As the '80s came to a close, so did what was termed "the Golden Age of slasher movies." While they were still around during the first half of the '90s, they weren't as successful or as prevalent as they were in the decade prior. The entire genre itself was suffering from lowered box office returns at the time. But things changed when legendary horror auteur Wes Craven teamed up with Dawson's Creek creator Kevin Williamson to make Scream. A deconstruction of slasher movies, Scream reinvigorated not only the very genre it set out to mock, but horror as a whole. It spawned movies like Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer, made a ton of money at the box office, and was actually greeted fairly warmly by professional movie critics. And as a fan of horror movies, I can tell you that Scream is one of the best of the '90s.
Welcome to Woodsboro, a small California town that is rocked when two high school students are brutally murdered by someone in a cheap Halloween costume. Their classmate, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), is hit especially hard by the tragedy, as it occurred close to the one-year anniversary of her mother's rape and murder. She soon receives a phone call from the killer (the voice of Roger L. Jackson), who taunts Sidney before breaking into her house and attacking her.
Circumstantial evidence seemingly points at her boyfriend, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). But when Sidney gets a second call from the killer that Billy couldn't possibly have made, she begins to doubt herself. Things aren't helped by the presence of Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), an aggressive tabloid TV reporter who starts harassing Sidney in hopes of digging up some dirt. Gale had had previously written a book that implied the man sent to prison for Sidney's mother's murder was really innocent and essentially accused Sidney of being a liar, so the bad blood between them only gets worse. But this is only compounded by the killer's continued stalking of Sidney and her friends, the body count steadily rising as time goes on.
Scream is an awesome flick. Watching it nowadays, you can see that the production is very much a product of the mid-'90s. But it still holds up as a great horror flick even fifteen years after its initial release. Yeah, it has a few cracks in its veneer that have appeared over the last decade and a half, most of which is due to advances in phone technology. But it doesn't stop Scream from being one of the best contributions to the genre to come out of the '90s.
It's also one of the last truly good movies to be directed by Wes Craven. The guy is a horror legend, but the vast majority his output since Scream was released hasn't been all that good. Cursed sucked, My Soul To Take bombed, and most of the movies he's credited as either writer or producer on have been mediocre at best. But Scream, on the other hand, is some of his best work. Craven perfectly balances the horror with the wit and humor that its script brings to the table.
This is most readily apparent in the movie's opening sequence. It starts innocently enough, with a pretty teenage girl (played by Drew Barrymore, which I assume was a bit of stunt casting meant to invoke memories of Janet Leigh in Psycho) answering a phone call from someone who's dialed a wrong number. The caller keeps calling back, eventually striking up a conversation. But the calls quickly evolve from seemingly flirtatious to creepy to threatening. The caller is soon forcing her to answer horror movie trivia questions, which will result in the painful and bloody demises of her and her boyfriend if she answers incorrectly. While the scene does owe a little to the first twenty minutes of When A Stranger Calls, it perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Craven uses the scene to say that it's all fun and games until somebody gets gutted out on the back porch, and he does so in a genuinely frightening way.
But Craven doesn't burn out early. He keeps the ball rolling steadily for the entirety of Scream's 111-minute running time. The scenes between the terror set pieces are fun and amusing, and the horror scenes are tense and suspenseful. One of the best moments is a scene where David Arquette's character enters a house in search of the killer. It's a short scene, but it's a spooky moment, especially how Craven handles it. The scene is one long Steadicam shot, following Arquette through the first floor of the house. And instead of being set to a piece of music, Craven perfectly uses audio from John Carpenter's Halloween to set the mood. The moment only lasts maybe twenty or thirty seconds, but it works incredibly well.
Craven also benefits from having a great screenplay to work from. Scream marked the first of four movies Kevin Williamson would write for Craven, and while he would go on to achieve greater fame for Dawson's Creek, he was an unproven commodity in 1996. Scream was his first big project, and I think he pulled it off excellently. What Williamson did with Scream was deconstruct every notable slasher movie trope and cliché and put them back together again, only with a wit and aplomb that most slasher movies don't have. Not once does it come across as a mean-spirited like the Scary Movie franchise. Instead, Williamson brings intelligence to it. He actually manages to subvert those tropes and clichés while playing them straight at the same time.
Williamson's script is essentially a breath of fresh air for a genre that had become stale and stagnant. Good slasher movies had practically died with the '80s, leaving us with movies like The Dentist and Dr. Giggles during the first half of the '90s. But Williamson wrote something that was not only a damn fine horror movie in its own right, but is smart to the point of self-awareness. There aren't too many intelligent slasher movies to begin with, but Scream's self-awareness allows Williamson to write both a parody of and a love letter to the great slasher flicks of the '80s.
This brings us to the cast, which — unlike other slasher movies — boasts actors with actual talent. As good as Craven's direction and Williamson's writing are, they'd have been out of luck with even a mediocre group of actors. But they managed to score big with a cast that was on their A-game for the entire flick. Playing the lead role is Neve Campbell, who was hired due to her work on Party of Five. (And really, Scream was the movie that started the trend of horror movies hiring actors from popular teen-oriented TV shows.) Campbell is wonderful in the role, giving Sidney both a certain sweetness and the vulnerability that the character needed in order to be a credible heroine. Had she appeared in more horror movies beyond the Scream sequels, Campbell would have made a great "Scream Queen."
I also really enjoyed David Arquette and Courteney Cox. Their characters couldn't be more different, as Arquette plays a cop who is a genuinely nice guy and Cox plays a stone cold bitch who'd send her own mother up the river for a story. But both Cox and Arquette play their roles with an energy that makes both of them really endearing in their own ways. We also get a good performance from Skeet Ulrich, who has a real "early Johnny Depp" vibe about him. Ulrich is no Johnny Depp, that's for sure, but he does have a striking presence that makes him worth watching.
And since Scream boasts some comedic elements, it's also got some comic relief. That comes to us courtesy from Jamie Kennedy. I thought Kennedy's performance was give or take; there were some scenes where I wanted to hit him. But that's just the way it goes with comic relief sometimes.
But my favorite performances came from Matthew Lillard and Roger L. Jackson. I thought Lillard was a lot funnier than Kennedy, and that he was nothing short of amusing every second he's on the screen. Jackson, meanwhile, actually has one of the most important roles in the movie, despite never showing his face on camera. He gives the killer a feeling of malice even when he's trying to convince his victims he's trying to be friendly. Jackson's performance is one of the true highlights of the movie, and Scream would have been poorer without him.
I don't care what anybody says; Scream is a terrific horror movie. Its impact may have been diluted somewhat over the years due to the knockoffs, wannabes, and various other genre deconstructions and reconstructions that have been released in its wake. But that doesn't stop the movie from being a fun, frightening flick from start to finish. Movies like Adam Green's Hatchet, ones that tout themselves as the next big slasher success story, wish they were only half as good as Scream. And on the usual scale, it's going to get four stars and a proud recommendation. And with Scream 4 being released today, here's hoping it can live up to the original.
Final Rating: ****
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