-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4430013,00.html
}}}>Begin
French link murders to cult film
'Scream' blamed for outbreak of teenage violence
Paul Webster in Paris
Sunday June 9, 2002
The Observer
France's third teenage murder in two years linked to the influence of the Scream
horror film trilogy has sharpened fears about the impact of screen and video game
violence on the young.
The case brings to nine the number of killings around the world specifically linked to
Wes Craven's movie. Other violent films and video games have been linked to many
more, including the 16 deaths in April at a school in Erfurt, Germany, when a
teenager obsessed with violent computer games ran amok.
A signature of the Scream trilogy, a mask based on Edvard Munch's famous painting
'The Scream', has also figured in killings carried out by adults in Britain and the US.
The latest killing, more chilling than any Scream episode, will strengthen the case of
those who argue that screen violence is directly linked to crime, a position generally
rejected by the movie industry but supported last year by veteran director Robert
Altman when he said violent blockbusters had shown terrorists who attacked the US
'how to do it'.
France's Culture Minister, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, has set up an inquiry team to
advise whether a new category of film censorship should be introduced for horror
videos, which account for more than half of video rentals by children.
'I have been quite shaken by this attack,' he said. 'It raises all sorts of questions
about official responsibility for material that can unbalance young minds.'
The latest murder took place at Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, western France. Key
pieces of evidence against a youth, identified only as Julien because he is 17, were
Scream videos, a Scream mask and a kitchen knife similar to the one used by the
fictional killer who carries out senseless stabbings on a US campus.
Julien watched the Scream video over and over again after returning from school to
his home, where he lived with his parents and two brothers. After watching the first
episode of Scream in his bedroom, he rang two girls, but they were out. Then he
rang Alice, who invited him to her house, where he was given an orange juice by her
father before the two teenagers - who had once been in the same class - decided to
go out for a walk.
It was about an hour later that a neighbour walking his dog heard the girl screaming
and found her soaked in blood, lying on the ground near a football pitch. While
waiting for an ambulance, she gave her own address and Julien's name, saying that
he had pulled out the Scream mask from his shoulder bag just before he started
stabbing her.
The post-mortem showed she had been stabbed 17 times. The neighbour told police
that her last words were: ' Faîtes moi une sourire, je sais que je vais mourir. '
('Smile
at me, I know I'm going to die.') An hour later she died in Nantes hospital.
'Julien seems to be living a virtual experience,' a policeman who assisted in the
interrogation said. 'Even though he has admitted the stabbing, he does not seem to
see it as a real event.'
Julien's lawyer, Elisabeth Daussy-Rioufol, said the youth, a shopkeeper's son who
planned to become an architect, had conceived the attack 'like a film script' over the
past year.
'At the beginning he intended to kill as many people as possible before being killed in
his turn,' she said, describing Julien as 'very intelligent and the product of a
pleasant,
problem-free childhood. But he considered his life monotonous, and he underwent it
like a ghost.
'He now feels horror and remorse for Alice's death, saying that he only wanted to see
what it was like to stab someone.'
In another case during 2000, a 16-year-old boy wore a similar disguise when he
attacked and severely injured his parents with a kitchen knife. The same year in a
Paris suburb, five young men wore Scream masks when they raped a young woman.
Three months ago two teenage girls in eastern France tortured a classmate using a
knife which the local prosecutor said 'strongly resembled the weapon in Scream,
which the girls had watched before the attack'.
Psychiatrists questioning Julien said they were worried about the inability of some
young people to distinguish between reality and fiction.
Their alarm has been increased by the news that the horrifying details of the murder
at Saint-Sébastien have contributed to a national rush to rent Scream videos.
The debate in France mirrors growing anxieties in the UK and the US. Last year a
report by the American Academy of Paediatrics found that by the age of 18 the
average young person had seen 200,000 acts of violence on television alone.
Dave Grossman, an American expert on the psychology and physiology of killing,
has found that repetition, desensitisation and escalation reduced the normal human
unwillingness to kill. He said: 'We have raised a generation of barbarians who have
learnt to associate violence with pleasure. All the time in movie theatres, when there
is bloody violence, the young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating
popcorn and drinking soda.'
Apart from Scream, the US Parents Television Council associated other pop culture
favourites with specific crimes. They included the Oliver Stone movie Natural Born
Killers and Marilyn Manson's album Portrait of an American Family .
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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