SCREAM
It is impossible for me to do an all time favorites list without a horror film. When it comes down to horror movies, I have to choose between 2 films, this one, and Halloween. They are far and away my two favorite horror movies, but I decided to go with Scream for a variety of reasons. Horror movies have a really bad reputation. People tend to think of them as cheesy and unbelievable and not having any real merit as films. When I was Nine years old I saw Halloween for the first time and I remember being terrified, like legitimately terrified and for some reason I drawn to that. I was drawn to movies that could really put me in a weird space like that. Scream came out my senior year in high school and I was working at a movie theater at the time and we premiered everything back then on Thursday nights after we closed. That meant the movie would be getting out around 2am. During the first time I watched it, I could remember a movie ever making me laugh and make me scared so often and so well. In fact, the movie was so funny that it made the scares, the jumps and the brutal deaths even more shocking. But those laughs lull you into a false sense of comfort and when I was walking out to my car, I was not thinking about how scary the movie was until I was near the alley and no one else had parked their car where I was. Suddenly I was truly terrified that Ghost face was going to come out of the darkness and stab me and no amount of witty movie knowledge was going to save my ass. This is the brilliance of Scream.
Wes Craven is a long time master of the horror movie genre. Go back and watch his filmography. There are, in my opinion 12 incredibly solid movies on his resume and a few of the creepiest movies ever are directed by him. He did for dreaming what Hitchcock did for showers and Speilberg did for swimming in the ocean. In the early 90s Craven first tried his hand at this META style of film making with New Nightmare, but with Scream he took it to a whole new level. Armed with a fantastic reference heavy script from Kevin Williamson, and a cast of young, fresh, ready-for-anything actors, Craven crafted a genuinely hilarious and equally scary film franchise that turned the entire slasher sub-genre on its head. Craven has directed all four Scream movies and while people have found the sequels to be varying degrees of less successful than the original, they stand as a wonderful series anchored by this whip smart, incredibly fast and brutal film. Set in the fictional town of Woodsborro, a maniac in a truly horrifying mask and cloak is going around stabbing young people. The main target appears to be Sidney Prescott and her friends. Is it a personal grudge? Is she just a victim of bad luck? Probably not. A year ago her mother was murdered and Sidney put the man who did it behind bars, or did she? Who really knows?
The opening scene, I think goes down in history as one of the best opening scenes in a horror movie, ever. Drew Barrymore, doing Craven a favor, plays a girl babysitting when she starts getting harassed by menacing phone calls. Soon she realizes she is in the midst of a game that probably no good ending. Creepy, bloody, smoky and weirdly comical, this opening scene sets a blazing tone for the rest of the film. Ghostface is not like so many of the slasher film villains, he is fast. He runs and he misses. He is clumsy, but he also stabs with unrelenting evil. He, like every slasher villain, somehow manages to be everywhere at all times and even though the mask deadens him, he has personality and it is not pretty. In what I like to think of as a nod to Michael Myers, Ghostface appears genuinely curious as to how people die. Like Myers slightly tilted his head when he murders Bob in halloween, Ghostface often tweaks his head after a satisfying kill, especially when Rose McGowen gets it. That scene works on so many wonderful levels and as a stand alone scene, in encapsulates everything this movie does right. That scene starts kind of funny, then gets a little bit creepy, then builds to the main action as we freak out about this character we have grown to like, then it gets gruesome. and Scene.
Of course, the thing most people remember from Scream is the rules of surviving a horror movie. I have read people in film academia write and discuss Scream from all angles, but they always come back to this idea of surviving the horror genres. By poking fun at the slasher film is Scream stuck to continue the tropes of the slasher flick? Does it have to play out exactly the way we know it is going to play out because of the rules it sets up? Essentially people ask if the META aspect of Scream trap Scream. I have always looked at it like this, I think that is the point. I think it is supposed to be "trapped" by genre conventions, but by pointing them out, the film knows it is trapped, if that makes any sense. We get a series of rules to survive a horror movie, and then those rules play out for the most part in a way that is both funny and scary because of the set up. To have scenes be both hilarious and scary really plays with your head. You are laughing because the big boobed girl is running up the stairs after a comment about a big boobed girl running up the stairs is made, but at the same time she is being chased by someone with no mercy, so is it wrong to actually laugh? I have no idea, but it gets you thinking.
That is why I love Scream so very much. it works as a satire, but it also works as a horror movie. It is bloody and scary with an awesome climatic sequence that, of course, takes place at a high school party. It has a great cast of young people and Sidney Prescott is the ultimate Final Girl, but she is not alone. I love how personal the story got, and I absolutely loved Matthew Lillard's performance. Scream has great references to a whole world of scary movies, but instead of being trapped by the conventions it dares us to laugh at how the conventions play out. That is not even including the brilliant scene of us watching the newsman watch a scene of Randy watching Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween telling Jamie to turn around as we want Randy (played by Jamie Kennedy to turn around. In sense we are Randy hoping Jamie will turn around. I wrote a whole page in an essay just about that scene once. I took a college course in horror and sci-fi film and Scream was the only film we spent more than one class period on because it adds so much to the genre of horror. It really added a new dimension to horror movies that you still see today. It existed before, (see The Howling)but it really showed us that when crazy things happen, we really only have fiction to guide us through them. If suddenly the world sprouted zombies, the one thing we all believe is that head shots will take them down because that is what we have always seen. Scream showed us that. Scream showed us that watching horror movies might be the only way to escape a real life horror movie.
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