French teenage murder linked to Scream horror films

A youth of 17 has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl of 15 found stabbed, a case linked to the Wes Craven horror-film trilogy Scream.

It is the fifth time in two years that the films have been connected to violent incidents in France.

The youth, who has not been named because he is a minor, was detained after the girl was found at Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, a suburb of Nantes, in western France.

She had been stabbed 17 times, but named her attacker before dying in hospital less than two hours later.

A public prosecutor, Pierre Foerst, reported that the youth, a secondary school student and friend of the girl, admitted that he was obsessed with the film Scream, which features a knife-wielding killer in a mask based on the Munch painting The Scream, terrorising fellow students on a US campus.

"He told gendarmes that he viewed the video on the night of the attack and it was after that he decided to kill someone," the report continued.

When the police searched his house they found a Scream mask and the kitchen knife believed to have been used in the attack.

The youth, who was questioned by a judge yesterday, allegedly admitted that he had been "playing a role".

He had tried unsuccessfully to attack two other schoolgirls before inviting his victim to go for a walk around a football field near their homes.

He allegedly stabbed her without warning, then ran away when he saw a man walking his dog.

Psychiatrists have been sent to the school where the girl was studying and to the youth's school to help the pupils to cope with the shock.

The justice minister, Dominique Perben, dismissed calls for the films to be banned, saying that while lessons had to be learned from the killing, it was not legally possible to withdraw such films in France once they had been released.

The law doesn't allow it directly unless there is a real problem with public order. Once the film has passed through the censorship barrier, it is very difficult to ban it," he told French television.

The trilogy has been placed at the centre of several violent crimes.

In April 2000 a boy of 16 wore a Scream mask when he injured his father and stepmother with a knife in a suburb of Versailles.

Two years ago five young men wore Scream masks when they gang raped a 21-year-old woman in a town near Paris.

A few weeks later at Lebetain, eastern France, the police arrested a boy of 15 when his parents were found dead after being repeatedly stabbed while they slept

In his initial confession, which he later withdrew, the boy said he had hallucinations after watching a video of the film and heard voices telling him to kill his parents. He has since been committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Three months ago, after two teenage girls at Saint-Vit, eastern France, tortured a classmate in an abandoned house, the local public prosecutor said they had admitted watching the film just beforehand.

He claimed that the girls, aged 15 and 13, had been influenced by the film and carried a knife which "strongly recalled the weapon used in the horror film".