Scream (1996)

What’s your favourite scary movie? Not a question anyone can really answer easily, anyone who can really hasn’t put much thought into their choice. Sometimes you can even struggle to come up with a Desert Island Discs of horror films. It’s not a question that’s easy to answer without it turning into a full-blown discussion. A lot of the time people know the problems in answering this question, so why do they ask it? Before Scream (1996) it’s unlikely that anyone would ask you that question, and certainly not with that knowing and half-joking smile on their face. At a time when the horror genre was in a nadir the mixture of horror fan newcomer screenwriter Kevin Williamson, genre legend director Wes Craven, Bob Weinstein’s money, and a host of already established young actors gave the genre a much needed shot in the arm and for a number of years was the high water mark of a successful horror film. As you may know our reviews always contain spoilers, so be warned before you read on.

By the time of the mid-90s the horror genre was on the wane, years of nothing but decreasing budgets and quality of slasher franchise sequels before going straight to DVD meant that a genre that had never been well thought of at the best of times was perhaps a few more years of declining quality away from going on the same shelf as the softcore pornography in Blockbuster. Even films that are unmistakably horror but were of a higher quality than most marketed themselves as thrillers rather than horror to avoid the stigma (see multiple Academy Award winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and critically acclaimed Se7en (1995)). It was in this climate that screenwriter Kevin Williamson, in need of a quick cash injection, combined a recent news story about a home invasion serial killer with his love of the great horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, going so far as to listen to the soundtrack to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) whilst writing what he called at the time Scary Movie. Taking inspiration from the early slasher films the identity of the killer is part of a whodunit rather than going for the unstoppable monster that characters like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees would become by the late 1980s, it works so much better for such a self-aware film that the audience is constantly guessing who the killer is as opposed to just having constant POV shots of some lurking figure peering at the characters from the bushes.

A lot of credit must be given to the direction and the acting in screen that translated the films horror and humour so well from script to screen. The use of actors already established on either television or film lends it a depth of acting talent that had been missing from much of the horror output of the 1980s, to the point where killing off the film’s most famous actor (Drew Barrymore) in the first fifteen minutes – which has to be the boldest move since Janet Leigh never made it out of the shower in Psycho (1960). Although most of the main cast for the most part look too old to be high school students, the characters are played convincingly enough that it’s never jarring. We get most of our comedic value from David Arquette as dopey local deputy Dewey Riley, Courtney Cox as tabloid reporter Gale Weathers, Jamie Kennedy as horror aficionado Randy Meeks, and Matthew Lillard as class clown turned serial killer Stu Macher. Rounding out the main cast we have Neve Campbell in her best girl next door mode as final girl Sidney Prescott, Rose McGowan as her best friend Tatum Riley, and Skeet Ulrich seemingly possessed by Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as her boyfriend and murderer Billy Loomis. Most of the cast had a least a few credits under their belt already that helps the film maintain your attention through good performances, but would such casting have been made under another director. Wes Craven has always been gifted with getting good naturalistic actors for his films. Even more than luck with casting he has always managed to bring a real humanity to all of his horror films, albeit sometimes a depraved humanity. Craven’s direction always really lends itself well to the creation of tension and suspense, sometimes better than actual horror. It can be difficult sustain threatening phone calls as a source of terror for as long as this film does (witness When a Stranger Calls (1979) as an example) yet Scream manages to keep the entire first act engaging based entirely around these; which really comes down to the script, the performances (in particular Roger L. Jackson as the voice of the killer), and Craven’s direction of slowly building tension into dread into terror during these sequences.

There is a very long and possibly heated argument to be had on whether Scream is more of a comedy or a horror film, with one smug idiot in the corner saying it’s neither and it’s actually a mystery thriller. Whilst it is all three of these it is unmistakably a horror film, there’s sincerity to the horror that you don’t get in most outright comedy horrors. Can Scream be considered truly scary though? The short answer is yes; the long answer is yes but you’ll need to look elsewhere if you’re looking for a “jumpy” horror. Take for example the opening scene, while most home invasion films that have come since have quickly resorted to having faces at the window and shadowy figures crossing doorways behind the protagonists while violins screech, here the horror is conveyed entirely through the characters interaction with a voice on the phone – almost like a good stage play or audio drama. It is a pretty comedic film as well though, mainly achieved through dialogue when the film isn’t scary and then only from a few characters. Matthew Lillard deserves specific mention, managing to make the character of Stu Macher even funnier after it’s revealed he has murdered multiple people. After finding out the police are on their way he tearfully laments that “My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me” before having the phone wrenched from his hands by his partner in crime and thrown back at his head, causing Stu to scream “why’d you hit me with the phone, dick?” Of course it’s all in Lillard’s delivery and along with David Arquette and Jamie Kennedy provides a number of laugh out loud moments in the film. As a whodunit Scream is serviceable, providing enough suspects and red herrings for the audience to have fun guessing who the killer is. Like a lot of whodunits (especially those written by Mrs. A. Christie) the actual killer is suspected quite early on only to be given an alibi that proves they aren’t the killer then in the final act revealing the presence of two killers one of whom is the obvious suspect who was previously eliminated. In spite of well tread ground of mystery twists we believe this was the first time it had been done in a slasher film, even the early whodunit slashers (Prom Night (1980) or Terror Train (1980)) leaving only one possible suspect left standing by the final act or introducing someone we’ve never met before.

A lot of the times with film you can’t tell if something going to be truly a milestone under years after it had been released, awards and box office are no method of telling. One way of judging how effective a film has been is through its imitators. Scream managed to inspire copycats within a year of being released and initially written off as a bomb that defied expectations. The late 1990s saw a resurgent boom of teen slasher films, all of them with a post-modern twist inspired by this film. Even once the boom had died down the trend of genre savvy almost self-referential characters continued for long after, in some ways it has never gone away. Screams importance to the horror genre cannot be overstated from where it was before the film came out, swiftly becoming purely straight-to-video sequels with only a handful of films released in the cinemas of which the most ambitious would call themselves thrillers, to going back to mainstream success that really hasn’t gone away since with mainstream horror releases numbering in double digits for most years of this century. That’s not to say that Scream was the first self-referential or meta horror film (as we examined in our 1990s handful), but it was the one that got people flocking to horror films in numbers that hadn’t been seen since the early 1980s. The genre would have reached these successes again eventually even without Scream, but it was Scream that achieved it and twenty years later its success can still be seen.

Scream is a milestone of the horror genre, it’s well written, well directed, and well acted; but while it’s scary the first time you see it like most slasher mystery films it is one that doesn’t stick with you long after it. The film is also so of its time in the mid 1990s that at times you can feel like you’re watching the cast of Saved by the Bell kill each other (which would have been better than Hawaiian Style (1992) but I digress). Considering all the film has going for it these are a few minor flaws though, and as such Scream gets an A- rating from both Kris and me, Ryan. If you want to spend an evening watching Scream and other late 90s slashers (and let’s face it, who wouldn’t?) then we recommend a four course feast of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Urban Legend (1998), and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) (this last can be eliminated for something smaller); if you like Scream and only Scream then you can follow up the original with Scream 2 (1997), Scream 3 (2000), and Scream 4 (2011). With all of that out of the way now, what’s your favourite scary movie?

Ryan’s Grade: A-

Kris’s Grade: A-

Odds & Ends

For evidence of how horror films were calling themselves thrillers to avoid the stigma of being horror check out the tagline on the poster at the top of the review.

Henry Winkler (The Fonz) appears the high school principle, I always forget this and never get over it when I remember.

Scream gave us three rules for surviving a horror film – 1: don’t drink or do drugs, 2: don’t have sex, 3: never say “I’ll be right back”. Like most genre rules these don’t hold up once you pass the point of no return of watching horror films almost religiously.

There is a Scream TV show from MTV, your reviewers have watched the first couple episodes and it is not worth the effort. I’d go into more detail but I’d end up punching the screen.

Look out for Wes Craven’s cameo as janitor Fred – complete with red and green striped jumper and fedora.

We mentioned in the review that Williamson’s original title was Scary Movie, this later became the title of horror movie parody Scary Movie (2000) from the Wayans brothers. It mostly parodies Scream which has never made much sense to me parodying what is already pretty much a parody, but it has nostalgia value for people who grew up in that period. Unfortunately this means there are people who conflate Scream and Scary Movie into one film.

Some aspects of technology really date this film to the late 1990s, probably the worst example is when Sidney suspects her boyfriend is the killer because he’s carrying a mobile phone. It gets even funnier when the Sheriff is interrogating Billy and enquires “Just what are you doing with a cellular phone”. This dated the film I think even four years later.

One of the reasons it was presumed the film would do badly was the time of year it was released. One week before Christmas. Yes, Scream was technically a Christmas film and it celebrates it’s twentieth anniversary on the date of this review (18th December, 2016).