It only took twenty-seven years, but I finally saw Scream.
Not having really ‘discovered’ horror until my later years, which is to say, the latter half of the 2010s, I completely missed the phenomenon that was Scream, which is just as well, because its references would have flown over my head and landed somewhere in the midst of my high-brow culture intake of the time. Having consumed considerably more genre content since, thanks in large part to this podcast, I was finally in the proper headspace to watch Wes Craven’s 1996 blockbuster.
For the uninitiated (all three of you), Scream takes place in the town of Woodsboro, California, where, a year after the brutal rape and murder of her mother, teen Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) finds her town in the grip of a murder spree, with a masked intruder picking off her friends and acquaintances. Sidney’s boyfriend, Billy, has endured a year of her aversion to sex, the agony of which actor Skeet Ulrich plays with an age-appropriate mix of confusion and sympathy. Meanwhile, her friend Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan) is happily ensconced with Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), the local cut-up, leaving as the fifth wheel one Randy Meeks, a horror movie buff played by Jamie Kennedy.
Hot on the trail of the killer, she thinks, is enterprising TV newswoman Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who’s incurred the ire of the Prescotts by claiming the innocence of the man arrested for the murder of Sidney’s mom, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber, sans dialogue). Gale enlists the aid of Tatum’s brother, local deputy Dwight “Dewey” Riley (David Arquette), and soon the two are working in tandem, falling for one another in the process. (Reader, they married three years later.)
The film begins, famously, with the stalking and murder of Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) by an intruder in a black “Father Death” robe and white “ghostface” mask. The killing off of a star — within the first ten minutes, no less — was an unusual proposition for 1996; but it was the phone conversation between Casey and her soon-to-be attacker that drew the most attention. It’s a round of horror film trivia, designed to save both Casey and her boyfriend, Steve, who’s tied up on the patio. To say Casey blows it is hardly a spoiler, but her inability to name the killer in the first Friday the 13th film is what makes the kill memorable. She thinks, as most of us would, that it’s Jason Voorhees. Not so, explains the voice on the line. In the first film, it’s Jason’s mother — and now you’re screwed.
Inside jokes cascade throughout: at a party, Randy explains to the gaggle of horned-up teens how horror films work: you have to be a virgin to survive, you can’t drink or do drugs, and most important, you can’t leave a room and say, “I’ll be right back” (because you won’t). References to other films abound: we watch scenes from John Carpenter’s Halloween on the TV, and Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street is name-checked. Craven himself makes a Freddy Krueger-inspired cameo as a janitor. Even the 1983 Tom Cruise vehicle All the Right Moves gets a shout-out when Tatum tells Sidney, “If you pause the film at the right point, you can see his penis.”
I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice it to say the film’s a procedural, with blood shed and murders committed along the way. The kills aren’t restricted to kids: an uncredited Henry Winkler, playing the high school principal, finds himself at the wrong end of the killer’s blade, and Gale’s hapless cameraman Kenny (W. Earl Brown) meets an untimely end after some merciless fat-shaming by Gale, something that I suspect wouldn’t play well in 2024. But I digress.
Yes, Scream is horror. Of course it is. It’s also a comedy, and thanks to the pod, I’ve seen enough subgenres to know that comedy is definitely one of them — though mileage, as they say, varies. For every Ghostbusters and Cabin in the Woods, there’s a Haunted Honeymoon and April Fool’s Day. Most horror comedies are lodged somewhere in the 2.5–3.5-star range, and are just, well, fine. Films like Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), Extra Ordinary (2019), Tragedy Girls (2017), Ready or Not (2019), and Jennifer’s Body (2009) have their moments, but for the most part, it takes the steadiest of hands to pull off the proper tonal balance.
Craven is a revered name in horror, and by 1996, he’d certainly earned the right to send up the genre. He’d also done better work, mainly Nightmare and The People Under the Stairs, both of which are too demented to be considered comedies. So why does Scream feel so anodyne, so watered down, by today’s standards? I suspect it’s because what was meta, clever, and cute in 1996 is old hat today. One could make the case that Ready or Not, Jennifer’s Body, and Extra Ordinary are doing similar things — mining horror movie tropes and pointing them out, so much of it feels like a big inside joke. If you’re the target audience for that joke, more power to you. If you don’t get the Dario Argento joke in Tragedy Girls, you’ve probably missed the point of the film. It’s not about scaring you. It’s about making you feel smart, part of the club. And having a few laughs along the way.
The big question for me is, absent the references, is Scream any good? No matter how clever a film is, if it doesn’t have believable characters or a story-worthy plot, it sputters and dies. On that front, I don’t think Scream succeeds. The cast is wildly uneven, veering from Neve Campbell’s soporific Sidney to Matthew Lillard’s broad, Shaggy-on-steroids Stu. Ulrich, McGowan, Winkler, and Brown are serviceable at best. Only Cox, Arquette, and Kennedy pitch their performances in the sweet spot. (One has to wonder, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo, how McGowan feels now about her role as the Miramax-produced film’s resident sexpot.) We know little to nothing about anyone beyond Sidney, and when the murderer is finally revealed, it’s more of a, ‘Huh, what do you know’ than a ‘Holy shit’ moment. Perhaps most disappointing: with one notable exception, the kills aren’t particularly creative.
Ultimately, Scream is probably best viewed in context. It’s a film that triumphed because its screenplay (by Kevin Wiliiamson) made fun of, and pointed out the almost-ridiculous rules of horror, then broke them. That was novel at the time. I’m sure, had I been bold enough to venture into a theater in 1996, I would have enjoyed it. Instead, I saw Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Basquiat, Tin Cup, Big Night, Dead Man Walking, Swingers, Breaking the Waves, Secrets and Lies, Trainspotting, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, and The English Patient. Films with characters that mattered, with plots that drew you in. That didn’t rely on sly, self-referential gags to succeed. And most important, films that still work, to this day, on their own merits. Now that’s entertainment.
Eric Winick