42 – Scream:

Can any of my older friends remember a time before movies were so meta? Like I was recently watching Lindsay Ellis’s video comparing the remake of Beauty & the Beast to the original – and she notes that Disney have gotten really big on the idea of nodding to the criticisms of their stories. Frozen hammers in the lesson that you shouldn’t marry someone you just met, Moana insists that she’s a chief’s daughter rather than a princess and Maleficent has Philip saying he can’t kiss an unconscious girl. I remember when I was seventeen and a TV show called Power Rangers RPM was airing. It too went meta with the PR franchise – with characters questioning why there were eyes on the Megazords, explosions when they morphed etc. This kind of thing mainly started appearing in the early 2000s as our fiction became more ‘self-aware’, but it was happening in the 90s too. I was watching an episode of Siskel & Ebert where they were reviewing a 1996 release called The Opposite of Sex – and Roger Ebert was really impressed that the film had a sarcastic narrator who was aware of the cliches in teen movies and kept defying them at every turn. It’s hard to image that such a thing was once considered new and innovative. Now in our media – particularly genre fiction – we’re constantly winking to the audience or leaning on the fourth wall. Or a better way to put it…

“The unexpected is the new cliche…”

The quote comes from the fourth film in this franchise – arguably the first mainstream property to really deconstruct an entire subgenre.

I touched on how the slasher movie genre took off after Halloween back in my review of that. But it was very quick out of the gate – with Friday the 13th ripping it off to great success. A filmmaker called Wes Craven – who had some horror successes in The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes – got in on the game with a 1984 release called Nightmare On Elm Street (adding a supernatural twist to the genre). Imitator after imitator followed, each film boiling down to the same basic plot; serial killer stalks misbehaving young people, killing the promiscuous ones while sparing the responsible virgin of the group. There were some hidden gems in there (April Fool’s Day and Sleepaway Camp for one) but if you saw one, you’d seen them all. The original three churned out sequel after sequel – with varying degrees of quality. By the mid-90s, Halloween had five sequels, Friday had eight, and Nightmare had five. But Nightmare got another sequel that was quite different.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was a film that leaned entirely on the fourth wall of the franchise. In this piece, it was the original film’s lead actress Heather Langenkamp who was the protagonist. Wes Craven likewise starred as himself, and the plot is all about the idea of fiction becoming reality. While it was critically and commercially successful, it didn’t light the world on fire. In came this gentleman.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson was one day inspired to write a short story about a girl who is harassed on the phone by a stranger and then attacked by a serial killer. As he was struggling to pay his bills, he instead reworked the concept into a screenplay that became a send-up of the slasher films he had loved as a child. Despite also drafting ideas for two sequels in the hopes of making it more attractive to studios, he still had trouble selling it because of the violence in the script. It wasn’t until Wes Craven signed on as director that the film started to come together. The concept was first titled Scary Movie and was then renamed Scream.

A teenager called Casey Becker answers her phone to a man with a mysterious voice (Roger Jackson). Casey is played by Drew Barrymore who, although she had gone through a very public battle with drugs and alcohol, was still a pretty big name to have attached at the time. Casey flirts with the boy and they talk about their favourite horror movies. They seem to be making a love connection until the guy says one thing:

Casey knows this guy means business when she sees that her boyfriend has been tied up and gagged in her garden! The man on the phone says she’ll have to play a trivia game to spare his life. Casey answers correctly on the Halloween question but flunks the Friday the 13th round. Giving us more incentive to hate that franchise, Casey’s boyfriend now meets a gruesome death. The man on the phone – though we can now safely call him the killer – smashes through the living room window and a chase ensues. Casey looks like she’s about to make it to safety as her parents’ car pulls up…

You’re damn right this movie pulled a Psycho and killed off the biggest name in the cast in the first ten minutes. The funny thing is that this was a complete fluke; Drew Barrymore was meant to play the lead Sidney Prescott. But other commitments led to her dropping out. Still really keen to be a part of the film, she took the smaller role of Casey. And thus the opening becomes 50% more effective. Or at least it was to a 1996 audience. Start with Scream 2 it became a given that each film would open with a name actor who gets suddenly killed. But at least they got people at the time.

The film unlike many other slashers also doesn’t shy away from the fact that the victims have parents. Casey’s find her body hanging from a tree! But now it’s time to meet the actual protagonist.

Neve Campbell ended up having a really good 1996. First of all the TV show where she got her big break Party of Five was cancelled due to low ratings – but a campaign by several loyal fans got it put back on the air, and it would run for six seasons in total. Secondly The Craft turned out to be a surprising hit and got her some respectable attention. And finally Drew Barrymore dropping out of the role of Sidney led to Neve getting her first lead. And she performs a lot better than she does in The Craft. Sidney is the perfect horror film lead like Laurie Strode – troubled but likable, innocent yet self-aware and delicate while able to be badass when the occasion calls for it. She is however reluctant to get hot and heavy with her boyfriend.

Yep, Skeet Ulrich is here too. The two said that working together on The Craft had made them feel more comfortable with each other – so it was easy to play boyfriend and girlfriend. He was cast mainly due to his resemblance to Johnny Depp – whose first big role was in the original Nightmare – and they even threw in a reference where Billy climbs in Sidney’s window the same way Glen does to Nancy’s. Anyway Billy will have all weekend to try more luck – as Sidney’s father will be going on a business trip.

The next day at school, there are police everywhere. The whole town knows about Casey and her boyfriend getting murdered, so there’s a major investigation going on. Everyone seems to be treating Sidney rather delicately, and not just because she’s a girl. What I really like about this sequence is how it introduces the characters in a different way. Protagonists who will play bigger roles in the story later get brief glimpses and lines as Sidney arrives. It’s nicely subtle world-building – showing how all these residents get brought together by the conflict. We meet a news reporter called Gale Weathers, a deputy called Dewey Riley and Sidney’s best friend Tatum.

Oh Lord.

Back when I started this way back in 2016, Rose McGowan was just an actress who had been famous in the 90s and 2000s but had slowly vanished from the public eye. I haven’t really watched anything of hers since the scandal broke last year. And wouldn’t you know it – this movie was produced by the Weinsteins. Rose as an actress could always be hit and miss – she herself admitting that it was something she just fell into and got sick of. But Scream plays to her strengths – sass, snarking and just a little bit of sympathy. Despite being a lifelong Charmed fan, it was this that was my first introduction to her.

But anyway we’re introduced to the rest of the teens.

Randy (Jamie Kennedy) and Stu (Matthew Lillard) – a horror movie buff and Tatum’s boyfriend respectively. The two get into a rather graphic discussion of how the killer would go about doing what s/he did to Casey – which makes Sidney quite uncomfortable. The reason why is revealed later at home when she watches a Gale Weathers news report; one year ago her own mother Maureen was murdered in her home. Another excellent way to introduce Gale, who will have a little bit of conflict with Sidney. But a different conflict comes when the killer phones her. Much like with Casey, they discuss horror movie cliches.

By 1996 slasher films were on the decline because audiences had gotten bored of those very tropes. Wes Craven’s intention here was to point out how silly each of them were, in the hopes that it would kill the genre for good. Well at least he tried.

The conversation turns sour when the killer taunts Sidney about her mother. Then he pops out of the closet! In a lovely bit of irony – after Sidney’s above complaint about the girl in horror movies going upstairs instead of out the front door – the safety chain is on the door. So she has literally no choice but to run upstairs. She barricades herself in her room and calls 911. Billy arrives in the nick of time but things look suspicious when a cell phone falls out of his pocket.

Back when cellphones were only used by people with important high-paying jobs. These days it’s like the movie is saying Billy’s a suspect because he and the killer both have SnapChat (someone please make that movie, stat). Everyone goes down to the police station, as Gale Weathers tries to get on the case too. After Drew Barrymore signed on, more established actors became interested in the film. And for Gale, the filmmakers really wanted a name actress. Elizabeth Berkley lobbied hard for it but this was 1996 and Showgirls had given her the Hollywood equivalent of the Ebola Virus. Who did they cast?

In another fun trivia bit that’ll be surprising for today’s viewers, Courteney Cox was turned down when she first tried for it. Not because they didn’t want a Friends cast member for the film; Courteney at this point in her career had mostly played soft, caring characters. They didn’t think she could play a bitch. Viewers of Scrubs, Dirt and every season of Friends after the fifth howl with laughter. I prefer Courteney’s take on Gale here than I do in the sequels. There they take the ‘shameless bitch’ thing and run with it, almost turning Gale into a caricature. Here she’s more balanced; she’s simply trying to get a good story regardless of how she does it. There’s conflict between her and Sidney not because Gale’s just a bitch, but because Gale is defending the man Sidney has accused of killing her mother. There’s plenty of softer moments with Dewey later on in the film, whereas the sequels have Gale sniping at everyone just because.

Anyway after getting done at the police station (where we learn that her father didn’t check into his airport or the hotel), Gale corners Sidney looking for an interview. It turns out she’s writing a book about her mother’s murder – and the movie will soon reveal that Gale was campaigning that her supposed killer (a man named Cotton Weary) was innocent. Sidney punches Gale but she can’t feel too good about it, as the killer rings her again!

The next day at school, Sidney confronts Gale again about the murder of her mother. Gale still believes that Cotton Weary was framed, and that he was having an affair with her mother. I’m going to praise Neve Campbell for keeping Sidney…well I won’t say likable but at least understandable. On paper, her behavior is pretty low. She’s really willing to let an innocent man get the death penalty because she doesn’t want to destroy the image she has in her head of the perfect mother. Unlike in the sequel when Sidney hits Gale again, it’s not a ‘right on’ moment; here it’s a symbol of the layers in her character. And unlike in The Craft Neve doesn’t switch personas (nice in one scene, bitchy in another) – this time she hits those layers and makes Sidney a flawed but understandable protagonist.

Gale meanwhile realises that if she can find Maureen’s real killer – who she now believes is the same one that killed Casey and her boyfriend – then her book sales will go through the roof. The students’ craziness seems to be going through the roof too – as a couple of them don the ‘Ghostface’ costume and run through the halls. Sidney’s day doesn’t get much better when she bumps into Billy – who insinuates that she hasn’t been the same since her mother died.

Sidney’s bad day becomes a shite day when – while sitting in the bathroom cubicle – she overhears two girls suggesting she was the killer or an attention seeker. Also slut shaming her mother for good measure. Kevin Williamson wanted to cut this scene to streamline the story, but Wes Craven insisted it was important to develop Sidney’s relationship to her mother. And my God, is Neve Campbell fantastic here. In her face you can instantly see her wrestling with the idea that her mother wasn’t the saint she thought she was. And if that isn’t enough, the killer attacks her in the bathroom.

The principal says all classes are suspended for now. And there’s a curfew in place to keep everyone in town safe. Gale Weathers starts sweet talking Dewey, but you honestly can’t tell if she’s just trying to weasel information or she actually likes him. The chemistry is so good it almost feels real…

Back at the empty school, the principal starts hearing strange noises in the building – which even in a self-aware horror film is a warning to don body armor and arm yourself with a chainsaw. After walking right by Wes Craven’s cameo as the school janitor, the killer ambushes him in his office. This was actually a death ordered by the producers – as they counted thirty-three script pages that went by without someone getting butchered. The principal getting killed also gave the teens a good reason to leave the party later.

Yes there is a party, because teenagers that’s why. Sidney even agrees to let her hair down for the night – also admitting that she thinks Billy has a point about her fear of intimacy. Tatum also seems to think that there is truth to the Cotton Weary = Maureen’s boy toy story. But she gets sent to fetch more beer from the garage…

That line really impressed me when I was 14 – “do these characters KNOW they’re in a movie?” – and Tatum trying to fight off the killer is a really well-done scene. We had our graphic deaths in Casey and her boyfriend, and our surprise death in Principal Himbry. Now it was time to see a protagonist really struggle with the killer. And we get to see the victim fight back and come close to escaping. With Tatum being a developed character and averting many of the cliches of a typical horror victim – she doesn’t sleep around, she’s not rebellious – the movie does a good job of making you think she’ll make it. Sadly she tries to crawl through a cat flap and meets her end courtesy of electric garage door. Not making this up, I swear.

Billy finally shows up at the party, and he and Sidney agree to talk. Upstairs. Make of that information what you will. But more importantly, it’s time for Randy to take the helm and explain all the rules one has to follow if you want to survive a slasher film:

You can never have sex.

You can never drink or do drugs.

You should never leave a room and say “I’ll be right back.”

Poor Gale Weathers makes that last mistake. She crashes the party to put a hidden camera there – but in her news van there’s a 30-second delay. She makes the mistake of telling her camera man Kenny she’ll be right back (though her lips seem to spell out ‘keep watching’) as she goes for a romantic walk with Dewey. During this time, the teens hear about the principal being killed and excitedly leave to look at the body because teenagers amirite? Gale and Dewey find Sidney’s father’s car abandoned on the side of the road!

Sidney is clearly oblivious to the fact that her dad may be nearby – as she decides that she wants to have sex with Billy! She’s the responsible brunette heroine in a horror film and she wants to lose her virginity. It doesn’t do Billy any favours however – as the killer jumps in on them and stabs him!

What follows is a sequence of the killer chasing Sidney through the house – and it was probably extra thrilling for a 1996 audience who thought she might actually die after having premarital sex. Even after having seen the movie way too many times to count, it’s still a great scene. Sidney escapes the house and makes it to Gale’s news van – where on the hidden camera they see the killer approaching Randy! The whole time he’s watching Halloween and telling Jamie Lee Curtis to turn around. Get it? Randy’s played by Jamie Kennedy and he’s saying “turn around, Jamie…”

They forget about the thirty-second delay on the video – and the killer shows up to slash the camera man’s throat. Sidney escapes him/her yet again and runs off just as Dewey and Gale get back. Dewey searches the house, which is empty but extra eerie with audio from Halloween still playing. Gale meanwhile walks into my favourite scene in the film where she finds the news van empty, blood all over the road and Kenny’s body on the roof. This whole sequence is just expertly done; jump scares can sometimes get annoying but not here. Wes Craven reveals the horror in perfect fashion – where it gets steadily worse as it goes on. By the time Kenny’s body slides down the windscreen, you wonder how much worse things are going to get.

Oh and Sidney makes Gale crash the news van. Accidentally I should add. The irony.

On the front porch, Sidney is confronted by a hysterical Stu and a hysterical Randy. Either one of them could be the killer, so she says “fuck you both” and goes inside with Dewey’s gun.

Hooray! Billy lives! He stumbles down the stairs and takes the gun, ready to protect Sidney. She decides to relent and opens the door to let Randy in. Too bad he gets shot immediately.

So Billy is the killer after all. When I first watched the film – genuine shock. I had no idea who it would be. The only time I’ve correctly guessed it with this franchise is the fourth film. Setting Billy up as a red herring and then having him turn out to be the killer…genius. But that’s not all.

The big twist at the time was that there were two killers instead of one. It’s not as shocking with every film in the franchise except the third pulling this stunt – but I can even remember going “whoa” when I realised Stu was also a killer. The two confess to killing Sidney’s mother, kidnapping her father and planning to frame him for all the deaths. They even start stabbing themselves so they’ll look like convincing victims to the police.

There’s something about Matthew Lillard’s performance here. It’s very hammy and out there…and yet it works. I feel as though nine times out of ten, this kind of acting will make you laugh at the ridiculousness. But this is that rare time that it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don’t laugh at Stu; you’re genuinely unnerved by him. He meanwhile gets unnerved by…

Gale exploits Horror Movie Logic 101 where if you didn’t see a body, they ain’t dead. And she points Dewey’s gun at the two boys. She however forgot to take the safety off, so Billy overpowers her and knocks her out. But this was enough for Sidney to escape and call the killers using the Ghostface voice changer – revealing that she also called the cops and reported them.

Ad-lib by Matthew Lillard, ladies and gentlemen. While Stu and Sidney have a struggle in the living room, he also ad-libbed “I always had a thing for ya, Sid” – and Neve Campbell in turn came up with “in your dreams” right before Sidney drops a TV on him.

As for Billy, he meets his end when Gale turns out to be alive and fires the gun for real this time. Randy too turns out to be alive, making it four survivors in total. And in the denouement Dewey is revealed to have survived as well. His death was filmed so that it could go either way, and Wes Craven decided to spare him on a day he was feeling particularly merciful. So the film gets finished off in one of the few times a happy ending is going against cliche – as horror films became infamous for their ‘final scare’ endings.

Back in the Enchanted review I listed all the Disney references hidden in the film, so I feel it’s only fair to do the same for Scream.

Casey’s father tells her mother to go to the McKenzies and call the police from their house – something Laurie tells Tommy and Lindsey to do in the finale of Halloween.

Casey is found hanging from a tree in a similar position to how Pat dies at the beginning of Suspiria.

Billy climbs through Sidney’s window just as Glen does to Nancy’s in Nightmare On Elm Street – and Skeet Ulrich is made to resemble Johnny Depp in that film.

Tatum’s outfit and hairstyle during her death scene are done to resemble Marcy from Friday the 13th.

The reporter who asks Sidney “how does it feel to be almost brutally butchered?” is played by Linda Blair, who was Regan in The Exorcist (which is name-dropped by Billy).

Joseph Whipp plays the Woodsboro sheriff. He had previously played a cop in Nightmare On Elm Street.

Wes Craven cameos as a janitor dressed like Freddy Kruger. The principal also calls him Fred.

The killer jumps out of the closet to attack Sidney just like Michael Myers does to Bob in Halloween.

The film opens with the killer calling Casey and harassing her over the phone – just like When A Stranger Calls.

The films rented for the party include Halloween (which we see them watching), The Fog, Terror Train, Prom Night (all Jamie Lee Curtis movies), The Evil Dead and Hellraiser.

Dewey and Sidney name drop The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Randy refers to Billy as ‘Leatherface’ – the killer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Casey discusses Halloween and Nightmare On Elm Street with the killer. Of the latter she says only the first one was good. There’s some self-deprecation there – as Wes Craven also directed the third film and New Nightmare. Casey also has to answer questions about Friday the 13th.

Billy’s last name is Loomis, after both the boyfriend in Psycho and Donald Pleasance’s character in Halloween. The latter also starred an actress called Nancy Loomis.

Randy name drops The Howling and Prom Night in the video store. Also the events happen on the anniversary of a relative’s death – just like Prom Night.

Tatum says to Sidney “you’re starting to sound like a Wes Carpenter flick” – referencing of course Wes Craven, and John Carpenter (director of Halloween and The Fog).

The scene with Cotton Weary is staged to resemble a similar scene in Nightmare On Elm Street where the characters watch a news report after what happened at Tina’s.

The Final Girl is a brunette, while her best friend who gets killed is a blonde. Just like Laurie and Lynda from Halloween, Nancy and Tina from Nightmare On Elm Street, Alana and Mitchy from Terror Train and Katy and Vicky from The House On Sorority Row.

Anyway Scream was a breath of fresh air when it came to the horror genre. I mentioned back in the Dark City review that we’re currently in a golden age of genre films right now – where sci-fi, fantasy and even horror are not just cult classics but Box Office smashes and earning critical acclaim. It might be just my personal opinion, but I feel as though Scream was the bridge between 80s B-movies and Get Out winning an Oscar. It wasn’t an immediate hit when it came out – and it actually took a couple of weeks for good word of mouth to really make things happen for it. But the success of this did lead to horror films becoming a little more respected – at least among commercial audiences. The very next year we got I Know What You Did Last Summer – a script Kevin Williamson had written before Scream but didn’t get greenlit until after. Both films saw their young cast members getting their careers launched and saw a brief second wave of slasher films – now with self aware characters.

Scream of course got two sequels to make a trilogy. I have to admit that something about Scream 2 doesn’t do it for me. While I enjoy the way it satirises horror sequels, and some people view it as better than the first, it’s number one that has my love. Scream 3 is perfectly watchable. And would you believe it’s actually the 2011 fourth film – satirising horror remakes – that’s my second favourite in the franchise? It’s the one I re-watch the most anyway. But I digress. We’ve come a long way from Michael Myers popping out of closets in Halloween to Get Out collecting the Best Screenplay award – but I will happily give the visionary Wes Craven (RIP) credit for giving the filmmakers of the future the key to eventually open those doors.

What’s your favourite grade?

*Story? It deconstructs slasher films while also reminding audiences why they loved them in the first place. Some expert direction leads to genuine thrills and twists that I didn’t see coming on my first watch anyway. A+

*Characters? Scream seems to be that rare thing known as a horror film where all its characters are likable. You’re sad to see literally every victim bite it. And the teens feel like actual characters – rather than just young victims there to be annoying and die horribly. Sidney is a great protagonist to root for. A+

*Performances? Neve Campbell brings it here when she didn’t in The Craft. The cast do very little wrong here – with notable standouts being Jamie Kennedy and Rose McGowan. I noted above that Matthew Lillard’s choice was risky but it paid off. B+

*Visuals? Special thought went into making each character have a subtly distinct look without obvious things like color-coding them. The sets too all had that memorable feel to them – Stu’s house especially. I always enjoy watching a movie that’s made in California and doesn’t try to hide it. B+

*Anything Else? Weaving all those references in gets a thumbs up in my book! B+

Up next is the wonderful world of Michael Powell – as Black Narcissus approaches.