Scream (1996): Faulty Yet Frightening

Wes Craven is winking at the audience with Scream. In a lot of ways, this movie is a product of its time, as while horror classics such as Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street laid the groundwork for the genre, Scream is more interested in subverting and satirizing these rules. This is a double-edged sword, halfway-applicable pun intended. Scream is a self-aware movie, but this tongue-in-cheek mindfulness also serves as an excuse to trot out easy cliches without much thought put into them and call it a day. The movie tries to be a half-parody of other horror movies, and I sometimes found myself wishing it would commit to either satire or seriousness.

Scream is not a perfect movie, but there is a good reason it has become so culturally relevant: when it's just trying to be a horror movie, it hits top marks. Its scarier scenes twist and turn with the audacity of a psychopath, and its eventual third-act villain reveal is perfectly surprising and disturbing. Scream understands that sometimes, we want deep and heartfelt drama, and other times, we just want to watch a deranged serial killer chase a screaming woman around her house; it puts a surprising amount of thought into bringing the latter of those to vivid and wildly temporary life, pun intended again. And then, after the blood has pooled and the bodies have been carted away by the CSI, we're promised more of the same further down the road, even if we have to last through some half-serious cultural commentary that's mostly a product of its time to get there. Scream is scary when it wants to be, and this is what both saves and solidifies it.

It's easy to imagine Sidney Prescott wanting everything a seventeen-year-old girl could want, from boys to cars to expensive jewelry, and yet, she's been withdrawn and closed off to the world instead, which is understandable considering that her mother was murdered a year ago. Even though the police are pretty sure they caught the killer, Sidney can't move on, and this is even beginning to get in the way of her relationship with Billy, her fairy tale boyfriend. Well, what better way to give your relationship a spark than to discover that a serial killer is on the loose in the area? Scream is a collection of horror and high school film cliches, and what consistently makes it a good horror movie is its execution, pun intended yet again: I'll stop now. It is dizzyingly and thrillingly unpredictable, seemingly for the sake of being so, even if its almost-meta commentary can grow tiresome.

This movie's understanding of the plot twist is firm and thorough, and its best moments unfold along the lines of the following formula: first, mislead the audience, and second, shock them with some horrific surprise. The infamous opening scene of the movie is probably the best example of this, though I'll avoid describing it for the sake of those of you who are out of the loop, for now. The infamous killer Ghostface adds wonderfully to this air of misdirection, as he is a spectacularly intelligent villain. His horrific, merciless playfulness is a lot of fun, in a twisted and demented way. If Sidney is the heart of Scream, then Ghostface is its pitch-black soul.

The movie does a lot of other things very well, too. It's like a considerably more serious Scary Movie, self-aware enough to reference real-world horror classics like The Exorcist and Halloween explicitly. Its almost voracious referencing of other works of fiction helps it slip past our defenses as the audience, making it feel just a little bit more real. On its own terms, it also has a smart habit of alluding to bad things that happened in the past with its dialogue, then stopping in its tracks before telling us outright what they are, leaving us wondering what horrible incident the characters could be talking about. Scream preys on our morbid curiosities to keep us watching.

The cast of this movie isn't the most emotionally complex team of bloodbags ever assembled, but they nevertheless play their pumped-up character traits to a corny perfection that works despite some overcooked sensory elements, most notably its intrusive soundtrack. The score of Scream is overwhelming in a way that distracts from some of its more fundamental elements, such as its characters. It's not bad music, but it's always intrusively present. Whenever the music advances beyond mere ambiance, it becomes overwhelming, working against the movie rather than for it. I can understand the editorial urge of oh, there's nothing here...whatever could I possibly add, but this movie's score can be an obstacle rather than an ally to its characters, especially in the moments where these characters aren't doing anything worthy of a backing track.

More fundamentally, Scream can't decide what type of movie it really wants to be. It is tonally conflicted, and even if that's intentional on some level, it's still really distracting from what it does best, namely its actual horror. Its meta referencing of other franchises has its upsides, but it also keeps the movie from laying aside what's good and delving into what's best about it. Still, its cultural impact is undeniable because its individual parts function very well on their own, even if they don't always get along together. In that way, you could say that this movie doesn't act unlike an unusually gifted pair of rival siblings, one both distracted and distracting, the other razor-focused and as metaphorically sharp as any tangible thing you'll see in it.

Wes Craven is winking at the audience with Scream, and some will wink back, while others will likely be annoyed by some of its more self-referential tendencies. Whichever camp you fall into, I think you'll be impressed by both the thoughtfulness and the ick factor of its scares. Gore-wise, this movie is relatively tame by today's standards. Still, it actually faced a significant battle with the MPAA to avoid an NC-17 rating, and Craven personally cut about twenty seconds of intense violence to secure the theater-approved R. It's a frightening horror movie, and in that regard, it is successful.

Both beneficially and detrimentally to its own legacy, Scream is a horror movie that isn't really about itself at all.

Scream (1996) - 7/10

Revelation 22:14-15