Why Scream 2’s Joel is the Smartest Black Character in Horror History
There’s a long list of African Americans in horror movies. Unfortunately, there’s an even longer list of African Americans who don’t survive.
But then there’s Joel.
If one ranked the admittedly short number of melanated people who lived to tell the tale at the end of a scary flick, Joel (Duane Martin) of Scream 2 stands alone at the tippy top. No, Joel didn’t defeat the bad guys. Nor did he solve any of the movie’s mysteries. On the real, the man doesn’t make himself useful at all outside of holding and pointing a camera. What separates Joel from the pack is that he not only outsmarted the movie but the entire genre by doing the one thing anyone in any horror movie should always do: he left.
The Scream series is built around characters who bathe in horror movie tropes and minutiae. But Gale Weathers’ (Courtney Cox) second cameraman possessed the most precise understanding of how scary movies play out. Joel never professed his love for horror in a witty monologue; he just paid attention. It may seem small, but that fundamental ability isn’t usually afforded to Black characters, including the other ones in Scream 2.
Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith), despite loathing the fact that horror far too often made Black people nothing more than walking and talking plot devices in scary movies, became one herself the minute she paid more attention to the film on the screen than her surroundings. Her boyfriend Phil (Omar Epps) focused on the wrong things entirely and got a knife in the side of the head for his lack of self-preservation and awareness.
Then there’s Hallie (Elise Neal), the Black best friend who only exists to make sure Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is okay. She even lovingly calls herself Sid’s therapist at one point. Hallie went the way of the dodo because she spent almost an entire runtime more concerned with the main character’s well-being than her own.
Maureen, Phill, and Hallie ignored the hurricane surrounding them and just kept dancing. Joel was caught in the middle of the same storm but stopped two-stepping just long enough to do his homework. When he closed Weathers’ book for the final time, he realized that while she escaped the first movie with minor bumps, bruises, and a book deal, her former cameraman wasn’t so lucky. At that point, he did what any real human would and removed himself from the equation. For everyone who sucks their teeth or rolls their eyes whenever a character does something that will surely get them killed, Joel is for you.
In the truest sense, he’s an audience surrogate because he feels like the realest piece of a make-believe world. Few horror characters get to act like nonfictional people. If that were the case, most movies wouldn’t go beyond the first act. That’s what makes Joel’s actions so bold when put under a microscope; everything he does, including fainting at the sight of a massacred body, feels rooted in our reality, not director Wes Craven’s. And it all stems from him having supreme agency.
Regardless of skin color, most horror characters are cogs in a bloody wheel. The reason that sticks out like a torn thumb when it comes to Black characters is the representation. They either exist through their white counterparts’ eyes or serve as knife fodder to show the audience how seriously they should take this threatening entity. They’re comic relief or, like Hallie, only around to comfort their white friends. For every one well-rounded character like Roland Kinkaid (Ken Sagoes, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), there are multiple Dick Hallorann’s (Scatman Crothers, The Shining); side characters with no desires or ability to make their own choices. If movies are empathy machines, how does anyone empathize with an individual who feels more like something than someone? Joel is easily the latter.
Scream 2 doesn’t paint a complete picture of the guy, but its Etch-a-Sketch outline gives just enough info to make him relatable. He’s ambitious, uses humor to deflect, has no qualms with showing vulnerability, has no desire to put on Superman’s cape, and stands up for himself. In fact, it’s his backbone that keeps him in the land of the living while Weathers’ former cameraman’s missing vertebrae got him gutted like a fish. Joel’s ambition never exceeds his desire to not become a cadaver. Sure, that sounds easy, but few, if any, horror characters with names and lines of dialogue get that choice as an option. The most metatextual aspect of this movie about movies is Joel being smart enough to choose to not be a movie character and, thus, not be in the movie at all. That is until the final moments of Scream 2.
Joel bolting after seeing characters with more screen time than him get killed is one of Scream 2’s boldest inversions, topped only at the end of the flick when the movie lets him return. That’s not what horror usually does, and it’s definitely not what Black people in horror typically do. If someone leaves because they’re afraid, no less? We either never see them again, or if we do, we see what’s left of them.
But Joel upends decades of genre doctrine with the simple act of showing up in those final seconds with a camera in one hand and a microphone in the other. Never mind the fact that his perfect timing was impossible based on 1997 technology and media, the move itself is stunning. Leaving in the middle of the massacre and returning when the bloodletting ended is the most brilliant decision any person in any horror movie ever made or will ever make. Period.
Besides establishing that whole “discretion is the better part of valor” thing as something admirable in the genre, the move gave a nonwhite character complete control of their narrative. Joel didn’t return because people were in trouble, nor did he do it because Weathers needed him. The man sauntered back into the picture like he never left because he wanted to be a part of the story on his own terms. That goes for both the film’s narrative about two psychos in Halloween masks playing copycat killers, and the larger story of an African American existing within scary movies.
No one before this unassuming cameraman got the choice to subvert the rules single-handedly, or the expectations that this guy might die because of the color of his skin and his importance to the flick. Those same assumptions said he wouldn’t survive without at least a smidge of suffering because baptism through fire is necessary for this kinda thing. Even the current landscape, which thankfully features many a person with melanin, still puts them through hell to see another sunrise. Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding) is basically 90 percent knife wound by the end of Scream VI. He and everyone else are still wedded to a rule book that Joel ignored because he had the power to do so.
In a series built on bending and understanding horror rules, the seemingly typical African American epitomizes Scream and horror to the fullest. His simple decision recontextualized the horror that came before it, and set a high bar for everything that followed. In Scream 2, Joel rebelled against a system and played the game his way. Almost 30 years later, nobody’s done it better.
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