Scream Queens.............



One of the chief complaints (among many) of the giallo has been the convoluted plot. Yes, the giallo can have you lost in the abyss of convolution. Like the fourth victim and who the murderer might be in Hawks’ The Big Sleep, after a while you start to do a double take. Slashers aren’t as typical to get so lost in a body count mystery as to produce such confusion that what a twist could be (a gas that had you following the clues, with deductive reasoning trying to eliminate and project the outcome totally usurped by details not necessarily altogether seen or maybe missed because attention was diverted elsewhere) ultimately winds up failing to quite live up to the journey to get there. So the journey is what gives you your satisfaction. Sometimes a giallo will take you on quite a wild, crazy ride and lay at your lap a twist that ultimately generates less than thrilling results…but at least the ride was fun.

Scream Queens shuffles the deck, shows you a card, asks if that is the card you choose, hides it back in amongst its family of cards, and starts pulling from said deck until the card you chose either emerges or doesn’t. Or at least that is your mentality. You choose a card and keep hoping that card is the right one. Many will choose correctly while others will totally miss it entirely (how often you see slasher/giallo fans say they saw the killer immediately and were right because it was so easy and other times the twist is so out of left field it felt like the card wasn’t even in the deck but slipped in from the sleeve of the holder’s shirt?). That is the fun part of a slasher or giallo…when it is built on keeping you guessing and letting you see what you want, decide and choose, and wait on the card if it is really the right one. Maybe this analogy is about as concise and clear as the ongoing plot of Scream Queens, a series in its first that never failed to grab your hand and drag you along across its hot coals. I often wonder how many were burned when Gigi’s head sat on the plate instead of the cooked turkey Dean Munsch was planning for the Thanksgiving dinner at Kappa Kappa Tai in the episode, Thanksgiving. Or when Boone was stabbed by his twin in Red Devil costume (we assume, right?) instead of Gigi prior to Thanksgiving? In Thanksgiving, the accusations and suspicions fly. Dean Munsch, for almost the entirety of the first season, has plenty of fingers pointed at her. Previously, she narratively admitted to killing her ex-husband, but the serial killings themselves is another altogether totally different thing. But trust issues exist even between father and daughter, as evidenced by Grace and her own pops, both of which at one point or another in the series pondered if they were the Red Devil killer to each other. Thanksgiving was the means to have the Kappa sisters, Grace’s dad, Pete, and the Dean all together to posit theories about who the killer could be…and Dean was grinning like a Cheshire cat during the whole “game”. Motives for killing the Dollar Scholars and Kappas are put right out there, with Dean certainly taking her share of accusations and Grace, too. Pete, with his “investigative journalism”, fingers Grace’s father and Grace, in Black Friday, decides with Chanel Oberlin to plot the execution of Dean Munsch! Before long not one single character comes out of the series unscathed or without scrutiny. Even if puffer fish poison and cryogenics didn’t kill Dean Munsch (the cryogenics was especially silly), Grace was complicit in the attempt of the first try at murder, and a failed convincing of Pete to help her a second time certainly didn’t paint her as the typical kind of final girl that often is featured in slashers. She does come to her senses, but the Kappas tell her to leave the sorority, and even Zayday doesn’t have Grace’s back, believing the only alternative to rescue all of them from certain death was to execute who they think is the murderer themselves. The series continued to get more and more absurd. Sure in Thanksgiving, you visit Chad’s repellent wealthy family (Julie Duffy of Newhart, the late, great Alan Thicke of Growing Pains, Chad Everett as the “overseer of the hard-working man”, and Patrick Schwarzenegger as the “hardcore porn connoisseur”) thanks in part to Chanel Oberlin’s persistent desire to be his wife and passage into further royalty, drug through a sewer of insults and even suffering a bribe to go away from their son forever, with neck-braced Hester emerging alive and well despite taking a spill down a flight of stairs in Ghost Stories…arriving just in time to inform them she’s carrying the baby of their Dollar Scholar son. Pictionary with Hester the brunt of cruelty and Chanel, during one of those brief heroine routines that seem to say she’s got more to her than what so often seems hidden underneath pounds of mean girl slurs towards the very ones who follow closely behind her, standing up to Chad’s family, leaving the shindig with some semblance of dignity that later diminishes when he pops back up at the sorority house resulting in a sense of relief and joy, as if a yo-yo that goes up and down, never at rest with who she really is.

Whether Chanel is speaking in less than glowing terms about those who frequent passionately at Black Friday or buying her sisters iPhones so they are ready to gang up on Dean at the most opportune time; she has moments where you almost see something beyond the furs, jewelry, high heels, designer dresses, and tiara, and Chanel doesn’t fail to deaden that with her return to shtick,. It is a fascinating effect of the show. She won’t let you get too close to her before calling heavier woman hippos or her own sisters sluts and bitches. The insults are creative and fly out of her mouth as if operating on locomotive speed with no break to halt them…Grace has spent a lot of time up until Black Friday rolling her eyes and scoffing at Oberlin because she just can’t seem to quit the verbal abuse and shut the fuck up.


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