Scream (1996)

 

Channel 4’s “100 Scariest Moments” list, #22:

Scream

(1996)

 

As I work from these lists, I encounter a lot of Slasher films. Problem is, I mostly hate Slasher films. They are the shallowest, most misogynistic, and (worst of all) redundant, of all of Horror’s sub-genres. Some are better than others, but most are awful. True, that can be said of most sub-genres (I love movies with space-ships and alien invasion, but how many of them are actually, well, good?) but with Slashers the percentage of decent-to-vile seems far worse than Theodore Sturgeon’s “law” (or maybe “revelation”) that "ninety percent of everything is crap."

 

Slashers were born in 1974 (with “Black Christmas”) became popular after 1978 (because of “Halloween”), they saturated the market starting in 1980, a trend didn’t really peter-out until after 1995. During the worst years of the craze, there were ten-or-more completely by-the-book Slashers released every year, but how many were truly great one were they in that more-than-twenty-year period?

 

I say four. The two mentioned in the above paragraph, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984), and this one, which, in fact, had the same director as “A Nightmare on...”

 

It was released 22 years after the sub-genre’s birth, and after the sub-genre started finally looking dead, and I say that plays more than a little into its surprising marvelousness. You see, this is a Horror-comedy, it explicitly spoofs the Slasher sub-genre, but rare among its type, in manages to deliver both clever laughs and solid suspense. Peter Stack put it nicely, “The film plays lively games with the macabre.”

 

The scriptwriter, Kevin Williamson, would’ve been about fifteen years old and going to movies by himself for the first time when the Slasher phenomenon exploded. They were his childhood (I’m close to the same age, but the genre bored me even then, preferring movies with space-ships and alien invasions). By 1994, when he was twenty-nine, he did what all writers eventually do, he started writing a story about his first love -- and by “first love” I don’t mean anything as shallow and fleeting as the desire for a woman. I mean the deep and never betrayed passion for the Horror movies of one’s early teens.

 

Though “Scream” is as deliciously contrived and wildly improbable as any other popcorn movie made over the last century of cinema (more than most actually), writer Williamson was, in fact, triggered by true events, and it is worth a moment addressing the Real-World Crime before moving on to the film.

 

Danny Rolling, AKA the Gainesville Ripper, was born in 1955 and grew up to be a fairly typical serial killer. After enduring a life-long cycle of extreme abuse, he became a guy who couldn’t hold down a job, frequently moving from state-to-state, an abusive husband and, by 1977, was already an extreme predator. Even before the crimes he became famous for, he had long criminal record that included terrorist threats, armed robbery, rape, attempted murder (the victim, his father, survived but was mutilated), multiple prison escapes, and had killed a woman in what was later determined to be an accident.

 

He became famous in 1990 because of a three-day slaughter-spree. All his five victims were strangers to him. Most of those he killed, he also raped. He mutilated and then ritually posed the bodies. He took body parts as trophies. Though the manhunt for the Gainesville Ripper was intense, he was never on the police radar. The killing spree ended only with his arrest and incarceration for robbery and he spent four months in jail without falling under suspicion for any of the murders. Finally, police took the then-bold step of getting DNA samples from those currently incarcerated. Confronted with this evidence, Rollins confessed.

 

There is something horrifically mundane about Real-World Murders, they are generally empty tragedies committed by pathetic people. Serial murder evokes an especial thrall because the perceived purity of the predation, they aren’t stupid arguments that escalated, they aren’t bleak cases of domestic violence, not some gutter junkie killing somebody for ten dollars to get a fix, but, instead, seem driven by super-human passions and exploding with color. But they aren’t. Their reality is farther removed from what you see in the movies than any other cinematic crimes.

 

Slasher films play on our fascination with “stranger danger,” a flawed idea in our culture wherein we find a comfort in the idea that evil is an unknown person jumping out of the bushes, rather than our predators being people that we know and are intimately part of our lives. Certainly “stranger danger” is real, its all-but inherent in all Real-World Serial Murder, but it is also rare; most of the time victims of murder, rape, or any kind of violent assault are going to be victimized by a friend or family member.

 

“Scream” bears no similarity to the case that inspired it. Interestingly, “Scream” doesn’t play on “stranger danger” either. Early in the film we realize that the killer, though still unknown, is methodically working his way through a small circle of friends, he/she/it knows them intimately. When the killer’s identity is finally revealed, this proves to be not only a personal betrayal, but an onion of one, with layers and layers of betrayals built up slowly, climaxing in a pre-planned bloodbath that was laid out in the killer’s imagination long ago.

 

This calls to mind another intersection between the film’s Fantasy and nightmarish Reality. When the killer is revealed, the machinations, though wildly improbable (maybe impossible), seem to anticipate the obsessions of the killers who executed the Columbine High School massacre later in 1999. Like the fictional villains, the two High-School-aged savages lived in a fantasy of brutality that they obsessed over in dreadful detail frequency and detail before bringing it into the Real-World. Columbine took place just before the third film in the “Scream” franchise was to go into production, and that film’s plot had a killer with the same fantasy-anticipation, long-planning, included a school massacre in its plot. Ill-timed, to be sure, and deemed too-close-to Reality. The script went through a massive, last minute, rewrite.

 

The first scene of first “Scream” film is justly famous.

 

 Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is at home, making Jiffy-Pop. This is more than mere product placement, this proves a great detail, establishing sense of place and measuring the passage of time, as the scene ultimately unfolds in the amount of it takes to burn popcorn. All of Director Wes Craven’s best films abound with this kind of detail.

 

Casey receives a flirty phone call from someone disguising his voice (Roger L. Jackson, but only in voice, he does not appear as a character in the film). The caller asks her, "What's your favorite scary movie?" This becomes a famous line, as it sinisterly sets up a grotesque game where the predator toys with its prey as if he were a cat and she were a mouse.

 

When Casey realizes the caller isn’t her boyfriend playing a game, she’s informed that her boyfriend is actually the serial killer’s hostage. The killer then quizzes her on horror movie trivia. This is a lot scarier than it sounds, because when Casey gets one of the questions wrong, her boyfriend will be murdered and she’ll be forced to watch.

 

Casey refuses to play anymore. The killer then comes after her. She dies.

 

Worth noting:

 

Casey fights like hell, but dies anyway. She didn’t commit any of what we Horror fans call SPTs (Stupid People Tricks). So, this film is about women being targeted for violence, but doesn’t inviting the (mostly young and male) members of the audience to identify with the killer. In another Slasher movie, Casey would’ve either been stupid and died easily or, conversely, been the hero and triumphed. Not here. The story hasn’t even really started yet, but already the character we were encouraged to root for has been butchered before our eyes.

 

After that, the media descends on the affluent suburb of Woodsboro; they are personified by TV journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) who is contemptable -- one of the questions she asks is “How does it feel to almost be the victim of a slasher?” -- yet oddly sympathetic at the same time. From the media we quickly learn that this idyllic community is actually is more violent than it seems. You see, the film’s actual heroine,  Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is struggling emotionally with the impending first anniversary of her own mother's scandalous rape and murder. Based on Sidney’s testimony, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) was convicted of that crime, but there is plenty of telegraphing that Sidney mis-identified her mother’s killer, and that this will lead inevitably back to the serial killer who is loose right now.

 

As killer is hunting within a small community that everyone knows everyone, and he takes a few days longer to do it than “Halloween,” the emotional devastation related to these acts of violence is more potent. But there is also, quite deliberately, mixed messaging; a point is made of how collective grief is mixed with collective crassness, and the crassness part seems a commentary on our culture’s desensitization to violence.

 

This is where Williamson most demonstrates his love of the films he grew up with, and clearly the one he loved best of all was “Halloween.” In this film, Sidney is equivalent to the earlier film’s Laurie Strobe (Jamie Lee Curtis) but with some important differences. Unlike Laurie, Sidney is already a trauma victim before this film begins, and shows admirable courage in her struggle to maintain her emotional balance, perhaps even more courage regarding that than on display then when she fights for her life, just as hard as Casey had in the first scene.

 

Another character with an explicit “Halloween” parallel is Deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) as a stand-in for the other film’s Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), a competent lawman but in way over his head. Slashers generally regard police as hopelessly stupid (though this was not true in either of the two very first Slashers, “Black Christmas” (1974) “Halloween”). Here Dewey is introduced as a fool, proves he’s not, and ironically ends up suffering for not being dumb (thereby echoing the fate of Casey and a couple of others).

 

Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), clearly intended to remind us of Lynda Van Der Klok (P. J. Soles) from “Halloween.” She tells Sidney, "Don't go there, Sid. You're starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick," that’s an inside joke concerning director Craven often being confused with "Halloween" director John Carpenter.

 

The killer gets nicknamed “Ghostface” because he wears a cheap Halloween mask, yet another explicit reference to the older film.

 

There were even excerpts of the “Halloween” sound track included in this film.

 

Though not the first Slasher to spoof Slashers, (that award goes to “Sleepaway Camp” (1983)), but Williamson was (almost) the first to introduce a self-awareness that glancingly touched meta-fiction (he was probably influenced by, “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (1994)). The killer toying with his victim’s with horror-movie trivia was only one example. Throughout the film, the teenagers talk about their favorite Horror films, referring to actress Curtis, and Craven even has a cameo that references the villain of “A Nightmare on …” In one scene, Sidney contemplates who will play her in the inevitable movie version of the town’s tragedy, “I see myself as sort of a young Meg Ryan, but with my luck, I'll get Tori Spelling” (the sequel follows up on this joke). Then there’s Sidney’s friend Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) hilarious lecture:

 

"To successfully survive a horror movie, you have to abide by the rules. You can never have sex: The minute you do, you’re as good as gone. Sex equals death. Never drink or do drugs: It’s an extension of the first. And never, ever say ‘I’ll be right back’ Because you won't be back!"

 

This is also a violation of a pretty deep, but until this film, unrecognized, cinema taboo. All genres are filled with repeated tropes and clichés, but characters in films are mostly not permitted to acknowledge that tropes and clichés exist. Did any character in the teen-romantic comedy “Clueless” (1995) admit their drama was stolen from a more-than-century-old Jane Austin novel that they were likely forced to read in class? (“Emma” first published in 1815.) But this was a taboo that needed to be broken, because Slashers were eating their own tale more than Jane Austin adaptations, and heaven help us, there were far more Slashers than Jane Austins.

 

This film’s cast as larger than a typical Slasher, but with few who can be viewed as disposable “Monster Meat” as 80% of the characters in most Slasher films generally are. Slashers also revel in their brutal and/or inventive violence, and this one tops most (Ms. McGowan gets and especially nasty death involving a garage door).

 

By the time the script came to be sold, Horror cinema in the USA was in terrible doldrums, mostly driven by flaccid remakes and seemingly endless and unbearably redundant franchises of older Slasher movies. “Scream” targeted those films’ audiences by targeting the films themselves. But as the studio started shopping for directors, they discovered that the genre’s best talent was as bored with Horror as everyone else. Robert Rodriguez, Danny Boyle, George A. Romero, and Sam Raimi all rejected the film as, initially, did even the eventual director, Craven.

 

Craven turned it down while developing a remake of “The Haunting” (original was 1963, and the remake did eventually get made in 1999, but not by Craven, and it was god-awful). He was also considering distancing himself from the Horror genre as he’d grown weary of the inherent misogyny and violence (Craven’s films, even the most exploitive, all at least tried to treat women as a little more than disposable sex-and-Monster-Meat, and though many were notorious for their violence, he always said he’d preferred to do comedies.)

 

But Craven did eventually accept the project. He seemed to approach it as a chance to improve upon his very inventive “Wes Craven’s Next…” Craven was a college professor before turning to film, where spent his first years in the industry in porn and other forms of exploitation. His first directorial effort, “Last House on the Left” (1972) was vile, but showed deep ambition, as it was an exploitation remake of art-house hit “Virgin Spring” (1960), only with a lot more sex and violence and a lot less Christian redemption. I would be stretching the point to claim he had waited his whole career for this script, but not by much.

 

And it was an important film to Craven; during “Last House on …” he demonstrated he was just barely competent behind the camera. His skills obviously improved with his second, “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977), but his work was still crude compared to other young and promising Horror directors of the same era like George Romero, David Cronenberg, Larry Cohen and Tobe Hooper. What came after “The Hills…” was inconsistent, but over-all demonstrated he learned something from almost every new project, so (mostly) the newest project was better than the one before. “Scream” could be seen as his coming-out party, though not his first one. This one is special though, because it's where he showed greatest skill in juggling a large cast.

 

And the cast is excellent, in addition to the above listed, other fine performances are provided by Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard.

 

Barrymore was initially cast as the lead, Sidney, but other commitments mounted and she was forced to take a smaller role. Despite this, she is among the best remembered of the film’s characters.

 

Barrymore’s loss was Neve Campbell’s gain, as Sidney proved to be her star-making roll. She was wholly believable as the trauma victim whose life was being turned upside-down yet again. I believe this was the first Slasher to even try to address trauma at all seriously, and that Campbell took the idea a lot more seriously than the script did.

 

A major obstacle to any Slasher film is that there’s a required body-count and each kill requires a stalking, while there are only so many minutes in a feature film. (Henry Winkler’s character was written in late in development specifically because the producers complained a full-half hour had passed without a murder). The idea that the “final girl” would also be a trauma victim is both obvious and near impossible because that kind of character development is competing with the requisite number of murders for screen time

 

“Scream” would gather positive reviews and earn amazing money, $173 million world-wide, making it the highest grossing Slasher-film ever, a title it would hold until the “Halloween” sequel/reboot of 2018. I’d argue that the film’s main impact was to demonstrate that the audience, though still most comfortable with the familiar, were longing for at least a little sophistication and originality. I’m sure this played some part in the wiliness to finance and market better Horror, leading us to the remarkable achievements of 1999 (“The Blair Witch Project,” “Stir of Echoes,” “The Sixth Sense,” etc.), easily the best year in USA Horror cinema since the Slasher craze ruined everything way back in 1980.

 

But when “Scream” became a phenomenon, it would be just as much a part of the doldrums of USA Horror as it was an escape-hatch from it. “Scream” was heavily imitated, and those films were uninteresting (“I Know What You Did Last Summer” (1997), “Urban Legend” (1998), “Final Stab” (2001, which also had the audacity to sometimes market itself under the alternate titles “Final Scream” or “Scream 4”), and two entries in the yet-to-be-rehabilitated “Halloween” franchise (released in 1998 and 2002)). “Scream’s” original title was “Scary Movie” and that was borrowed by another franchise (first film in 2000) that spoofed it – you got that right; we have reached the point that we are making franchise parodies of franchise parodies.

 

And “Scream,” of course, became its own franchise. That was, in fact, planned while first was in pre-production. Inevitably, each new film was somewhat inferior to the one before, but it didn’t sink as low, or as quickly, as the many franchises it mocked.

 

One of the things that made this franchise superior to the others was the decision, unusual in a Slasher, not to kill off the entire cast of the first film, as a result it has been anchored by familiar characters whose lives progress from movie-to-movie. To date, there have been four “Scream” films (the last one released was in 2004), all directed by Craven and most were written by Williamson. There was also a TV series (2015) that I haven’t seen. Serious issues emerged in the writing with the third film (the only one not written by Williamson) which I touched on that above, and they dogged the fourth as well. Still, Craven was loving it, and intended to do more, but at his own pace. He was finally getting some recognition for projects outside of the Horror genre, his 1999 film “Music of the Heart,” concerning a heroic Public-School teacher defending the arts funding, was nominated for a couple Oscars, and during the entire film Meryl Streep did not murder even one of her students. Though Craven made it clear he wanted to do more “Screams,” these future plans were stalled when he died 2015. Finally, a fifth scream got slated for release in 2022.

 

Which brings me back, for a third time, to the weird intersection between the gleefully artificial reality of this film and the actual reality we find ourselves stuck in.

 

One of the more telling lines in this film was, “Movies don't create psychos; movies make psychos more creative."

 

This film was inspired by, but in content ignored, a Real-World Crime. The third film’s writing was thrown into chaos by a Real-World Crime it seemed to have anticipated. Between those dates (1996 and 1999) other bad things happened.

 

In 1998, 16-year-old Mario Padilla and his 14-year-old cousin, Samuel Ramirez, stabbed Mario's mother, Gina Castillo, to death. In their confessions, the two stated they were inspired by the “Scream” series and planning a larger killing spree. As the trial geared-up, psychologist Madeline Levine stated, "There were a whole bunch of reasons why they acted out that way. But did the movie provide a blueprint? Absolutely.” The Judge denied this to be allowed into testimony.

 

In 1999, 14-year-old Daniel Gill and 15-year-old Robert Fuller, repeatedly stabbed their friend, 13-years-old Ashley Murray. Murray survived. At the trail, Murry testified that Gill and Fuller had been inspired by the film series.

 

Also in 1999, following the above-mentioned Columbine High School massacre, the United States Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing about Hollywood's marketing of films to youths. The committee focused specifically on Horror films, and the opening scene of “Scream” was shown to the committee as an example of negative media which may be viewed by children.

 

There’s a feedback-loop, both positive and negative, between fiction and reality, or maybe put more rightly, between media and reality. It’s both obviously potent and ill-understood. It’s easiest to demonstrate with political propaganda, like how a man like Adolf Hitler convinced the people of a well-educated, civilized nation like Germany to savagery turn on their neighbors, extracting genocidal revenge for crimes never committed. But “Scream,” for all its satirical elements, isn’t a propaganda film by any stretch. Its “reality” is smugly abstract, that’s its core joke.

 

How could anyone think they could, or even want to, make Ghostface real?

 

Which is the same thing as asking, how could anyone want Columbine to actually happen?

 

Well, at least two kids wanted it.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWm_mkbdpCA