Let's look at another old movie, but not quite as old as yesterday.
I recently re-watched the 1996 slasher movie Scream, written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven. It was an interesting experience for more than a few reasons, but I'll admit I still found it pretty entertaining some 15 years later. It's interesting to see where we've come from and what our tastes have acclimated to in the intervening years. Scream was responsible for resuscitating the dying genre, one that had become a bad parody of itself. Fitting, then, that an intensely self aware, parodic take on the genre kick started a whole new wave of the very movies on which it was riffing. It became apparent through the modern lens, though, that what the imitators lacked in voice and vitality, Craven stacked them to the rafters in his send up. So what's the deal? What makes Scream enjoyable when it could just as easily have gone stale in the last decade and a half? Let's take a closer look.
When it was developed and released in the late 90s, the slasher movie was a dying breed. There was little interest in the genre and little of any consequence being produced as both cause and effect of this. It took a creative pairing like Craven and Williamson to inject fresh blood into the field. Coming off the heels of his incredibly prescient meta-contextual love fest that was Wes Craven's New Nightmare, he sought to both send up and send a love letter to a genre on what was perceived to be its last legs. Writing an expanded take on a hyper-self aware script, Williamson gave the director material with which he could do his best.
Set in the sleepy little town of Woodsboro, Scream starts with a bang. The opening scene (which also gave new life to Drew Barrymoore's stalled career) is immediately captivating. A young woman, alone in her parent's home, is quizzed via the phone about old horror movies. She realizes the person on the phone not only can see her, but is planning to do away with her after violently kill her boyfriend out in her back yard. It's a graphic and horribly flashy way to start the movie but it's also enthralling and sends the clear message that the movie won't be pulling any punches over the next two hours. After the grisly murder of the two high school students, everyone becomes suitably paranoid and a media circus begins. As more and more people meet their untimely ends at the hands of the serial killer in the now iconic Ghostface mask, suspicions grow. Everyone is a suspect. Curfews go into effect. A party is thrown. Teenagers wander off. It all sounds a bit rote, but the plot unfolds in a fairly organic (if by the numbers) manner. Craven, utilizing what was at the time a who's who of young actors, packs the movie with referential dialogue and unspoken nods to forbearance, including some of his own.
Watching Scream now is an experience not unlike the one I wrote of when I re-watched the Matrix trilogy earlier this year. The things that made this movie fresh and novel back in 1996 were so copied and aped in every way that it's surreal to see them done well and without pretension. That a movie (a horror one, no less) would be so intensely aware of its own pop-culture existence was, at the time, almost groundbreaking. Now it's assumed that you can't make an affecting scary movie without snarky teens making constant self-referential quips in a pained attempt at relevancy. It also seems strange to have a movie in which there is no last minute pulling of the rug from under the audience's feet. Sure, the reveal of who the actual culprit was at the end is a surprise, but the surprise stems from clever misdirection and writing, not an arbitrary plot twist. Teenagers (okay, 20 somethings) giving monologues about 'rules' in a horror movie hadn't been done yet - I remember how during my first viewing of the movie the 'teenagers' and their witty dialogue seemed genuinely hip; now I watched it and thought they still looked older than me, even though I'm clearly on the far side of college.
It's an amazing time capsule from the 90s, when you get down to it. Guitar driven rock filling the soundtrack, awkward fashion choices and bad hairstyles, a lack of relentless shiny things to distract from the fact that you're watching a movie. The cast is nowhere near young enough for high school, but still were fun to watch - remember Neve Campbell? Matthew Lillard? Rose McGowan? Skeet Ulrich? Wow. Jaimie Kennedy. Henry Winkler in a dramatic role. This is the movie that introduced Courtney Cox and David Arquette! How weird is that? Give Scream a viewing for Halloween - it's a fun whodunit with an edge, even after all these years.
I recently re-watched the 1996 slasher movie Scream, written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven. It was an interesting experience for more than a few reasons, but I'll admit I still found it pretty entertaining some 15 years later. It's interesting to see where we've come from and what our tastes have acclimated to in the intervening years. Scream was responsible for resuscitating the dying genre, one that had become a bad parody of itself. Fitting, then, that an intensely self aware, parodic take on the genre kick started a whole new wave of the very movies on which it was riffing. It became apparent through the modern lens, though, that what the imitators lacked in voice and vitality, Craven stacked them to the rafters in his send up. So what's the deal? What makes Scream enjoyable when it could just as easily have gone stale in the last decade and a half? Let's take a closer look.
