Nice Guys and Girls Get Slashed Last by Don...

Nice Guys and Girls Get Slashed Last
by Don Jaucian

Scream (1996)
D: Wes Craven
C: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox-Arquette, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Liev Schreiber

If there’s one thing that the horror genre has taught us—ever since creepy crawlers, monsters, and supernatural entities infested our nightmares and imaginations—it’s that being smart is the cure-all to every possible roadblock that might be hurled in our way, be it a knife or a soul-sucking ghost. The horror genre itself might have broken under the weight of expectations stemming from decades’-worth of movies and books, but there still comes something that puts it back together, like an affair that pumps up a rather bland marriage.

Wes Craven’s Scream does exactly that. Its plot is not exactly new: some cloaked killer is going on a bloodbath chasing this nubile girl. There are intentions hidden in the folds of his cloak and underneath the mask. Everything plays out according to rules, both proclaimed and implied, but there are still many times that the rug gets pulled from under our feet. Coming from a long line of Z-list slasher films, gorefests, and routine scares, Scream was a breath of fresh air or a sudden chill right down the spine.

The script’s intelligence has always been something that has set itself apart from its predecessors: ball-dropping, film-checking smartassness as embodied by the film’s resident horror film geek Randy (Jamie Kennedy), stereotyped of course as a friend-zoned, scrawny dude working in a video store. Right from the opening scene we see a famous movie star get murdered (despite our belief that famous movie stars always get slashed last), with her life depending on getting the right answer to a horror movie quiz. It’s also a test for the audience: how much do we know about horror films? Are the numerous nights watching horror flicks enough to get us through this film?

The murderer, of course, is a horror film geek himself, who skewers all the basic slasher genre tropes, techniques, and rules he knows. Gutting the narrative of a flimsy genre isn’t easy, so we get meta-treatments. We see the killer hover behind Randy, and we scream at him to turn around while he’s actually screaming at his own TV, telling Jamie Lee Curtis to turn around before a knife slashes her.

In a way, Scream is actually a study of horror films. It maps out audience response; how we formulate theories as to who the killer is and who gets slashed next. The filmmakers wants to play a whodunit and we’re part of the clever ruse to overturn our expectations of the genre’s tried and tested formulas.

But that doesn’t make Scream any less enjoyable. It’s one of the few remarkable films which mixes wit and fast-paced thrills, and, in the process, it sets a higher bar for the succeeding films (both its sequels and the rest of the horror film industry). It’s relentless, pulling tricks one after another. As the body count goes up, we’re left wondering how quick the film’s wit will wear off until the last splatter of blood finds itself on the wall (or on someone’s face). We have to wait for the sequels for that.