Pizza & a Movie #41: "Scream"
There are certain rules one must abide by in order to survive a horror movie.
“Scream”
1996 • 1hr 51mins • R • Watch the Trailer
Tonight we explore the most fearsome setting of all: High school. It’s slasher classic Scream. No, not the 2015 series of the same name. No, not the identically titled 2022 sequel. The unbeatable 1996 classic, Scream.
Here’s the plot. High schooler Casey (Drew Barrymore) is home alone when the phone rings. The voice on the other end quizzes her on horror movie trivia, primarily to show off. Casey and her boyfriend don’t survive the game, ending up with their insides on the outside thanks to the knife of a killer in a Dollar Tree Halloween costume. The next day, Sidney (Neve Campbell) is in low-key crisis over the anniversary of her mom’s death one year earlier. The killer, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), is behind bars, though local reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) thinks he’s innocent. With her dad away on a business trip, Sidney waits for best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) to come over and keep her company. Casey’s killer calls, chasing Sidney through the house. As soon as the killer disappears, Sidney’s boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich), appears on the doorstep with a cellphone. He’s arrested as a suspect, but Sidney gets another call from the killer while he’s in the cooler. Can Sidney uncover who’s wearing the mask and live to see another Halloween? Does it have anything to do with her mom’s death? And how does a killer run in a polyester robe and heavy work boots anyway?
After this point, spoilers. I think it’s more fun to go in blind, but up to you.
The opening with Drew Barrymore is the perfect setup. It establishes the rules: Know your tropes if you want to make it to the final square on this gameboard. It also gets gross with gore to set the stakes. A flick with yucky stuff usually saves its red-dye-and-corn-syrup budget for the finale. But innards are out within the first fifteen here. Grossest stuff at the top—power move.
The events halfway through at Woodsboro High are a lesson in efficiency. We get backstory in the bathroom. Then we ask ourselves “Is the boyfriend the baddie?” in the stairwell. For a chaser, a grown-up gets gutted in the office. Is he the first? Will there be others? Principal Himbry’s death actually solved a final act dilemma for screenwriter Kevin Williamson: How do you get all the extras out of the room so the killers can reveal themselves? Answer: They leave to see if the principal’s really dead.
Why are we watching Scream? Because it changed the game. Horror as a genre had a bad brand. Direct-to-video releases made on a shoestring budget used blood and gore to distract from bad acting, uninteresting locations, plotlessness and shoddy filmmaking. “Horror” meant schlock and shock. But you can only shock so many times. By contrast, Scream put together an already famous cast. Created characters hyper-literate in horror flicks instead of bumbling fools. And? It fed us a list of the rules and a curriculum of the genre classics. We may owe our present-day concept of what the horror classics are to Scream itself, and Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven by proxy. You can even draw a direct line between Scream and The Cabin in the Woods, our best modern example of self-aware horror.
Scream changed the game in ‘96, but the game would change again. ’99 brought us The Sixth Sense, which is really a character drama pretending to be a horror movie. The Others would do the same thing two years after. The Blair Witch Project also landed in ’99, paving the way for later low-budget docu-style entries like Paranormal Activity. Resident Evil leaped to the big screen in ’02, arguably creating the action-horror film. Also in the class of ‘02: 28 Days Later. It was a big year for zombies. Saw and Hostel got grisly in ’04 and ’05, bringing viscera back in vogue. Both continued to serve up the yuck for the rest of the aughts. The 2010s showed us a blend between scares and story—Insidious (’10), The Cabin in the Woods (’12), The Babadook (’14), It Follows (’15), Train to Busan (’16), Get Out (’17), Hereditary (’18), Suspiria (’18) and others. A golden age of scary thinkers.
Within twenty years, horror went from a written-off genre to one so vibrant it encompasses well-defined subgenres—slasher, supernatural, found footage, prestige, action, zombie, etc. You can thank Scream for starting the revolution.
NOTES:
When Dimension acquired the script for Scream, it was titled “Scary Movie”. Four years later, Dimension would release Scary Movie, a spoof this very flick (among others).
Scream got bumped down from NC-17 to R by the MPAA by making the argument that its satire and comedy elements keep its violence from being literal for the audience. Pretty clever; probably true. Oh, and they still had to edit a bunch of stuff out.
This opened a week before Christmas. It seems bored youths on Christmas break are responsible for its $100M domestic take. It ended up with $173M against a $15M budget. Also out in ’96: Independence Day and Mission: Impossible.
Special effects company KNB Effects mixed up fifty-plus gallons of fake blood for the production.
Dimension, a subdivision of Miramax, focused on horror. Their big gets before Scream were The Crow (’94) and From Dusk till Dawn (earlier in ’96).
Fred, the high school janitor dressed like Freddy Krueger, is a cameo by Wes Craven himself. You’d know him as the writer/director of Friday the 13th (’80), mostly. He worked a lot and became a brand name in himself.
If you watched a lot of daytime TV in the early 2000s, you know Rose McGowan from the WB show Charmed. Her first film role was in Encino Man (hey, we covered that one!).
If you’re itching for more famous teens in a mid-‘90s slasher, put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after this.
Scream’s watch list: Halloween (’78), When A Stranger Calls (’79), Friday the 13th (’80), Prom Night (’80), A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).
This whole movie could have been solved with voicemail.