Scream (1996)

Official trailer

Scream is Wes Craven’s 1996 American slasher film depicting a high school targeted by a killer in a Ghostface mask who knows horror-genre conventions and uses them against his victims.

Neve Campbell plays Sidney Prescott. Drew Barrymore plays Casey Becker. David Arquette plays Dewey Riley. Courteney Cox plays Gale Weathers. Skeet Ulrich plays Billy Loomis. Matthew Lillard plays Stu Macher. Rose McGowan plays Tatum Riley. Kevin Williamson wrote the screenplay, his first produced screenplay.

Dimension Films and Miramax produced the film for theatrical release in December 1996 to major commercial success that revitalized the slasher subgenre after its mid-1990s commercial decline.

What I love about Scream is that it’s a smart-mouthed movie that scares me anyway. It cracks jokes about the rules of horror while the knife stays real, and very few films manage both at once. My only complaint is that the rules talk gets a little pleased with itself in stretches, and that’s what holds it at a 9.

Scream works as a real slasher film and a piece of meta-commentary about slasher films at the same time. Kevin Williamson’s screenplay makes the characters aware of horror-genre conventions, and they discuss them openly, with rules-of-horror conversations built into the narrative.

That gives the film permission to use slasher conventions while acknowledging them, and 1996 horror audiences hadn’t encountered anything like it. I think that balance is the film’s great trick, and it revitalized the subgenre for the following decade.

The Drew Barrymore Opening

The film’s opening sequence with Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker has become a landmark opening scene in modern horror. Barrymore was the film’s highest-billed actor and was marketed as the production’s lead. Her death within the first ten minutes worked against audience expectations in a manner similar to Psycho’s Marion Crane death thirty-six years earlier, with the structural parallel deliberately invoked by Williamson’s screenplay.

The opening sequence runs about thirteen minutes and is a miniature horror film inside the feature.

The phone-call menace, the horror-trivia interrogation, the home-invasion violence and the brutal death set the tone before the plot even begins. I’d rank it above any horror opening I can name, and the trivia quiz is the part that disturbs me. Later horror productions have imitated it without matching it.

The Meta-Horror Structure

Williamson’s screenplay establishes that the characters are horror-genre literate and discuss the rules of horror films openly. Randy Meeks, the video-store-clerk character played by Jamie Kennedy, delivers the rules speech at a party midway through the film, explaining that you can never have sex, never drink or do drugs, and never say ‘I’ll be right back’ in a horror film. The rules are then deliberately violated by the surrounding plot.

The meta-structure could have collapsed into pure parody if Williamson had committed only to genre commentary. The screenplay keeps real slasher stakes throughout.

The characters know they’re in a horror situation, talk about the conventions, and then suffer or survive those conventions anyway. I think that’s why the film holds up where its imitators don’t, because the jokes never let anyone off the hook. The one place it gets a little smug for me is Randy’s rules speech.

Wes Craven’s Direction

Wes Craven had directed A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 and was approaching his career as a senior horror professional by 1996. His direction handles Williamson’s screenplay with the particular craftsmanship that the meta-structure required: serious enough that the horror works, light enough that the comedy works, integrated enough that neither tone undermines the other.

Craven’s set-pieces include the opening Barrymore sequence, the bathroom encounter, the garage-door killing, and the final-act house party with Ghostface attacking several victims at once. The garage door is the one that makes me squirm hardest. Each sequence shows professional horror craftsmanship that the meta-commentary never interrupts, and I don’t think any horror director-writer pairing has struck this balance as well since.

Is Scream as good as people say?

I give Scream a 9 because it’s scary, funny and smart at the same time, and very few horror films manage even two of those. Craven’s direction, Williamson’s screenplay, the Barrymore opening and the meta-horror structure add up to a film that has shaped horror filmmaking for nearly three decades. It misses a 10 because the rules talk occasionally admires itself a bit too much. Everything else about it works for me.

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