Visual literacy, metafiction, and horror movies : an account of self-reflexivity in the new stalker film

Abstract

This study investigates the significance of metafiction, game, and visual literacy as they relate to today's changing practices of spectatorship. These concepts are elaborated in relation to the rebirth of the eighties' horror film genre 'stalker' as a selfreflexive text in the nineties. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) is taken as the purest specimen of the 'new stalker' in which the abovementioned concepts can be observed with clarity.