English Dept.
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.
It starts with the opening strains of Philip Glass' extraordinary score, which immediately gets under your skin. And throughout, it's one part Anton Bruckner ecclesiastical music and one part Phantom of the Opera. And then very beautiful, measured aerial photography of the arteries of Chicago locates us instantly. It's evocative both of insects crawling and it kind of insinuates that we're going to ascend from the quotidian to something like the sublime.
It's set up from the start like a Lovecraft story with what would appear to be an unreliable (by virtue of insanity) narrator, whose flashback would seem to comprise the bulk of the storytelling. But it is specifically this unreliability, which we are led to expect from this character, which throws all manner of doubt onto easily interpreting what's real versus what isn't.
