eco’s and Genette’

Eco’s s Theories
Genette’s
So far both Eco’s and Genette’s versions of what intertextuality is, how it should be
categorized, and how it should be termed, have been presented. What I suggest to
do now is collect all the terminologies under four large headings, and from that
conclude that the definitions, offered by the theoreticians, are not as different as
they appear to suggest. I will, once again, make use of a figure as a means of collecting
all the categories under the large headings,

Figure II:

Headings/Groupings
Genre-related references
References to other texts/-
movies
References to other forms
of media
References to own textuality “Metafiction” (E)
Categories
The ironic quotation of the commonplace (E) 23
Genre-embedding (E)
Intertextual knowledge (E)
Intertextuality (G) 24
Metatextuality (G)
Paratextuality (G)
Hypertextuality (G)
Extratextual quotations (E)
Paratextuality (G)

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The reason why I have not used more space outlining the differences in Eco’s and
Genette’s definitions is that I do not find the theories very different, except for the
terminologies. Therefore, the further analysis will be according to the four new
groupings uniting both theoreticians’ theories.
I will, in the remaining of this article, use the terminology ‘intertextuality’ as
opposed to ‘hypertextuality’ to illustrate the categories above. I will do this due to
my arguments presented earlier regarding Genette’s transtextuality/hypertextuality,
where I argued that hypertextuality amounts to the same as intertextuality, and since
intertextuality is the older of the two terminologies,25 I will stick with that.
In the next segment more scenes selected from the Scream trilogy will be analyzed
in terms of their intertextual value and functions.

The Intertextual S C R E A M
If interested in the study of intertextuality the Scream trilogy is surely a treat. All
four groupings of different types of intertextual references, as presented above, can
be located in the trilogy. Throughout the presentations of the theories sequences
from the movies have been selected to illustrate the different categories argued by
either Eco or Genette. In the light of these brief analyses of various sequences in the
theory chapters, this chapter will function as a further exploration into the
intertextuality of the Scream trilogy. Due to the spatial limitations of this article and
out of consideration to the reader, I will not pretend to undertake every intertextual
element I have located throughout the trilogy, but limit my examinations to selected
scenes or elements that constitute the different kinds of intertextuality. Lastly, I will
collect the analyzed scenes and the trilogy as a whole and fit it into the final category
of metafictionality; but this will be explained and explored last in this segment. As
a final remark, I will, in this segment, attempt to pay equal value to the three movies,
so that segments from all three movies will be analyzed.

Genre-Related Categories
According to figure II above, I will begin by examining the grouping of genre-
related references. Early in Scream the viewer is presented with this type of
intertextuality, as the initial scene is an act in which a young girl is harassed over the
phone by a man, who will only save her and her boyfriend’s lives if she knows the
right answer to his scary-movie trivia questions. This initial scene sets the mood for
and functions as a mise-en-abyme to the rest of the movie.
In one of the later scenes, the female protagonist Sidney, is asked why she does
not like scary movies and the dialogue continues,

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“Sidney: What’s the point? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking a
big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she
should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.
Man: Are you alone in the house?
Sidney: That’s so unoriginal. You disappoint me Randy.”26
In these lines Sidney is obviously referring to her previous experiences with these
types of movies, and is as such referring to genre topoi more than to one movie in
particular. She has recognized the man on the phone’s urge to act out scenarios from
the genre, and therefore decides to play along, mostly because she, at this early
stage, believes that it is her friend Randy who is joking her around. The pastiche to
the horror genre is created when Sidney, moments later, is chased by the killer in her
home and she ends up running up the stairs, when she probably should “have gone
out the front door”. In these scenes the topos, however, is broken because, despite
the fact that Sidney has just proclaimed that girls in scary movies who act according
to her own stereotyping per definition get killed, she survives this incident. The
humorous aspect is created when it remains up to the viewer to decide what saved
Sidney from her definite destiny, whether it was her lack in bust or her inability to
act, or simply because she, as opposed to the man on the phone, is original in her
thinking!
The topos described by Sidney, and subsequently broken, does prove its right in
Scream 2, where the first two female murder victims both are alone in their homes
at the time of the initial attack, and they both run up the stairs and end up dead due
to their wrong judgments of what to do. This is one incident of many in the trilogy
where topoi from the genre are presented in order to be either broken or followed
through.
The next examples I wish to analyze are sequences in which Randy is collaborating
years of expertise in the scary-movie field in order to help himself and his friends
survive and catch the killer. What is interesting in this connection is that these ‘rules’,
which function as genre topoi, become lines to be followed particularly in the plot
of Scream 2 and Scream 3, as the rules/topoi to survive presented in Scream come
too late for some of the characters involved. The features that categorize this as a
pastiche of the horror-movie genre are the spelling out of how scary movies follow
a particular pattern, resulting in the viewer finding him-/herself occupied with
checking whether these topoi hold or are broken. The topoi presented in Scream are
broken, as Sidney is no longer a virgin at the end of the movie where she overcomes
and kills the killer, and in Scream 3 the topos of the killer being superhuman is first
spelled out only then to be broken. The killer proves to be very hard to destroy, and

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he proclaims himself to be superhuman stating that they cannot kill him, but Dewey
does so by shooting him in the head. Moreover, the topos that “some of you won’t
make it” is also broken, as Dewey, Gale, and Sidney are those present at the scree-
ning of the videotape, and they all come out of the trilogy alive.

References to Other Texts/Movies

Texts/Movies
The next grouping in figure II is that of references to other texts/movies. The first
example I wish to present is a very direct reference to another movie, namely the
screening of Halloween in Scream. During the final party scenes in Scream the
movie Halloween, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is watched on video. In many of the
subsequent scenes in Scream, the story line follows that of Halloween as it plays on
the TV. At one point Randy is alone in the room watching the movie intensely and
shouting to Curtis that she has to “look behind” her in order to escape the killer,
Michael Myers. The irony is, first, when the Scream killer appears behind Randy,
while he is shouting at Curtis to look behind herself, and, second, 30 seconds later
when, Sidney and Gale’s camera man are watching a monitor in the press van showing
Randy shouting at Curtis to look behind her, they see the killer sneaking up behind
Randy. They both start shouting at the monitor for Randy to look behind him, the
irony is that all parties are shouting for someone else to do something that they
should be doing themselves, and as a result of not listening to one’s own advice, the
camera man ends up dead. Furthermore, the irony is that everyone knows that it
makes no difference shouting at a TV – the movie has already been made, besides,
the camera in the van has a 30 second delay and therefore the scene is over and
cannot be altered even if it did make a difference shouting at a TV screen. So this
not only qualifies as a genre pastiche, it also forms a pastiche of the audience watching
scary-movies and their reactions to watching them.
The next matter, with which I wish to establish references to other texts/movies,
is name use. Throughout the trilogy there is a play of names that, when analyzing
intertextuality, become apparent. In Scream Tatum and Sidney are sitting on Tatum’s
porch talking about the possibility that Cotton Weary could be innocent,
“Sidney: If I was wrong about Cotton Weary, then the killer’s still out there.
Tatum: Don’t go there Sid. You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter
flick. Don’t freak yourself out – we’ve got a long night ahead of us. Let’s shake
it.”
Here the pastiche is to the two moviemakers Wes Craven and John Carpenter, who
both are directors in the horror-movie genre. John Carpenter is the director of the

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before-mentioned Halloween, and Wes Craven is the director of the present trilogy.
The pun played on these two people is funny both because it creates an ironic
distance to the horror genre, and because it puts on the same footing many of the
movies created in this genre, as being the same. Not even the girls in one of the
movies can tell the movies apart, they may as well star in one as the other movie in
this genre. So self-ironic reflections do not lack in the intertextual references of the
trilogy, neither does a healthy distance to the genre, which makes the pastiches in
this trilogy so interesting and entertaining for the viewer.
Above is a joke played on two directors of horror movies, but no one in the media
business should feel safe, no matter how far their career may be from the horror
genre,
“Sidney: God look at this place, it’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Dewey: Hey, I saw that movie. True story, ‘bout some killer in Texas.
Tatum: Hey, Sid. Just think, if they make a movie about you, who’s gonna play
you?
Sidney: I shudder to think… [interrupted by Dewey]
Dewey: I see you as a young Meg Ryan myself.
Sidney: Thanks Dewey. But with my luck they’d cast Tori Spelling.”
The remark in Scream about the unfortunate Sidney being portrayed by Tori Spelling,
known for her role as the innocent Donna in the TV series Beverly Hills 90210, is in
itself amusing, but it is even more so when in Scream 2, there is an interview with
the character Sidney from the movie Stab and it is Tori Spelling being interviewed.
So the pastiches in the trilogy do not only play on characters and actors within the
horror genre, but also on actors known from other genres.
There are many more examples of pastiches drawn from persons or characters
known in other types of media productions. As a last example in connection with
references to other texts/movies, I want to mention that all the actors in Stab 3, in
Scream 3, cast as characters from the Scream trilogy have names that refer to other
actors/actresses or famous people as illustrated in figure III.
Figure III:

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Portrayed character’s name Name of the actor/actress Names likely referred to

Sidney Angelina Tyler Angelina Jolie and Liv Tyler
Gale Jennifer Jolie Jennifer Aniston and Ange-
lina Jolie
Dewey Tom Prinze Tom Cruise and Freddie
Prinze Jr.
Ricky (Randy) Tyson Fox Mike Tyson and Michael J.
Fox

The element of names referring to real persons, and there are so many more than
those I have presented so far, appears to be one of the most elaborate means of
intertextual reference. This makes the trilogy a pastiche of, not just the horror genre,
but of the entire movie industry and of being famous in the world today. The name
cross-referencing could be argued to function as a way for the trilogy to imitate, not
only the horror-movie making, but to expand this imitation to the entire spectra of
movie-making, thereby creating a general pastiche of Hollywood as the movie Mecca
of the world. Not to mention the fact that the name-play entertains the alert viewer
immensely.

References to Other Forms of Media

The third grouping in figure II is that of references to other forms of media. The first
examples are especially amusing seen in the light of the discussion above, as they
both involve the actress Jennifer Aniston. In Scream 2 Gale’s poor mood is
commented on, and the reply is that it has been like that ever since those nude
pictures on the Internet. To this argument Gale states “it was just my head, it was
Jennifer Aniston’s body”, which offers a response to the pictures, in the real world,
that were published on the internet claiming to be of Courteney Cox, but which
turned out to be fakes, as it indeed was someone else’s body and only her head.
With a comment like this the use of the internet is also brought into the world of
pastiches making up the trilogy, and, moreover, it could be argued that it has the
function of warning the viewers that not everything that they read and see can or
should be trusted.
In Scream 3 we again indirectly have a reference to Jennifer Aniston,

“Actress Gale: You know I’m sorry things didn’t work out on ‘60 minutes
2’, but ‘Total Entertainment’ is a pretty good fall back.

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Gale: Thank you, I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Brad Pitt, but being
single that’s a pretty good fall back.”

As evident in figure III Actress Gale’s name in Scream 3 is Jennifer Jolie, so it

seems fair to suggest that this quotation again is a reference to Jennifer Aniston,
who is known as Brad Pitt’s better half. At the time of Scream 3 it was only through
the tabloids that the world knew of the relationship between the two stars, and as
such the tabloid industry has been included in the pastiches of the trilogy.
The references to Jennifer Aniston could also be meant as references to the TV
series Friends, which co-stars her and Courteney Cox as best friends, and to sug-
gest that the Jennifer in Scream 3 and Gale should be best friends would be quite
ironic as the bitter exchange of words above illustrates. Thereby not only a referent
to another media production but also a play with words, which makes the bitter tone
between the two Gales much more effective. As mentioned, many more people and
characters are mentioned by name or reference throughout the trilogy, and so are
other types of media and media people such as the news programs ‘20/20’ and
‘Dayline’, news readers Diane Sawyer and Conny Chung, and talk-show hosts Maury
Povich and Ricky Lake. All of these names and media-related matters assist in
making the Scream trilogy succeed as a great pastiche of the entire media world and
its productions.
As mentioned above, I will conclude this segment by arguing that all the intertextual
elements presented throughout this article, and all the remaining unmentioned
intertextual references present in the trilogy, favor the contention that the trilogy is
highly metafictional. As Genette does not include the element of metafiction in his
presentation of hypertextuality, it is Eco’s definition of metatextuality aided by
Waugh’s definition that will provide the background for the following.

The Metafictive S C R E A M(s)

Metafictionality has been defined as a work’s reference to its own structures and
the way it was made, and, as I have highlighted throughout this article, the Scream
trilogy is highly intertextual and as such unusually aware of its own production. I
believe, when a work is intertextual to the degree that the trilogy is, it is in itself
proof that it is metafictional. This is so because when a work is intertextual it dis-
plays awareness of the productions of other texts, and thereby of its own status as a
fictive work.
The Scream trilogy’s metafictive status is particularly obvious in its highlighting
and exposing of topoi belonging to the horror genre, and in the production of the

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Stab movies, which are based on the events in the Scream movies. In order to
explore and verbally present the topoi of the movies’ genre the movies will have to
be aware of their own textuality as movies. This is further displayed in both Scream
2 and Scream 3 where characters meet or are introduced to other characters supposed
to portray them in a movie based on their lives. How this works is illustrated in the
example above where Gale has just met Jennifer, who plays the part of Gale in Stab
3. These meetings between the characters in Scream and the characters portraying
their characters in Stab are quite humorous at times, as the barrier between what is
movie production and what, supposedly, is not is totally turned up-side down. You
have the characters in the Stab production portraying characters from the Scream
trilogy telling these characters how and what their characters are according to their
portrayal of them. Confused yet? I hold that in order to make a movie production so
aware of its characters and how they act, or should act depending on who is acting
the part, the movie will necessarily have to be aware of its own status as a fictional
movie production.
In Scream the movie freak Billy presents further evidence of the trilogy as a
highly metafictive production,

“Billy: […] It’s like Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs when she
kept having flashbacks of her dead father.
Sidney: But this is life. This isn’t a movie.
Billy: Sure it is Sid. It’s all a movie. Life’s one great big movie. Only you
can’t pick your genre.
[…]
Sidney: Why can’t I be a Meg Ryan movie?”

In the last sentence in this quotation Sidney also agrees to the fact that it is a movie
after it has been confirmed that she cannot pick her own genre – she has already
stated earlier in the movie that she does not like scary movies, in fact she finds them
insulting, and as such she probably does not want to be in one.
I believe that a movie so aware of other media and media productions, which it
refers to so frequently in order to produce the pastiche that it is, has to be metafictional.
I believe that in order to be a pastiche, a work has to be metafictional because
pastiche by definition is an imitation of other works, and as such it will necessarily
display its own fictionality and means of production. Pastiche in the form of such a
quantity of intertextual references as in the Scream trilogy, I find to equal meta-
fictionality, and I think the analyses throughout this articles build to illustrate this
argument of the close relationship between intertextuality and metafictionality.

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I will now collect the conclusions reached throughout this article in the overall
summary presented below.

Summary
In this article I set out to explore the intertextuality and subsequently metafictionality
of the Scream trilogy. In order to do this, I first presented Eco’s and Genette’s
theories of intertextuality. During my presentation of these theories I analyzed
sequences from the Scream trilogy in order to illustrate the various categories within
the theories. The reason why I chose to begin my analysis of the trilogy in the
presentations of the theories was that I found it more relevant to exemplify the
different categories with examples relevant to this article, rather than to use the
examples offered by the theorists. During the presentation of the theories I found
them not to be particularly different, which is why I decided to show the similarities,
and against that background develop four new groupings that embraced all the various
categories and arguments offered by Eco and Genette.
It was according to these groupings that I continued my analysis of intertextual
and metafictive features in the further analysis of the trilogy. In this continued analysis
I argued that the Scream trilogy is a highly intertextual one, which uses these
intertextual references to create pastiches of not only the horror genre, but of the
entire media world and of being a famous person today. This creation of pastiches I
have argued to be proof of the trilogy’s metafictive nature, as it seems that in order
to be intertextual to the level that this trilogy is, and to create pastiches to practically
everything in the media, a movie, or movie-collection, will have to be unusually
aware of its own status as a fictive creation.

Notes
1
Allen, Graham Intertextuality, Routledge London, England, 2000, p. 1 ll. 12-21
2
Eco, Umberto ”Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics”, Capozzi,
Rocco Reading Umberto Eco – An Anthology, Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 18 ll. 8-14
3
The figure is a brief summary of the pp. 19-21 in Eco, 1997
4
Eco, 1997, p. 21
5
Eco, 1997, p. 21
6
Eco, 1997, p. 22
7
Eco, 1997, p. 23
8
Eco, 1997, p. 23-24
9
Eco, 1997, p. 23-24
10
Eco, 1997, p. 24
11
Currie, Mark Metafiction, Longman Group limited, Essex, England, 1995, p.40 ll. 25-28 & ll. 36-39
12
Genette, Gerard Paratexts, thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1997, back co-
ver & p. xii-xiii

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13
Genette, Gerard Palimpsests – Literature in the Second Degree, University of Nebraska Press, 1997,
p. 1 ll. 9-15
14
Genette, 1997, p. 1-2
15
Genette, 1997, p. 2 ll. 6-9
16
Genette, 1997, p. 3
17
Haastrup, Helle Kannik ”Polyfone film” artikel i Kosmorama nr. 221, sommer 1998
18
Genette, 1997, p. 4
19
Robb, Brian J. Screams and Nightmares, the films of Wes Craven, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, N.
Y. 1998, p. 61
20
Genette, 1997, p. 5 ll. 6-9
21
When Eco is mentioned in this chapter as the representative of the broad definition of intertextuality it
is only to refer to what has been presented as Eco’s theory of intertextuality in the previous segment.
22
Genette, 1997, p. 85
23
(E) = Eco’s terminology
24
(G) = Genette’s terminology
25
Allen, Graham Intertextuality, Routledge, London, England, 2000, p. 3 & 11
26
Throughout this article and particularly in this segment I will not specify the various quotations from
the movies any further than mentioning which movie in the trilogy the quotations are from. This is due
to the fact that I have not been able to locate accurate screenplays to the movies, the ones downloaded
from the website http://www. script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html have proven to be absolutely
worthless in terms of accuracy. It is therefore my own transcriptions of the dialogues that are presented.

Bibliography
Books:
Allen, Graham, Intertextuality, Routledge, London, England, 2000
Currie, Mark, Metafiction. Longman Group, Essex, England, 1995
Genette, Gerard, Palimpsests – Literature in the Second Degree, University of
Nebraska Press, Nebraska, USA, 1997 (1982)
Genette, Gerard, Paratexts – Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge University
Press, England, 1997 (1987)
Robb, Brian J., Screams and Nightmares – The Films of WES CRAVEN, Overlook
Press, Woodstock, New York, USA, 1998

Articles:
Eco, Umberto, “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern
Aesthetics” in Capozzi, Rocco, Reading Umberto Eco – An Anthology, Indiana
University Press, Indiana, USA, 1997
Haastrup, Helle Kannik, “Polyfone film” in Kosmorama – tidsskrift for filmkunst
og filmkultur, nr. 221, sommer 1998, p. 130-137

Videos:
Craven, Wes, Scream, Miramax International, 1996
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Craven, Wes, Scream 2, Miramax International, 1997

Craven, Wes, Scream 3, Miramax Inc., 2000

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