‘What’s your favourite scary movie?’
Director: Wes Craven
Cast: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette
Plot: When a horror movie obsessive begins slaughtering high school students, local teen Sidney Prescott finds herself at the centre of events on the one year anniversary of her mother’s murder.
With satire as sharp as a knife, SCREAM took the clichés which plague the horror genre and spun them on their head. Then slit their throat. The super-meta slasher first hit the big screen in 1996 and introduced a saga that would influence scary movies for years to come. The ‘…Baby One More Time’ of horror, if you will.
Masked killer Ghostface creates a real-life horror movie inspired by an obsession with Hollywood’s darkest creations. The infamous opening scene, and arguably the scariest, encapsulates what SCREAM is. Drew Barrymoore answers the phone to an anonymous voice but their immediate flirting descends into threats. ‘What do you want?’ ‘To see what your insides look like’. The twelve minute sequence sees the star hung, drawn and quartered, and steals a trick from PSYCHO in killing off ithe suspected lead. As we learn, to reach the closing credits you must follow the rules…
‘There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex. Sex equals death, okay? Number two: you can never drink or do drugs. The sin factor! It’s a sin. It’s an extension of number one. And number three: never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, “I’ll be right back.” Because you won’t be back.’
Neve Campbell’s Sidney is Ghostface’s primary target and SCREAM’s real lead role. She’s aided on her quest to discover the killer’s identity by David Arquette’s moustache (or Deputy Dewey, whatever) and cinema’s greatest crime-fighter Gale Weathers. She’s bitchy, manipulative and can take a punch, plus her wardrobe is an inspiration to all. (Why businesswomen of the 90s didn’t snap up that lime green suit is beyond me.) This solid cast remain throughout the four features, picking up and disposing of much less-rounded characters along the way. The cast of SCREAM 3 barely have one personality between them…
The success of SCREAM spawned critically-lauded sequel SCREAM 2, the opening of which actually resulted in James Cameron’s future Oscar winner TITANIC to push back its release to avoid competition. SCREAM 2 used movie-in-movie Stab to take a swipe at horror sequels and delivered some truly innovative frights. The opening scene, featuring Jade Pinkett-Smith meeting a grisly end in front of unsuspecting cinema-goers, stands out as a defining scene of the series.
Unfortunately, SCREAM 3 is truly the runt of the litter. Opting to ramp up the laughs rather than the scares, the third feature took a swing-and-a-miss at horror trilogies. Even the tag-line sucks: ‘The final Scream is going to be the loudest!’ The film went through a number of rewrites and – mostly due to the events of the Columbine Massacre – moved the action from Woodsboro to the Hollywood set of Stab 3 in order to distance the franchise from teen-on-teen violence. In place of big scares we were met with cheesy dream sequences and bizarre cameos from Jay and Silent Bob. Parker Posey is the only saving grace here, facing off against rival Gale Weathers. I’m still waiting for a television spin-off in which the pair drives across the country solving crimes and bitch slapping each other.
Recent sequel SCREAM 4 modernized the now-dated premise and successfully fused a new cast with the three surviving originals. Critically shrugged off, SCREAM 4 feels like a direct sequel to the first and provides big laughs with a surprising amount of gore. Adopting the rules of modern horror, the closing chapter manages to surpass the excellent SCREAM 2 and shit all over the embarrassing mess that is SCREAM 3.
Certainly not the scariest in THN’s HalloweenFest, SCREAM’s intelligence and scathing humour has earned it a place in horror history. You can read the rest of THN’s horror favourites here.
