Scream Review

Scream review.

Scream arrived at the exact moment in time that it had to. Commenting on the genre, new technology and a generation of viewers who grew up watching slasher movies. There are multiple reasons why no movie since has worked quite as well. Perfectly cast with a (pardon the pun) killer script…but that’s just the start. No movie could compete with Scream‘s greatest trick. Timing.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

Scream

Directed by Wes Craven

Written by Kevin Williamson

Starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy and Skeet Ulrich

Scream Review

Full disclosure: Scream may be my favorite movie of all time.  I’m not going to argue that it is the best movie ever made…I don’t even believe that it’s the best slasher ever made.  I believe that honor belongs to Halloween.  I will argue, however, that Scream is one of the most necessary movies ever made.  A movie that is a masterpiece on its own merits…but as a capture of a moment in time becomes something even more. 

To understand Scream’s place in history you have to put yourself back in the mid-90s.  The slasher craze that dominated the 80s had faded away.  Jason Voorhees had hit his low with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday in 1993.  Freddy Krueger had wrapped up his main series and despite getting a brilliant coda in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare…his time was up in 1994.  Michael Myers was done in by the Cult of Thorn storyline and that timeline had come to an end with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995.  Box office for all three series was hovering around, or hitting, all-time lows.

1996 changed everything.  18 years after the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween and the start of the slasher era of horror…Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson gave us Scream.  A movie that had to exist in 1996.  About, and aimed at, high school students who grew up in the era where slasher movies dominated pop culture.  It’s a movie, in part, about the last 18 years of horror.  Contemporary reviews noted that it referenced all of these movies…something relatively uncommon in the genre before that.  These characters watched what you watched and knew what you knew.  It was doing something more than getting cheap pops for references, however.

Scream gets a lot of credit for being witty and clever.  The cleverest thing that it does is to lull you into a comfortable feeling of watching something you’ve seen before.  The characters openly discuss it.  They don’t break the fourth wall or anything…but for all intents and purposes they know they are in a horror movie.  So they shamble on commenting on their situation, making you feel like they’re ahead of the plot…which puts you ahead of the plot too.  But Scream is misdirecting you the whole time.  It’s way ahead of you…as its genre best third act makes painfully clear.

For most of Scream it is painfully obvious that Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is the killer.  Everyone seems to accept it.  Randy (Jamie Kennedy) flat out tells us it’s Billy.  Randy’s role is to be the eyes of the viewer…when he talks we should be listening.  But it’s too obvious.  He’s accused and arrested immediately.  Who cares if he’s clearly the killer…it can’t be him…I’ve seen horror movies.  Kevin Williamson has seen horror movies too.  He knows exactly what you think.  But he’s even more ahead of you than simply putting the killer in plain sight and assuming you’ll dismiss him.  He knows what you’re going to think next.

Billy spends the middle part of Scream pulling you back to the notion that he is the killer.  Now the movie has you thinking that it has misdirected you by trying to tell you it’s him.  After he and Sidney (Neve Campbell) have sex…there is a moment where you are sure that it’s Billy and Sidney is about to find out.  That’s when Scream pulls a brilliant move.  It has pushed your focus so hard, in opposite ways, to suspecting Billy that when Ghostface shows up and appears to kill him…you don’t know what to do.  It’s why the third act works so well.  You’re barely thinking about who it can be at this point because you’re swept up in the action and were just proven wrong.

Then came Scream’s masterstroke.  There are two killers.  After an hour and a half of being reminded of every slasher movie you can name…Scream flips the formula on its head.  It does something original.  Billy and Stu (Matthew Lillard) were working together the whole time.  It’s brilliant because you’d never be looking for it.  Even if you guess…you were only going to be half right. 

Clues that the movie isn’t going to play by the rules it’s pushing are everywhere…you just aren’t looking for them.  The, then, new technology of a cell phone changes the rules.  The killer can not only be calling from inside the house…they could be anywhere.  A voice changer allows them to be anyone.  These things didn’t exist in the stories Scream reminds you of.  Hell…the entire third act is scored by Halloween being played on TV.  It wants you to think of what was, so you won’t see what is. 

Everything in Scream works today…but it never worked better than in 1996.  The technology was new, and Scream made it scary.  The idea someone could be calling you from your closet or your porch…and there was no way to know was terrifying.  This has dulled some with time because we are now used to technology.  Not so in 1996.  The target audience represented the exact era of horror watchers that would relate to every reference and, more importantly, would think like these characters.  The references weren’t just timely…they were time sensitive.  Positioned directly for the people born in the final years of Generation X.

Scream pulls no punches on its commentary about this pocket generation.  They’re portrayed as pop culture loving smart asses.  They think they know everything and yet are too stubborn, lazy or stupid to do anything with that knowledge.  As a member of this exact people…they nailed it.  Nothing is taken too seriously until it’s too late.  Other than Scream 4, the series has never recaptured this biting social commentary of taking it too the audience under the guise of playing things up for the audience.  Another of Scream’s brilliant deceptions.

There are so many aspects of Scream that could be discussed.  You just read a thousand words that never touch on the kills or the dialog or any of the performances.  It’s all terrific.  It begins with one of, if not the, greatest openings in horror history. Sidney is a great final girl.  The movie is perfectly cast.  Billy and Stu are iconic killers who manage to pull off the rare feat of elevating the movie after they are revealed.  Most whodunnits suffer from underwhelming reveals and then limp to a finish.  Scream flies.  Perhaps the best scene in the movie comes after we discover the great deception.  It’s violent.  It’s mean.  And it’s something you’ll never forget.

So, out of the dozens of ways to discuss Scream…today we choose its timing.  The slasher genre was dead.  Scream brought it back for one moment bigger, bolder, and smarter than it had almost ever been.  The new crop of movies that it influenced didn’t, or couldn’t, take the right lessons from it.  We mostly got glossy CW star filled movies with nothing to say.  But that doesn’t mean that Scream didn’t have a positive influence.  You can see its influence in movies like Shaun of the Dead and Cabin in the Woods.  It’s in Happy Death Day and The Final Girls.  It’s in any movie that takes something you already know and finds a new way to do it.

Scare Value

To high school seniors in 1996 Scream is the ultimate reflection of a generation. The dying embers of Generation X were caught in a trap. Pigeonholed by aspects of a generation they were born too late into to define. Scream understood that feeling. It also understood that technology was moving us towards the future at light speed…and that childhoods filled with movies of masked killers had value. Scream understood more about its audience than most movies ever could. A love letter to a specific group of people arriving at the perfect moment in time. That it appeals to so many people from different time periods is what elevates it to classic status.

5/5

Scream Links

Streaming on Paramount+

Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu

Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon

Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon

Scream Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of Scream, check out our reviews of Scream 2, Scream 4 and Scream (2022) as well as our full series ranking