A Scream for a New Generation Illustration by Rob...

A Scream for a New Generation
Illustration by Rob Cham
Words by Jansen Musico

It started with a question: “Do you like scary movies?” Next thing we knew, Drew Barrymore’s being chased by a costumed killer, gutted, and then hung from a tree. The rest was scary movie history.

1996’s Scream was a film that resuscitated a dying fad. It gave movie-going teens a fresh thirst for blood and gore. It not only jumpstarted an old genre, it created a new audience.

Scream paid homage to 70s and 80s slasher films made iconic by their respective psychopathic killers. There was the chainsaw-wielding cannibal Leatherface, in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the ridiculously immortal Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers of the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises. There was also Child’s Play’s Chucky, the maniacal serial killer doll with a little posse of plastic minions. And who could forget Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven’s dream stalker with the perverted sense of humor?

If you don’t consider last year’s dud of a remake, A Nightmare on Elm Street was one very successful horror franchise. It wasn’t only able to create cheap thrills and scares; Nightmare was able to take advantage of its audience by creeping into their own dirty little fantasies and dreams.

Craven knows his suspense. Being one of those filmmakers who reintroduced and re-popularized the slasher flick, he definitely knows his genre. Aside from Nightmare, he wrote the original The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He knows how to create an unsettling mood which not only exploits the characters on screen it also exploits his audience. Hence, we have Scream.

Scream is a franchise that doesn’t take itself seriously. As stated earlier, it’s homage. It takes all the horrific elements employed in successful slasher flicks and creates a scary, funny, and sexy pastiche that is palatable for a new generation of popcorn-munching masses.

The beauty of the series was that it was tailored for the 90s. It was the perfect decade for the original trilogy. Back then, technology could only do so much. It was advanced enough to create a metanarrative—having characters talk about scary films while they’re obviously in one—but was also neither too outdated nor too hi-tech for Scream’s brand of suspense to work.

In Scream 4 (which Ariel will review) there’s a self-referential spiel that’s so meta, it’s funny. It tackles the slasher film set in the age of status updates and smartphones. Will Ghostface, Scream’s own iconic killer, be able to do what he or she did in the 90s given this technology we have today? With the new wave of exploitation films and torture porn in contemporary cinema, will the same witty suspense and gore that worked then survive this new decade?

Get your uncut torrents and your popcorn ready. Pelikula will be dissecting Scream as part of our week-long Halloween special. It’s going to be bloody.