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2 • October 18 - 24, 2015 • Brainerd Dispatch By Jacqueline Spendlove TV Media W ith Halloween just around the corner, you're probably being inundated with monsters, gore and everything else typical of the horror genre. It's the perfect season to get into "Scream Queens," the latest series from the creators of prime- time juggernauts "Glee" and "American Horror Story." Despite blood and murder aplenty, the hor- ror-comedy anthology lightens things up by combining terror and violent slayings with humor in an over-the-top parody of the genre — while serving up a mystery to boot. "Scream Queens" premiered last month and a new episode airs Tuesday, Oct. 20, on Fox. The series opens with a Kappa Kappa Tau sorority party in 1995. In an "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" situation, one of the sisters is dis- covered in the tub, covered in blood, with her new baby — "I thought it was the freshman 15," she wails. Her callous sisters abandon her to go dance to TLC's "Waterfalls," and she succumbs to blood loss. Tragic. Twenty years later, Wallace Uni- versity's Kappa Kappa Tau is still going strong, and is currently lord- ed over by the rich, beautiful and impeccably dressed Chanel Ober- lin (Emma Roberts, "We're the Millers," 2013), a.k.a. Chanel No. 1, who's every bit as nasty and heartless as her '90s predecessors. To her horror and disgust, the school's new dean, Cathy Munsch (Jamie Lee Curtis, "Halloween," 1978), is declaring the highly ex- clusive sorority open to the un- washed masses — that is, any- body who wants to join, no matter how undesirable they may seem to Chanel and her ilk. As if that isn't bad enough, on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 death, terrible things start to hap- pen again. A devil-masked killer is targeting Kappa Kappa Tau, and the bodies start to pile up not long into the first episode. The show's feel is a blend of "Scream" (1996) and "Mean Girls" (2004), or, as co-creator Ryan Murphy put it in '80s terms, "Heathers" (1988) meets "Friday the 13th"(1980). "[Co-creators] Brad [Falchuk] and Ian [Brennan] and I, all three of us, were always obsessed with the '80s/early '90s slasher genre that was always about young peo- ple and always about coming of age," he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Like the Heathers, Chanel and her posse all have the same name. Ariana Grande ("Victorious") plays doe-eyed Chanel No. 2, new- comer Billie Lourd plays earmuff- wearing Chanel No. 3, and Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine," 2006) plays kowtowing Chanel No. 5. Chanel No. 4 is conspicu- ously absent. The Chanels aren't the only ones being targeted by the Red Devil; the sorority's batch of strange and quirky pledges aren't safe either. Far from endearing us to these misfits' quirks à la "Glee," the show makes most of them pretty irritating so that, in their own way, they're not really prefer- able to the vicious Chanels — pre- sumably so that we're not too dis- tressed when one of them is de- capitated by a lawnmower, which adds to the first episode's body count. If the show sounds violent — and it is, at times — the blood and gore are toned down by the funny, clever script and sheer outra- geousness of the over-the-top at- tacks. And the screaming. There's a lot of screaming. A LOT. Falchuk discussed the comedy/horror bal- ance in an interview with The Hol- lywood Reporter: "The way you find the balance is understanding that, when you're missing some ingredients, certain ingredients are super strong, and the flavor is so strong that if you use too much, it ruins the whole soup. Horror is some- thing that is a really strong flavor, so just little drops of it is the best recipe." The actors haven't been told who the killer is or if and when they themselves will be offed, so really, they're just as in the dark about their characters' fates as the audience is. "We don't want to tell the ac- tors because it's more fun if they don't know, because then they all think that either they're the killer or that they could be killed," said Falchuk. "Everyone is a suspect — and they should be. Every one of those characters absolutely could be the killer. It's designed that way. Anyone could do it." According to Falchuk, only five people know the identity of the killer: the three co-creators and two assistants. Every episode will have at least one death, as well as a new clue as to who the Red Devil really is. His or her identity won't be revealed until the final episode. Unlike "American Horror Story," which fully reboots every season with a different cast of characters, "Scream Queens" isn't a true an- thology, though it's listed as such. Of course, with so many corpses by season's end, the next season will require an awful lot of new characters. The survivors, however, will still be present. "In horror movies, particularly in that era [the '80s and '90s], there was always the last girl, the final girl," Murphy told EW. "So we're playing with that. Whoever survives — and there will be peo- ple who will survive — they will go on next season to a new loca- tion and a new terror." Abigail Breslin, Billie Lourd and Ariana Grande as seen in "Scream Queens" Death comes to school 'Scream Queens' parodies slasher fl icks from the '80s and '90s Cover Story this week 001315475r1 "Your One-Stop, Locally-Owned Medical Supply Company." FREE Delivery in our service area! • 8-5:30pm M-F, 9-12 Sat. 206 W. 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