Scream (1996)
Scream is an interesting movie, but not one that I liked all that much back when I saw it in theaters, though I was pretty much exactly within its intended audience -- 17-year-olds familiar with the conventions and cliches of horror movies. The whole series just went back up on Netflix a few weeks back, and...I still don't like it very much. So let's call it The Beatles of horror movies: a thing I'm not all that fond of, but whose influence is undeniable.
Scream starts out with the now-iconic scene of Drew Barrymore getting murdered after a phone conversation with a serial killer who quizzes his victims on their knowledge of horror movies. She gets a question wrong -- it was Jason Voorhees' mother who was the murderer in the first Friday the 13th, not Jason himself -- and she and her boyfriend end up getting stabbed to death. The real protagonist is Sydney Preston, a teen whose mother was murdered a year earlier among controversy and scandal, and the more recent killings seem to be connected in some way, drawing sensationalist reporter Gale Weathers to the small town of Woodsboro as more bodies start turning up.
Randy, who works at the local video store and knows basically everything there is to know about slasher movies, goes over the rules with everybody. Don't drink, don't have premarital sex, don't smoke pot or split up to investigate strange noises. Slasher movies have always been moralistic in nature, and conservative at that -- the killers are the scourge of God, there to punish young people who transgress. Otherwise there's no reason for it all. At the same time, there's a clearly titillating angle to it all that almost seems to run counter to the moral pecking order. Bare skin and blood. America has always been pretty confused about what it thinks of sex and violence and their relation to one another -- that's what you get when you have a country started by puritans, I suppose -- and you could probably write a book about the psychology that goes into the slasher movie formula.
Crispin Glover wonders where the corkscrew is in Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter.
Three guesses what happens next.
As I said in my review of The Cabin in the Woods, which I think is a much better movie as horror-genre deconstructions go, Wes Craven intended Scream to kill the slasher movie by holding a spotlight on its cliches to the point where nobody could take the genre seriously anymore. There could be any number of reasons why it didn't turn out as expected. There are two that stand out as far as I'm concerned.
One is that Wes Craven tends to think he's cleverer than he is. People already knew slasher movies are full of cliches, and didn't really need him to point them out. Halloween and especially Friday the 13th -- not the first slasher movies, but certainly the most popular to date -- had resulted in such a flood of imitators, the cliches were established in a matter of months, and even as far back as 1982, there were parodies being made. The best is probably The Slumber Party Massacre, which was directed by Amy Jones (yes, the co-writer of Beethoven) and written by Rita Mae Brown (yes, the same one who writes all those mystery novels with cats). Executives meddled with it, and the end result was a more straightforward slasher movie than intended, but the edge is still there. A year before that -- only a year after Friday the 13th was released -- we had Student Bodies, a much more overtly comedic slasher-parody written and directed by Mickey Rose, best known for his writing on Johnny Carson.
So people were already well aware of the genre's foibles. Craven wasn't the first to point them out, but he was the first to do so in such an unambiguous, self-aware manner. This is part of what sets Scream apart. Take any horror movie, any science fiction movie, and they seem to exist in a vacuum. Nobody in a zombie apocalypse movie has ever watched Night of the Living Dead. Nobody in an alien invasion movie has ever watched Independence Day; maybe they'll mention The War of the Worlds, but modern movies? Never. Slasher movies were the same, until Scream. The Slumber Party Massacre and Student Bodies were comedic to varying degrees, but they didn't take place in a world in which anyone had seen a slasher movie. Scream does, everyone knows about Jason and Freddy and Michael.
No one could get iller.
The other thing that really made Scream backfire is that it wasn't even necessary. The slasher genre was basically on its last gasp by the mid-1990s anyway. Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were played out, running on fumes, even by the late 80s, and nobody really cared about the genre anymore. Had Craven not made Scream it probably would have quietly died out, because nobody took it seriously anyway. Some of the weirder franchises like Phantasm and Hellraiser were unusual enough that someone could always pick them up and do something interesting with them, but the unstoppable guy in the mask killing teenagers for making out just wasn't making bank anymore. As it was, Scream basically took pot-shots at a dead horse and brought it back to life.
As a result of Scream's success, we had a second wave of sorts. Suddenly all these new slasher movies cropped up, starting with I Know What You Did Last Summer and moving on to flashes in the pan like Valentine and newer stuff like Chain Letter and Smiley, because the people who write horror movies aren't scared of sex anymore, now they're scared of technology. For a while in the late 90s and early 2000s there were a ton of slasher movies, all of them at least a little bit more self-aware than the genre was back in the early 80s, but still more or less playing it straight. Scream fell into that trap as well, as it was sort of indecisive whether it was a parody of slasher movies or just a slasher movie that was aware of its own cliches. In Scream 2, there's a part where the killer is completely knocked out after a car accident, and rather than doing the sensible thing and finding something to stab him about fifty times to make sure, the girls very carefully crawl out the other window so they don't wake him up. It's the sort of oversight that's all the more galling because it's a movie that takes aim at the stupidity of the victims in these things.
Scream is at its best when it's not directly referencing horror cliches in conversation. The first movie got a few laughs out of me with its sillier and more subtle moments, like when Sydney tells the killer over the phone that horror movie victims always run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door -- then ends up trying to run out the front door herself, gets surprised by the killer, and runs upstairs. Or when Craven shows up in a three-second cameo as a janitor named Fred who wears a hat and a black-and-red sweater. Or when the local comic-relief deputy, Dewey, seems like he gets killed in every movie but shows up in the next one -- and actually manages to survive all four movies. It's also unusual looking back on it now because it ends up being a sort of unintentional relic of its time -- a major plot point in the first movie is that the killer used a cell phone, and the police are tracing every cellular account in the county. (I remember this was about the same time when there was a big debate at my high school over whether students should be allowed to carry them -- I think one student actually had one.)
There are better, more recent slasher parodies out there, but the thing is, none of them would ever have been made without this one. I hope Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon shows up again on Netflix sometime, because it basically took the same premise as Scream and made a much smarter movie out of it. Scream itself became the Friday the 13th of its time, spawning legions of imitators. Slashers became postmodern, with Friday the 13th taking jabs at itself in Jason X and Freddy ending up with his own meta-movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Then they tried making them scary again, with less-than-successful reboots of Friday and Nightmare. So now we're sort of back to where we started, with a bunch of stupid teenagers dying as a result of their transgressions. Still, while Scream may seem dated by current standards -- the way Seinfeld doesn't seem funny since we've grown up with a dozen other sitcoms that followed the same basic formula -- Craven can't be kicking himself too hard, as it put him back on the map as a horror director and made him a lot of money. Where does the genre go from here? I only know one thing for sure:
YOU'RE DOOMED!
YOU'RE ALL DOOMED!
Trivia: The instantly-recognizable and often-parodied "Scream voice?" Know who else he was? Mojo Jojo. No kidding.
Available On: Netflix.
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