2026/06/01 by Diana Neiva · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Cinema and Media Studies #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
paper · doi:10.3390/arts15060128
openalex publication_date 2026/06/01 · openalex created_date 2026/06/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
This paper examines Wes Craven’s Scream 4 (2011) as a testament film that philosophises about creative death: the process by which artistic works face exhaustion, inauthenticity, and the impossibility of renewal. Released four years before Craven’s death in 2015, the film uses the resources of the slasher and its sequel culture to meditate on what it means for a creative work to die. I argue that Scream 4 conducts this investigation through characteristically cinematic means, such as its metatextual architecture, the progressive collapse of the franchise’s reality across four films, the figure of Jill Roberts as an embodied reboot, and its construction of creative death as something that cannot be reversed through the mechanisms commercial culture makes available. The paper also situates this argument within the broader question of film as a medium for philosophising about death, drawing on Craven’s own account of what horror films are for.