15 pages on the history of movie series that consumes my life filled with colorful and shiny pictures: It seems like a perfect fit. The editors obviously chose the wrong journalist to complete this task of welcoming Scream 4 with loving arms into the genre. Clearly there was no direction here; the author of the article, Eric Newell, stumbles with the subject of the most popular horror movie series of all-time.
Whenever you have a sixteen year old who is still in high school struggling to reading a magazine piece on horror movies for reason alone because of spelling errors is pretty embarrassing not just to the author at hand, but to his editor, his peers, and his magazine's reputation. He constantly throughout the article changes the spelling of the characters names, example: the first page or so he called Neve Campbell's character by her real name, Sidney. Flip the page and he's spelling her name wrong, Sydney. Same with Gale (real spelling) -> Gayle (his rewritten version). Goodness, he can't even pay respects to the queen of Hollywood, Meryl Streep (Merrill Streep, speaking of Wes Craven's film with her prior to the third Scream film).
Simple grammer that I've learned he just fell prey to. Where and when to place commas was a big one as well. I also found that Newell recycled his same vocabulary throughout the article. Granted, I understand that five-six pages is a heck of alot to write and he probably had the same word on his mind while jotting down his "deep thoughts". I'm not saying I'm an expert in grammar or editorials, but come on, this is just lousy journalism.
Now, onto my real beef with this guy. He begins the article by saying that he was a prejudiced writer and Scream "fan" as he claimed to put that aside before writing this article. "Ever the faithful writer" he referred to himself. He begins the major part of the write-up, fine, actually more than fine, very good. He explains how the horror genre was dying and when Scream was released it revived it. Newell also goes into it's impact on horror movies to come; how it started the "teen slasher era" of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
After he concluded what he must say about the original film, he continues to the two sequels. Anyone who knows me knows I love 2 and 3 just as much as I do the first film, and this guy tore them to shreds. Newell decides to focuses on the negative things he conjured up from the truth. I must say he did shed more light heart on 2 than 3. He degrades them and ridicules them which is very offensive to fans of the series who buy the magazine for the sole purpose of reading something on their favorite films.
All journalists should remain neutral whether they are covering competing bestsellers or an unsolved murder case. Eric Newell is a prime example of what not to do when it comes to achieving film series summaries. Although it starts out as a somewhat strong piece, it fails because of this journalists lack of professionalism.
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