reVIEW (50)
SCREAM
With the impending release
of Scream (the fifth installment and
the first without the late, great Wes Craven at the helm), I figured I should
resurrect a couple of corpses and let them do the zombie shuffle across the Interwebz,
so… here’s one…
[The review below existed in a former published
life--and in an altered form--in the year 1997, under the identity of “Hitting
the Right Pitch.”]
“What’s the point [of watching scary
movies]? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted
girl who can’t act, who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going
out the front door. It’s insulting.”
-- Sidney
In
1977, former literature professor Wes Craven--who had already helmed 1972’s
lurid Last House on the Left--directed
the aridly vicious The Hills Have Eyes,
cementing his reputation as a creator of gritty and uncompromising horror
films.
A year later, on the last night of October, Michael Myers haunted the streets of Haddonfield in a blood-drenched homecoming that would spawn a whole sub-genre within the horror field, and would make the careers of director John Carpenter and actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
It would be six years later, in 1984, that Craven’s path would intersect with the trajectory of the slasher film genre, when he ended up creating a horror icon: A Nightmare on Elm Street’s “bastard son of a hundred maniacs,” Freddy Krueger--an icon that would later lose all of its potency to the insidious disease, sequelitis.
Flash forward a dozen years, and Craven once again plunges into the slasher genre with a little scary movie called Scream.
“See, the police are always off-track
with this sh!t. If they watch Prom Night, they’d
save time. There’s a formula to it! A very simple formula! Everybody’s a
suspect!”
From
its intense opening sequence which features a wicked ‘90’s take on When A Stranger Calls, coupled with a
game all horror hounds would both love and dread to play (watch out for the
trick question), Craven makes it clear he’s out for blood.
The 13-minute sequence is so taut and solidly crafted, it makes far better viewing than any number of random full-length slasher entries you might name.
It also utilizes a device hardly seen in the 36 years since 1960’s Psycho (though Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob, and Craven’s own original Nightmare actually, also used it to good effect).
With that brilliant sequence, we are rushed headlong into what can perhaps be best described as a postmodern slasher film that could very well have been the final word on the genre.
“You should never say ‘Who’s there?’
Don’t you watch scary movies?! It’s a death wish. You might as well just come
out here to investigate the strange noise or something.”
-- Ghostface
It
will be remembered that Craven first attempted to do the postmodern meta thing
with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,
where Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, and Craven himself, all appeared in a
tale that presented them struggling against the evil they had created on the
screen, now bursting through into the “real world.”
John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness would also explore similar terrain.
However you may feel about either title though, I think it’s fair to say that Scream hits just the right (meta) pitch.
It’s
a wickedly self-referential film that speaks the language of the movie buff:
from the general (rated relationships and the “life is a movie but you can’t
choose the genre” analogy) to the specific (the exposure of a slasher film’s
conservative, puritanical heart in one of the cardinal rules of the genre: sex equals
death, the virgin gets out alive--oft-discussed by the more critically-minded
of us gorehounds in the nearly 20 years between Carpenter’s Halloween and Craven’s second slasher
triumph).
In
loving tribute to the very audience who had, by that point, held him in awe for
decades, Craven’s Scream is a genuine
joy for horror film fans, making reference to a whole slew of movies, from Terror Train to The Silence of the Lambs.
It even turns the entire “Do horror films create violent psychos?” debate on its head in one swift, clean stroke.
With the skill of a surgeon (or an anal-retentive serial killer), Craven and scriptwriter Kevin Williamson play with audience expectations, utilizing every trick they can get their hands on, including time-honoured horror movie clichés and the genre formulas we all know and love, to give us a solid slasher flick that cuts right to the bone.
“What movie is this from? I Spit On Your Garage?”
Scream is a horror movie that manages to
entertain, set you on edge, and study the genre it belongs to, all in one fell
swoop. In doing so, it places the entire slasher genre on the hot spot.
But like all great horror movies, it’s also relentless and persistent--the Energizer bunny wearing a hockey mask, coming at us again, and again, till the bloody end; an end orchestrated to perfection with a videotape of Halloween playing as counterpoint.
“Only virgins can outsmart the killer in
the big chase scene in the end. Don’t you know the rules?”
-- Randy
-- Sidney
A year later, on the last night of October, Michael Myers haunted the streets of Haddonfield in a blood-drenched homecoming that would spawn a whole sub-genre within the horror field, and would make the careers of director John Carpenter and actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
It would be six years later, in 1984, that Craven’s path would intersect with the trajectory of the slasher film genre, when he ended up creating a horror icon: A Nightmare on Elm Street’s “bastard son of a hundred maniacs,” Freddy Krueger--an icon that would later lose all of its potency to the insidious disease, sequelitis.
Flash forward a dozen years, and Craven once again plunges into the slasher genre with a little scary movie called Scream.
The 13-minute sequence is so taut and solidly crafted, it makes far better viewing than any number of random full-length slasher entries you might name.
It also utilizes a device hardly seen in the 36 years since 1960’s Psycho (though Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob, and Craven’s own original Nightmare actually, also used it to good effect).
With that brilliant sequence, we are rushed headlong into what can perhaps be best described as a postmodern slasher film that could very well have been the final word on the genre.
-- Ghostface
John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness would also explore similar terrain.
However you may feel about either title though, I think it’s fair to say that Scream hits just the right (meta) pitch.
It even turns the entire “Do horror films create violent psychos?” debate on its head in one swift, clean stroke.
With the skill of a surgeon (or an anal-retentive serial killer), Craven and scriptwriter Kevin Williamson play with audience expectations, utilizing every trick they can get their hands on, including time-honoured horror movie clichés and the genre formulas we all know and love, to give us a solid slasher flick that cuts right to the bone.
But like all great horror movies, it’s also relentless and persistent--the Energizer bunny wearing a hockey mask, coming at us again, and again, till the bloody end; an end orchestrated to perfection with a videotape of Halloween playing as counterpoint.
-- Randy
But its box office success would prove to be a siren song Hollywood was loathe to resist.
Which, in the final analysis, was still a very good thing, as Scream 2 (reView post to follow soon) proved to be a crackerjack sequel.
And while I was ultimately disappointed by Scream 3 (Williamson did not write the screenplay), the 11-years-after Scream 4 (with Williamson back on scripting duties) turned out to be a curious title for me.
I didn’t much care for it back in 2011 when it was released. But I went back to it just last year as a refresher and was pleasantly surprised to discover a newfound appreciation for it.
Whereas my initial reaction was that it was an ultimately pointless retread, it turns out my reconsidered opinion is now that 4 is a slyly wicked subversion of the “Let’s introduce the new generation to replace the OG characters” type of reboot, where
Bravo, Craven and crew.
Hopefully, it does Mr. Craven proud.
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