Scream (1996)
Posted on September 17, 2006
Filed Under Movies, Serial killers, Series, Slashers
With hindsight, can you blame a film for the poor imitations that followed? Received wisdom among horror aficionados states that Scream, Wes Craven’s 1996 mega-hit, is where it all went wrong for the genre, ushering in a series of sub-par slashers and refocusing major-studio horror almost exclusively on teenagers: nearly all the big horror hits of recent years have been neutered, 15-certificate fare or under. All legitimate charges, of course, and when faced with the prospect of Scary Movie 5 next year, it’s hard not to feel some degree of antipathy towards the film that started the ball rolling.
But while Scream may sit at the top of a very long downward spiral that we’re still sliding down ten years later, it’s also a rather good film. Craven’s tale of a group of horror-obsessed teens who notice eerie parallels with the movies they love when their schoolmates start being killed off one by one is both a love letter to the genre movies he references and a solidly-crafted slasher in its own right. The most common criticism of the film is that it substitutes irony for scares, and that the self-referencing undoes any real potential for terror, but the aspects for which the film is most remembered – the ‘rules’, the silly discussions of Halloween – are really only window dressing. For all Craven mocks the formula, he sticks to it rigidly and deploys it artfully, and the films most intense moments – especially the opening sequence and the climax – are as nerve-shredding as any of their predecessors.
This is essentially the film’s triumph. Craven’s paid his dues as a horror auteur, meaning he’s skilful enough to walk the walk as well as talk the talk; he can deconstruct what he’s doing without detracting from it. The final scene, which lays bare the killer’s motivation – essentially, he was warped by watching too many horror movies – casts the jovial name-dropping of films into a more sinister light. The ‘rules’ aren’t just the babblings of a know-it-all teen, they’re a murderer’s modus operandi, which is shown to have real consequences for the other characters. Far from patronising or belittling the works on John Carpenter and his peers, this raises them to a far greater level of importance – and rules or no rules, Scream at least managed to keep me guessing until the very end.
Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that a man who’s had a film banned in several countries on the grounds that it might deprave and corrupt should score his biggest commercial success with a movie in which an impressionable teen is corrupted by horror movies. Fans of Last House on the Left and the like may consider this to be Craven’s sell out moment, but it’s too sophisticated for that. Sure, there’s a surface level of meta-detail that can complicate the issue, but essentially Scream is an honest-to-god slasher that follows the rules and is all the better for it.
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