Scream Review

 

I’ve started to think twice about the movies I picked when covering the nineties. Mind you, Jacob’s Ladder is rather good as well as this one. Although, I felt that I should’ve picked other films such as The Blair Witch Project and an assortment of others that are regarded as decent. I think I can attribute it to how the genre in that time was declining in quality. Mind you, there are good ones, but a vast majority were hitting the bargain bins. Wes Craven’s Scream manages to poke fun at itself and be self-aware as far as a horror movie goes. SPOILERS will appear in the review. 

1. Story

        The movie is a mix of a high school movie, a whodunit, and a slasher. In no way does it feel that it feels incoherent or just tone deaf. So it starts with Drew Barrymore’s character getting a phone call. It starts innocently enough as the caller stated it was a wrong number. Then he calls again and starts to antagonize the first victim with what her favorite scary movie is. 

        She answers and the killer who is only known as Ghostface kills her boyfriend and the young girl. Word spreads throughout the high school. Our main character Sidney played by Neve Campbell is shocked by it and her friends joke about who the killer really is. All the friends are typical horror movie tokens. You got the girl who we root for, the ditsy girl Tatum, the boyfriend Billy, the class clown Stu, and the geek Randy. One thing to note is that Matthew Lillard is in the film and it’s just astonishing that he looks like Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Which led him to be cast in the film. 

        Soon, Sidney is being stalked by the killer and starts to become paranoid that her boyfriend is the killer. Meanwhile, the controversial news broadcaster Gale Weathers played by Courtney Cox, pesters Sidney since she believes that Sidney’s mom’s killer is innocent. Ultimately, the principal decides to cancel classes and Stu decides to throw a party to celebrate. 

From there, Sidney soon comes face to face with the killers. That wasn’t a typo, she finds an accomplice, but I won’t reveal who they are. 

2. The Self-Awareness of Being Meta

        Obviously, the main highlight is that film is self-aware for what it is. Technically, it’s not the first film to be a meta horror. Years earlier, Wes Craven made New Nightmare, I can assume that it was the first horror film to be aware of itself. Since it dealt with the idea of making a movie that involved Freddy Krueger. Where they had to make more movies about the character since he’s a demon. 

        Here though, the characters cite that their lives are like a movie. Right down to doing the obligatory love making scene. It doesn’t feel force or any of the characters look at the camera and giving an obvious wink to the audience. The whole thing works since there are many red herrings to figure out who the killer is. We assume its Randy since he’s into movies and Ghostface uses movie trivia to get to the victim’s houses. 

        I think the best example of this is when Sidney turns the tables on the killers. She dials the phone to mess with them mentally. It brilliant because playing in the background is Halloween (1978), where Laurie is fighting back against Michael Myers. In Scream, Sidney is using the very thing to fight back the killers. 

3. Use of Movies

        Like I mentioned earlier, most of the cast talk about movies and poke fun at the idea. In the first act when we see Sidney and Billy, he says that their relationship was like The Exorcist but edited for television. I feel that the use of the movies in general is to make their lives more eventful than what they really are. Since Billy wants to take the relationship to NC-17 levels. You can look that up since I don’t want to elaborate

        I think the times where the characters start to comment on the horror movies is when they are in contact with Ghostface. When he goes after Tatum, she starts teasing him since she wants to be in the sequel. The self-awareness works since they are playing it completely straight. Another example is when Randy starts to explain the rules to survive a horror movie. He states the rules and throughout the final act he manages to survive alongside Sidney. 

        The whole movie motif is interesting since the killings are happening to the small town that the main characters are using movies as a way to have an escaped reality to take their minds off the Ghostface killings. Like when Tatum asks Sidney who would play her when the whole things is turned into a movie. 

4. Legacy

        It was no surprise that Wes Craven had another success under his belt. It really reinvigorated the horror genre due to the change with the status quo. With that, many imitators try to put their spin with the updated teenage angle. The movie I Know What You Did Last Summer tried to replicate what made Scream successful but didn’t get the same results critically. 

        I want to acknowledge that my first exposure to Scream was through the parody movie Scary Movie. It spawned its own series which to be honest, only the first and third ones were decent. They just got stupid for their own good. Since they used Wes Craven’s film as a basis to mock it and to point fun at the other contemporary pop culture happenings that were relevant in the late 90s to 2000. 

        Although, Scream did a better job at poking fun at the tropes and cliches in a horror movie since it was entirely the whole point of the film. More so when films that had either Leatherface, Jason Voorhees and even Michael Myers were not well received and usually resorted to being straight to video or getting thrashed critically with a low box office return. 

5. Overall

        I’m glad that I got to watch this one to close out the 90s outlook on horror movies. Probably next year I can explore other films that were good in their own during the decade since most of the established horror icons’ films were not doing so well. Scream is probably one of the most interesting and game changing horror film due in large part that it acknowledged what it was since it didn’t beat the audience over the head. 

    Scream gets a four out of five.