Scream (1996) - film review

Shock and fear descend on a small American town when two high school students are brutally killed by a masked psycho-killer.  Another student, Sidney Prescott, only just avoids being victim number three and suspicion falls immediately on her boyfriend Billy Loomis, who just happened to be in the vicinity when Sidney was attacked.  More killings follow in quick succession and Sidney once again finds herself cast as the heroine in what looks increasingly like a John Carpenter film.  Could this spate of attacks have something to do with the murder of Sidney’s mother a few years previously?  The police think they may have a lead when they learn that Sidney’s estranged father is in the area.  Another prime suspect is Randy, a geeky horror film buff whose insight into the workings of slasher movies is truly scary.  Or could the killer be the school principal, a sinister man who rails constantly against the immorality of the young and who has a habit of threatening his students with knives?  The culprit might even be the school janitor Fred, a suspicious character in a red and green sweater.  One thing is clear: solving this mystery is going to be murder...

Having brought a measure of respectability back to the slasher genre in the mid-1980s with his horror masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), director Wes Craven achieved pretty much the same result with Scream a decade later, although he did so by coming at it from a totally different angle.  At the time, the genre had been pretty well mined out and audiences had long grown tired of watching badly trained actors running up and down stairs pursued by a monosyllabic knife-wielding madman enacting his own personal stab-a-thon.  The slasher film was ripe for parody, and this was what Craven delivered - a brilliantly executed send-up of the very same genre that he had once given the kiss of life to, and which found a new lease of life as a result.

Because Scream is a Wes Craven film, it cannot help being a decent, full-blooded horror-thriller as well as a magnificent spoof.  The humour is underplayed to the extent that anyone unfamiliar with the genre will probably not find the film remotely funny and will only see it as an ingeniously constructed mix of suspense thriller, whodunit murder mystery and gory horror film.  Those who have already lost their slasher virginity to the likes of John Carpenter, Sean S. Cunningham and Wes Craven will see a totally different film, one that is absolutely awash with in-jokes and overt references to the best (and worst) slasher movies.

Things get scarily funny when all the characters start to act as if they are aware of being in a slasher film, something which makes sense after you’ve seen the twist, or rather twisted, ending.  One character gives his mates instructions on how to survive a slasher movie - so formulaic has the genre become that if you are a teetotal, drugs-clean virgo intacta you are guaranteed to survive, otherwise you are almost certainly dead meat.  Having written off the genre as exploitation trash because the heroines in such films always do silly things like panic, run upstairs and lock themselves in the bathroom, the heroine of this film does exactly this when the Casper-mask wearing killer shows up on her doorstep and starts to give her the full Michael Myers treatment.  Wes Craven even puts in a fleeting appearance as a Freddy Krueger lookalike, just one of the innumerable cheeky nods to A Nightmare on Elm Street.  It must have been something to watch this film at the cinema on its first release, with one half of the audience shrieking in terror, and the other half shrieking with laughter.

If you have never seen a slasher film before, Scream is both compelling and genuinely frightening, a truly visceral cinema experience.  Craven’s slick and imaginative direction, complemented by a well-honed script and some gripping performances, sustains the pace and tension right to the end and delivers plenty of shocks along the way.  Slasher habitués are far less likely to be scared and more likely to end up laughing out their guts at the sight of all those self-consciously planted clichés and references, which pile up faster and more gratuitously than the gore-soaked bodies.  The one problem with this film is that, having seen it, you are unlikely ever again to be thrilled by a slasher film.  Like a magician foolishly revealing the secrets of his art in the course of his act, Wes Craven rips out and displays too many vital organs of the slasher beast for it to have quite the same effect again. 

In an era when the slasher movie was well on the road to extinction, Scream could have been an enormous flop.  In fact, it proved to be a massive box office hit, eventually grossing over 170 million dollars worldwide (a handsome return on a 14 million dollar budget).  Critically acclaimed in its day, Scream is now almost universally acknowledged as one of the best (if not the best) horror films of the 1990s and has so far spawned two reasonably popular sequels (with a third due to be released in 2011).  This is the film that revived a dying genre and inspired a new generation of filmmakers, whilst putting the final nail in the coffin of those shallow exploitation shockers that had given horror a bad name over the preceding decade.  Slashing is a serious business, too serious to be left to amateurs...

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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