It's the one we all remember. Fondly, probably. So let's get this out of the way right off the bat. Is Scream actually that good? Ignore the half-decade long downward spiral it flung the genre into, a tail-spin whose ramifications can still be felt. Ignore the nostalgia, if you can. Ignore the fact this is the film that turned American cultural icon Courtney Cox into Courtney Cox-Arquette (for a while). Should Scream be spoken of in the same breath as genre staples?
Yeah, probably. It's really good but not anywhere near as smart as it thinks it is. Even at the time it shouldn't have been given carte blanche to be as smug and clever as it wanted to be, but the audience was so desperate for a change from the same group of kids being stalked and stabbed by a masked murderer.
Wait, whoa, hold up a second here. Isn't that exactly what Scream is, though? It was. In the intro to this series I outlined what was happening in horror in 1996 and, to recap, all of the tried and true names and faces (Halloween, Krueger, Voorhees, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw) were no longer reliable. In fact, the 80s body count slasher was as good as dead. Think about it - if you were 17 when Friday the 13th opened, you were 33 for the arrival of Scream. Nearly half your life would have been spent under the banner of the slasher. The kids who were making out at the drive-in to The Burning were now hand-wringing over their children watching Beavis and Butthead or learning what a blow job was from the news. The genre needed something that loudly declared, "I'm not your parents' horror movie!"
And Scream did. Loudly. With all the smug pomp of Ferris Bueller twisting and shouting his way through the Chicago streets. Except Scream was far more Abe Froman than Ferris, dressed up to the nines to fool anyone willing to take a shot into believing it was something it obviously wasn't. And everyone fell for it. But let's talk shop first.
How about that opening? We all know it by now, right? Drew Barrymore with wretched 90s hair, the voice on the phone, "What's your favorite scary movie," "Want to play a game?" Now it's as much of a cliche as anything this movie points to. But then? Then, killing off Drew Barrymore in the first thirteen minutes of the film was drawing comparisons to Psycho's infamous shower scene dispatch of Janet Leigh. Think about that for a second. This new kid on the block was drawing comparisons to one of the greatest horror films of all time solely on the idea that they killed off someone relatively famous. (Keep in mind that Barrymore, at this point, was at a pretty big crossroads in her career and not at the level of star power we know her for today. She was a former child actress who drugged her way into irrelevance. She was close to going full Lohan maybe a year earlier.) Did or does Scream stand, in basically any way, alongside of Psycho? Fuck no. But that's the crux of the argument - horror was in such dire straits that anything that didn't smell like mothballs would be hailed as a triumph. It was horror's HOPE poster - Ghostface all looking off in the distance in primary colors. Gut you like a fish? Yes we can.
At the same time, the opening is fantastic. At first Barrymore seems to stroll through a generously-sized California property, bantering back and forth on the phone with an unknown caller. But as the call takes its turn, the house seems to get smaller and smaller. Ghostface encourages both Barrymore and the audience to guess at the questions of his grisly game: Who was the killer in Halloween? In Friday the 13th?1 Am I at the front door or the back? Now, you and I know damn well that the game was rigged - each door had a killer at it - but Craven creates a mood so tension-filled and suffocating that there might as well have been 50 Ghostfaces around the Becker house. The once sprawling home has been shrunken down to a corner of the living room behind the television. And even when Barrymore does make it outside, Craven manipulates expectations wonderfully, not only tearing away the hope that seemed only a few feet away, but carving it up and putting its corpse on display.
1. Let's be real, we all would have blurted out Jason.
Scream makes a statement in its first 13 minutes and it's a bold one. Unfortunately, it's also a high point that neither the Scream films, or the sub genre as a whole will ever come close to reaching again.
And then we meet our cast of, what would usually be cliches. Sidney, the obvious final girl (Neve Campbell); bad boy boyfriend Billy (possible failed Johnny Depp cloning experiment Skeet Ulrich); Randy the movie nerd (Jamie Kennedy); Stu, the obnoxious jokester, (Matthew Lillard), bumbling cop Dewey, (David Arquette); breasts (Rose McGowan). Except almost all of these characters, save maybe Lillard's Stu (for obvious reasons), feel very real and are crafted with far more care than your usual selection of dead meat. This is where I want to talk about the best written character in Scream: Tatum. Tatum does not, in any way, fulfill the "slut" archetype that 80s slashers got their rocks off on. She isn't shown having sex and we don't see her tits. 2 In fact, the entire idea that she could (or should?) fit into this archetype is based on
a) Body: she's blonde and has a rack2. The fact that 90s slashers are relatively puritan will come up occasionally and I want to clarify that I don't believe some boobage is required for a horror movie. References to this are in direct comparison to 80s slashers where studios mandated either a corpse or a nip ever couple of minutes.
b) Clothing: she's wearing a skirt and a tight top that shows off aforementioned selling points
c) Archetype: well, someone's gotta fill it, right?
As Tatum says when Stu implies the killer has to be male, "That's so sexist." Her sexuality is limited to the above and a passing mention of being able to see Tom Cruise's dick in a movie. She's smart, clever (and not in the way this script is), funny and genuinely cares for her best friend. The assumptions we assign to each of the characters as the sit around the fountain and bullshit come from the way our minds have been molded by the let decade of horror, whether we're conscious of it or not. This is where Scream works the best, in the subtle moments of genre rebellion that exist between bouts of douchebaggery.3
3. Similar genrefuck Cabin in the Woods takes the opposite approach of turning actual humans into cliches for its own purposes, but Scream turns the cliches into people before our eyes.
But what about Kevin Williamson's holy relic of a script? For starters, the kids' discussion outside of school following the opening murders feels like things that despondent 90s teens could actually say. Shit on Kevin Williamson for Dawson's Creek, but the guy does have an ear for dialogue.4 The in-jokes and ribs feel positively restrained here compared to the rest of the Scream series. Unfortunately there was no one to keep Williamson just a tad more restrained, and by the sequel he has been hailed as the second coming of screenwriter Christ, coursing his dialogue into an ego-driven meta circle jerk. Wes Craven could have, perhaps, wrangled Williamson in a bit if he hadn't decided to go dive headfirst into post-modernism hand and hand with Williamson, already dipping his toe in the pool with New Nightmare just two years earlier. And, wow, some of the dialogue is just obnoxious.
"But this is life, this isn't a movie." (Fuck you, Kevin.)
"Well the first Nightmare on Elm Street was good but all the rest sucked." (Fuck you, Wes.)
"You're starting to sound like a Wes Carpenter flick." (Fuck BOTH of you.)
4. Except for Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Apparently the studio fucked with it massively after Columbine but outside of any sort of violence, the characters are the most insufferable shits in teen film history.
Courtney Cox and Henry Winkler5 end up grounding the film, and without them the movie would disappear a bit too much up its own ass (in later entries this will mainly fall on the backs of the Scream Trinity of Campbell, Arquette and Cox). Winkler, in an uncredited role is a blast and Cox, clearly trying her damnedest to shed the Monica image, steals almost every scene she's in as the time-warped hell baby of Nancy Grace and TMZ.
5. Winkler's death was actually added in re-shoots because the studio felt there wasn't enough blood between Casey's death and the party. Even the savior of horror films wasn't safe from an 80s-minded studio mandate.
The film isn't very well known for its middle act. Nothing of consequence really happens outside some scant plot/character development (Sidney has a mysterious past!6 and setting up the red herrings for the whodunnit. And the film IS, at its core, a whodunnit and it never tries to hide it. The whodunnit nature of Scream would be something that the wave of 90s slashers would latch onto. The use of a very human killer is secretly Scream's greatest rejection of past genre tropes. I say secretly because for all of the hooting and hollering Scream does about not being other movies, it never really acknowledges this concept until Scream 3. Meanwhile, the final act party sequence is where the movie makes its boldest proclamations of self-awareness. The film is fairly famous for setting up the rules of surviving a horror movie and then going out of their way to shatter them. In front of a paused video rental of Halloween, Randy memorably proclaims:
1) You can't have sex (Sidney does and lives)
2) You can't drink or do drugs (Randy is drinking a beer as he says this)
3) Never say I'll be right back (Matthew Lillard doesn't even take ten seconds to throw this one back in Randy's, and since he is the audience proxy, our, faces)
6. The Maureen Prescott issue will be addressed in Scream 3's review. I think it's one of, if not the most troubling aspect of the entire franchise.
But this isn't the tip of the smug, all-too-clever iceberg that is the Scream franchise. And while it will get far worse in the future, the symptoms of what makes the entire endeavor fairly intolerable can be seen here. A janitor named Freddy who wears familiar clothing (and played by Wes Craven because why the fuck not?). Randy announces the killer getting in one last scare a second before it happens. Tatum's death scene is the absolute nadir of the film between her sarcastic taunting of Ghostface ("Can I play the helpless victim…Oh no please Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!"), the overuse of dutch angles and the pants on head stupid death.7 Campbell accuses horror movies of being "All the same - some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It's insulting" It is. And it still is even if you point it out thirty seconds before you have that character do it. This is where the inherent problems with Scream lie. Being self-aware of what is bad or cliched, and then announcing and drawing attention to the fact you are aware that these things are indeed bad, and then actually doing them does NOT, in fact, absolve your use of them as bad. In fact, it might actually make it worse because your'e also being a dick about it. The meta references come at such a rapid fire pace that it's utterly exhausting at times (and with a weaker screenwriter, as we will see, goddamned intolerable). Calling slasher movies stupid and then being a slasher movie does not make you any more clever. The Scream franchise is so bathed in irony and self-loathing that, in a way, it's the most hipster horror film ever made. Where a movie like Friday the 13th: Part 7 is bad, it owns it. There's no tongue in cheek gags or winks at the camera and that makes the endless sequels more repayable and enduring than any of Scream's.
7. Humorously, according to an interview, McGowen found that she actually could fit through the dog door.
It's a testament to the framework of Williamson's script, Craven's direction and, especially, the performances that the first Scream holds up so well. Billy and Stu's revelation is simultaneously unhinged and restrained (something that every 90s slasher monologue will go way too over the top on) and then outright hilarious as Lillard slips further into delirium. The final chase actually comes in advance of the revelation and is pretty great in how far its sprawls while still feeling suffocating and personal, pulling us between tight bedrooms and even tighter cars while still flirting with the outdoors, similar to the opening. And the self-awareness can occasionally hit the mark. Gale and Sidney watching the time-delay footage of the living room and shouting at Randy to turn around as Randy yells at Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween to turn around is a great moment of auto-cannibalization.8
8. Randy's dialogue of "Jamie, turn around!" is a great little stroke of coincidence considering it's coming from Jamie Kennedy.
Given a different cast or a less competent director (or Wes Craven in full lazy mode as he often is), Scream could have fallen flat on its ghost face. Instead we're left with an enduring time capsule of the 90s slasher in its infancy. The affront of post-modernism is more palatable here because it feels restrained, as if they weren't quite sure how much irony they could get away with. Scream rides a fine line of being genuinely great at what it does and being such a miserable, arrogant shit about it that it's barely tolerable. It's the Tom Brady of horror. In that case, next episode's film, I Know What You Did Last Summer would be the Mark Sanchez.
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