11. Scream (1996, Wes Craven)
By Eivind Langdal
30th September 2009

Scream is all about questions. Why do characters in horror films always make stupid decisions that results in their gory demises? Does people in movies ever go to the movies themselves? It doesn’t answer the first question, but it answers the second, because in Scream, people go the movies. They know them. They remember them. They talk about them. At times, they come ridiculously close to realizing they are in one. That they ultimately do not, is because they’re not technically in a movie anymore than you and I are. If you asked them, it’s all real.

Of course, nothing is real in Scream. It is a movie. But it is a movie made by real people. One of them is its director, Wes Craven, whom you might or might not know is somewhat of a prolific figure in the horror genre. Another is its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, whom with Scream wrote a film that this horror column simply couldn’t have lived without reviewing. Instead of writing a horror film where horror films seemingly doesn’t exist, he wrote one where they not only exists, but is such an important part of the characters’ lives that when a killer turns out to be on the loose in their small town, they discuss which one of them is the likeliest suspect based on whom would likely be the killer in a horror movie.

Scream is to the horror genre what the brilliant TV mini-series Generation Kill is to previous depictions of war in visual mediums (you know, not radio). In Generation Kill, the soldiers are not normal guys from all over America who has been drafted in the war and seemingly wants nothing but to go home. No, they are men (or overgrown boys, to be more specific) who have volunteered and is more interesting in a rumor that Jennifer Lopes might be dead than the current location of Saddam Hussein. Same goes for the characters in Scream, who, despite being part of a known story, are, in the end, just ordinary people. Sure, they are, like the characters of many horror films, victims of a masked killer, but before their lives turned into a horror plot, they lived a normal life as normal human beings. Those who survive the film, still do the same after it is finished. You’d think that movie characters that have a life beyond the plot would be more commonplace, but as Scream reminds us, that is not the case.

The film begins with one of the most well written scenes in the genre. A girl named Casey is home alone, making popcorn. She’s about to watch a scary film when a guy suddenly calls her. He says he had the wrong number, so she hangs up. But then he calls her back, and slowly, Casey realizes the guy had the right number from the beginning. He starts taunting her with questions about horror films, first as a seemingly innocent game, later as a mean to decide if she will live or die. In a way, this scene is like a smaller part of the movie it belongs to. On one side, it is deliberately tongue-in-cheek with its clever references to horror icons like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, but on the other side, it is also very, very scary, and when Casey realizes exactly how important it is that she gives the right answers to the guy’s questions, the scene has already become extremely tense.

As the film continues, it finds small ways to throw the audience off balance. Despite being played by Drew Barrymore, Casey is not the main character (might have something to do with her dying in the first scene). No, that honor is bestowed upon another girl named Sidney, whom we learn had a mother that was killed almost exactly a year ago. When the school Sidney attends learns of Casey’s murder, a career savvy reporter named Gale Weathers show up at the school and questions Sidney about her mother. As it turns out, Gale wrote a book that challenged Sidney’s theory on whom her mother’s killer was. The man who was put in jail, Cotton Weary, is now on Death Row, and Gale suggests that the person who killed Casey might have been the killer of Sidney’s mother as well. If that’s true or not is one thing. What’s certain is that, no matter who killed Sidney’s mother, there is one person on the loose who doesn’t care what the book says. He’s out for blood.

There are a lot of details to pay attention to in Scream (check out the clothes on the janitor), the most significant being how much it is aware of itself being a movie. One scene between Sidney and her boyfriend, Billy, sees the two of them discussing their relationship with movie age ratings as language. The characters in the movie constantly talk like that. The dialogue is so well written that, while watching Scream, it is easy to ask the question: what did horror film characters talk about before this? It certainly couldn’t have been anything as interesting as this. After all, then we would have more fantastic scenes like the one where a video clerk states the eternal rules of horror: if you want to survive, you cannot have sex, you cannot do drugs, you cannot drink, and you can never, ever say, “I’ll be right back”.

While Scream is a funny film that toys with its predecessors as much as it idolizes them, it is also very scary. Horror comedies existed before this one, but none of them were particularly bone chilling. None of them were as clever either. But allow me to dwell on that thought for a second. Everybody already knows that Scream is a “clever” film, yet few people recognize exactly how clever it is. Sure, we all know about the film’s comedic aspect, but what about it’s ability to engage us through scaring us? Pay attention to the doors in this film, for example. Thanks to possessing common sense, several characters in this film lock the door when they suspect that a killer is outside their house. But what if the killer is already inside? Wouldn’t that locked door cease to be of help and instead become an obstacle then?

The film also finds much tension to be drawn from a movie camera that is placed inside a house where a party is taking place. The camera is placed by the aforementioned Gale Weathers, who suspects that things might happen in the house during the night of the party. She wants to be there first. So she watches the party with her cameraman on a monitor in a van outside the house. Problem is, there is a 30-second delay on the tape, so when the two of them are watching it, they are essentially observing what has already happened. So when the killer appears on camera and then disappears, he might be closer than what might be considered healthy for the two of them.

Had Scream simply been a “fun” film that poked fun of the horror genre, it wouldn’t have worked. It is important to note that, while the film is quick to point out the many clichés of horror films, it is also not afraid to praise the aspects of them that make us watch them in the first place. It does that by delivering an adrenaline-injected plot that is as gory as it is scary. It’s like that scene in The Simpsons where Rainier Wolfcastle tries to be a stand-up comedian and ends up machine-gunning the audience. Depending on where in that scene you hit the pause button, it is either very funny or very serious. Scream is pretty much like that.