← Back to Reviews
in
Scream
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 1996
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been a while since I've seen it. I already know how it ends, but I've forgotten the journey it took to get there. He's also playable killer in Dead by Daylight.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Wes Craven was something of a horror geek god, not just for creating Nightmare on Elm Street, but also Scream, which sets itself apart from other slasher movies by virtue of it's explicit genre savviness.
It immediately opens on a girl home alone who receives a creepy phone call from a guy who goads her into talking about scary movies, immediately referencing Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, and even spoiling that movie, before it turns serious and the threat of home invasion becomes real when a guy with a combat knife and a Spirit Halloween costume runs in to start stabbin'.
This trend follows throughout the entire movie with numerous references to movies, tropes, and even one character just standing up and deconstructing the modern horror genre into it's most popular cliches.
It runs an extremely fine line where it wants viewers to know that it's smarter than your average horror movie, but it also doesn't condescend to it's audience. A general tone of self-awareness and genre subversion is prevalent throughout a majority of it's setpieces, and so too is a thin veil of black comedy.
The Ghostface Killer never speaks full lines while onscreen, so he has moments where he's given amusing body language to communicate and in action scenes where he's trying to kill someone, as anyone would notice, his hits and falls are a soundboard shy of slapstick.
Even when he's talking on the phone, the voice actor playing him is enjoyably campy and the two characters eventually revealed to be the dual identity of the Ghostface Killer bring their best performance, be both believable and entertaining psychopaths.
I knew Shaggy was up to no good.
The reveal of the Ghostface Killer is also pretty central to this movie since it quietly lays the foundation for a whole NEW dimension to this movie: the whodunnit mystery.
Names are cast about, shade is thrown, and tiny little lingering camera moments give you just long enough to question whether, "Wait a minute! That cop was wearing boots! The killer was wearing boots too!"
Scream never leans heavily enough into the whodunnit aspect of the movie to make you seriously suspect anyone other than the characters most frequently appearing onscreen, but this movie manages to subvert even that;
Typically there's only one guilty party in a whodunnit.
In an effort to avoid this expectation, some whodunnits pull the "everyone is guilty" card, such as in Murder on the Orient Express,
Short of that, while still wanting to be surprising, whodunnits will implicate characters outside of the realm of reasonable culprits. For example if there's a locked room mystery, and there are 9 people at the hotel, they'll produce all sorts of evidence to implicate any or all of them, but then pull a 10th person out of their ass at the last second and hang it all on them, despite there having been no evidence, or even poor evidence that they were the killer.
This is worst of all because it completely defeats the point of a whodunnit, which is enjoyable in large part due to the viewer being given the opportunity to speculate who the culprit could be.
This movie not only implicates one of it's killers early on, exonerates them, then throws them under the bus again, but rationalizes this 180 by presenting a second killer, which explains discrepancies in the theory that implicated him. That's a pretty cool ending... even if I wasn't given much evidence to make a strong determination.
Scream runs at a refreshingly brisk pace, and even the occasional filler dialog bridges the gaps between setpiece moments with an odd, yet pleasing combination of period pop rock music and atmospheric score.
I can't really think of too many things this movie could have done better with what it was going for. The ending where the movie geek goes "be careful, this is when the bad guy suddenly comes back to life", just as I was thinking about that, then plays it straight by immediately shooting the dude in the head was... how you hip young 90s kids might call "choice".
I think the thing I would want most out of any of the sequels is more thoughtfulness. I really want to be given enough evidence to confidently point a finger at one of the characters and be proven wrong because the plot is secretly much more clever than it seems.
Time will tell.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Scream
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 1996
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been a while since I've seen it. I already know how it ends, but I've forgotten the journey it took to get there. He's also playable killer in Dead by Daylight.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Wes Craven was something of a horror geek god, not just for creating Nightmare on Elm Street, but also Scream, which sets itself apart from other slasher movies by virtue of it's explicit genre savviness.
It immediately opens on a girl home alone who receives a creepy phone call from a guy who goads her into talking about scary movies, immediately referencing Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, and even spoiling that movie, before it turns serious and the threat of home invasion becomes real when a guy with a combat knife and a Spirit Halloween costume runs in to start stabbin'.
This trend follows throughout the entire movie with numerous references to movies, tropes, and even one character just standing up and deconstructing the modern horror genre into it's most popular cliches.
It runs an extremely fine line where it wants viewers to know that it's smarter than your average horror movie, but it also doesn't condescend to it's audience. A general tone of self-awareness and genre subversion is prevalent throughout a majority of it's setpieces, and so too is a thin veil of black comedy.
The Ghostface Killer never speaks full lines while onscreen, so he has moments where he's given amusing body language to communicate and in action scenes where he's trying to kill someone, as anyone would notice, his hits and falls are a soundboard shy of slapstick.
Even when he's talking on the phone, the voice actor playing him is enjoyably campy and the two characters eventually revealed to be the dual identity of the Ghostface Killer bring their best performance, be both believable and entertaining psychopaths.
I knew Shaggy was up to no good.
The reveal of the Ghostface Killer is also pretty central to this movie since it quietly lays the foundation for a whole NEW dimension to this movie: the whodunnit mystery.
Names are cast about, shade is thrown, and tiny little lingering camera moments give you just long enough to question whether, "Wait a minute! That cop was wearing boots! The killer was wearing boots too!"
Scream never leans heavily enough into the whodunnit aspect of the movie to make you seriously suspect anyone other than the characters most frequently appearing onscreen, but this movie manages to subvert even that;
Typically there's only one guilty party in a whodunnit.
In an effort to avoid this expectation, some whodunnits pull the "everyone is guilty" card, such as in Murder on the Orient Express,
Short of that, while still wanting to be surprising, whodunnits will implicate characters outside of the realm of reasonable culprits. For example if there's a locked room mystery, and there are 9 people at the hotel, they'll produce all sorts of evidence to implicate any or all of them, but then pull a 10th person out of their ass at the last second and hang it all on them, despite there having been no evidence, or even poor evidence that they were the killer.
This is worst of all because it completely defeats the point of a whodunnit, which is enjoyable in large part due to the viewer being given the opportunity to speculate who the culprit could be.
This movie not only implicates one of it's killers early on, exonerates them, then throws them under the bus again, but rationalizes this 180 by presenting a second killer, which explains discrepancies in the theory that implicated him. That's a pretty cool ending... even if I wasn't given much evidence to make a strong determination.
Scream runs at a refreshingly brisk pace, and even the occasional filler dialog bridges the gaps between setpiece moments with an odd, yet pleasing combination of period pop rock music and atmospheric score.
I can't really think of too many things this movie could have done better with what it was going for. The ending where the movie geek goes "be careful, this is when the bad guy suddenly comes back to life", just as I was thinking about that, then plays it straight by immediately shooting the dude in the head was... how you hip young 90s kids might call "choice".
I think the thing I would want most out of any of the sequels is more thoughtfulness. I really want to be given enough evidence to confidently point a finger at one of the characters and be proven wrong because the plot is secretly much more clever than it seems.
Time will tell.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]