Long before Cabin in the Woods or Zombieland, a master gave us his take on meta-horror.
The 80’s were a boom time for horror movies. Even though the much of the era’s output may be of dubious quality, there is no denying that horror was in the zeitgeist when I was growing up. Freddy, Jason, Pinhead and Michael Myers were bona fide cultural icons, and the horror aesthetic was simply in the ether. By the mid-90s, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. The most popular horror films being released were lousy (Fear, anyone?) and the only real descendant of those great 80’s franchises was, what, Leprechaun? Ugh. So it’s easy to understand how effortlessly Wes Craven was able to capture the imagination of people my age when he entered this wasteland with his fresh, cool and self-aware take on the slasher film. It’s hard to overstate how popular Scream was with the late teen/early 20s set. Sure it was enough of a box office success to spawn a handful of sequels and “inspire” a slew of knock-offs (I Know What You Did Last Summer was an entire, successful franchise based on ripping off Craven), but the real yardstick of popularity was the fact that you couldn’t have a gathering of three or more young people in 1997 without it turning into a group viewing of the film, or at least without having someone throw on the video in the background.
The question is whether or not Scream actually deserves all of that love, now that we have some distance from the situation and it’s no longer the “savior of the horror genre.” It’s a tough question to answer, not helped by the fact that I’ve probably seen this thing 20 times. Let’s start with the script, which is certainly more clever than the average horror fare, but still very beholden to the slasher structure. There are red herrings, a virginal final girl and a commendable body count, all leading up to the climax where we learn the killer’s true identity and motivations. The lack of originality is mitigated, though perhaps not as much as Craven thinks, by the meta commentary of the movie. It has to follow these specific beats because it is just as much a dissection of the slasher genre as it is an entry into the same. However, while novel at the time, I don’t find that the meta elements actually say anything about the genre at all. Yes, it’s fun that these kids live in a universe where horror movies exist and understand all of the tropes, but that’s pretty much the extent of it.
The acting is, again, better than average for this type of movie, but it’s remarkable how unlikable many of these characters are. Much of that is owed to the writing, which basically posits that all teenagers are raging sociopaths (spoiler: some of these teenagers are actually raging sociopaths.) We have unfortunately seen the aftermath of real life high school tragedies, and teens shockingly possess the same capacity for empathy that we have seen in regular human beings. In the film’s universe, however, they are faced with the brutal dismemberment of their classmates and any emotion is substituted by the snark of Rose McGowan or the screech of Matthew Lillard. Only nice girl Neve Campbell seems to be affected by the murders, and that’s only because her mother was brutally dismembered less than a year prior to the movie’s events.
All flaws aside, however, Scream does actually hold up as a very fun horror movie. It’s is tightly constructed, elegantly simple and easy to watch in a way that was never re-captured in the increasingly more muddled and less plausible sequels. There are not a lot of moments of true scariness, but the opening sequence remains one of the most effective horror set pieces ever committed to film. The way we are introduced to the killer (his iconic scary voice, ghost mask and penchant for getting kicked in the nuts) and the discussion of the classic 80’s movies serve as a neat encapsulation of the film to follow. More importantly, it is genuinely pretty terrifying. That scene is filled with more tension and gore than anything else on offer in the series. Particularly, the section where Drew Barrymore’s mother tries to call 911 only to hear her daughter’s whimpers and gasps as she is being drug across the lawn, phone still in hand, has always stuck with me and feels even more desperately chilling now that I have children of my own. So, maybe Scream isn’t quite as brilliant as we all thought it was twenty years ago, but it certainly is a worthy addition to any Halloween viewing schedule. If nothing else, you have to tee it up to witness that great opening 15 minutes.
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