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Edward Hegstrom's avatar

“Is it any good? No” is a great running gag.

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Andrew Rogers's avatar

I agree with the gist of this piece that the series is not good and the reclamation project for it is odd—especially for 3, can't grasp why that's the one people most vehemently go to bat for. Love the structural comparison to pornography.

But I think 1 is pretty fun. Very much smacks of being a Morgan/Wong X-Files idea retrofitted into post-Scream teen horror. It has some of the best Rube Goldberg kill scenes. The characters are mostly bland, except for Clear Rivers which is funny every single time I read/write it and only gets better when you watch it and see how much of a jumbled, incoherent mess the character is. Great piece of pseudo-profound dialogue:

Clear: Almost autumn.

Alex: It's only the end of June.

Clear: Yeah, but everything's always in transition. If you focus, even now, just one week into summer, you can almost feel autumn coming. Kind of like being able to see the future.

Mostly, though, I think 1 does the best job of using POV and perspective shots plus the film grammar of horror/thrillers in a novel way. Here's what I wrote a few years ago:

"During his premonition of the inciting accident he becomes aware of the tense camera angles, the ominous slow motion and dissolves, and the heart-pounding music cues. He picks up on symbolic foreshadowing: clues appear in advertising slogans; in the names that reference horror cinema like his own last name or teacher Valerie Lewton or, most blatantly, hockey/lax goofball Hitchcock; in the book held by the class's smart loner being Henry Miller's mortality-obsessed Tropic of Cancer. Alex notices all the signs of impending doom that normally would only be accessible to the theatrical audience, images for the viewer to digest and decode; this is the story of a man who staves off death by becoming a semiotician."

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