In the opening scene of Scream Drew Barrymore is warmed to horror movies on the phone, after which she is made cold. The unpredictability of that scene – Barrymore is just about the biggest name in the generic at that time – makes the franchise immortal in one fell swoop.
Just as memorable as the first act is the Munchian scream mask of protagonist Ghostface, a horror classic-obsessed killer who terrorizes teenagers in the Woodsboro suburbs with a gleaming knife and macabre movie trivia. Ghostface becomes the Freddy Krueger of the nineties. As funny as it is creepy, and just as witty as it is crafty.
Humor in the shudder
The year is 1996. Mobile phones are still a bizarre curiosity, doors do not have to be closed spontaneously at night and horror has crept into a dead end street. That’s the decor in which Scream comes to life. The humor in the shudder is largely lost in the early 1990s, after slasher films had reached the bottom a decade earlier.
Director Wes Craven is also lost. He made his mark in the horror industry with gory low-budget films like Last House on the Left (1972) in The Hills Have Eyes (1977). But his big commercial breakthrough comes with A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), the first film in a highly lucrative franchise centered on psychopathic dream killer Freddy Krueger.
With the Elm Streetmovies, the commandments for the slasher genre are pretty much set in stone. Every time in such a slasher film it is about a maniacal sadist who kills in a bloody way. However, those same film conventions will begin to erode horror films afterwards: screenplays become eerily predictable and the genre loses the public’s attention when intelligent, nerve-racking horror is taken as Silence of the Lambs appears on the white screen.
Craven doesn’t know what kind of wood to make arrows from, until he realizes that the offending conventions of the slasher film might as well serve as a parody. He already proves that in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) but that movie flops. The time is not yet ripe for satire and meta humor. Five years later, that is the case with the postmodern horror comedy Scream. The film becomes a real blockbuster, with screenwriter Kevin Williamson and Craven starting a revival of teenage horror.
the virgin
What Scream What makes it so refreshing in the first place is that horror fanatic Williamson hilariously cuts through all possible horror clichés. The sexy, overage-looking teenagers in his story, who have to unravel the murder mystery in their village, are no longer the naive country bumpkins of yesteryear. They know the laws of the slasher genre like the back of their hands, so they know that the police are always just a little late and that the girl who remains a virgin has the best chance of survival. But the murderous knife puller in the story turns out to be at least as well aware of the cinephile conventions.
In this ‘meta-slasher’ the laws of the genre are deconstructed and visualized. You will not survive the fatal attacks if you have sex, drink alcohol or use drugs. You won’t survive the movie either if you briefly leave with the message “I’ll be right back” or with a thin voice beeping “Who’s there?”.
Everyone is also a suspect in these whodunnits, which will be exploited in an almost silly way in the Screamfranchise. The bumbling culprit, who takes a formidable beating in every murder scene during his murderous raid, also mocks the arch-villain’s usually otherworldly powers in slasher movies.
Other directors
Tomorrow comes the fifth Scream from. Whether it will shock the horror world just as cheerfully, remains to be seen. But that Scream being honored as a modern milestone is beyond question. This sequel features many of the cast returning from previous films, including Courteney Cox, David Arquette and lead actress Neve Campbell. There is a big shift in the director’s chair. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett take the honours, as Craven passed away in 2015.
“We were afraid to do it without Craven,” Campbell recently admitted to comicbook.com. “He was the master and the reason these movies were so great. But Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett wrote to us that they became directors because of Craven. It is truly their wish to honor his legacy.”
Which also helps for the Screamfranchise is that shudder and horror are currently experiencing a renaissance. Not even in the daily reality of a pandemic, but also in modern classics like It Follows (2015), Get Out (2017) in Hereditary (2018).
Scream shook up the horror world by creating heroes who weren’t led to the slaughter like sheep and by ignoring the predictability of horror. “Craven reimagined the film landscape at least twice,” said Jordan Peele, director of Get Out in Us, who by the way is venturing on a remake of Craven’s horror classic The People Under the Stairs. “He wrote the tables of the Ten Commandments Nightmare, the other time with Scream. In either case, you must honor those commandments.”
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