What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1996. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995
Horror is an interesting genre because it’s always changing and always reflecting our own fears back at us. Pick any popular horror hit of the last few decades and you’ll see what we as a culture were preoccupied with at that point in time. The biggest, most recent example of this was last year’s “Host,” which played on the uncertainty we all felt at the start of the pandemic, but you can easily map this theory out for the “torture porn” craze of the early 2000s with films like “Saw,” (we were in the early years of a war and we were all worried about threats against our bodies by unknown terrorists) stuff like “Unfriended” commented on our growing infatuation with and distrust of the internet, and the slasher films of the ‘70s and ‘80s were a reaction to the advent of the rise of shocking, seemingly random killings in real life.
“Scream” director Wes Craven was responsible for many of those slasher films, but by 1996, the genre had grown stale. The man responsible for Freddy Kreuger hadn’t had a box office hit since 1991, and hadn’t done a slasher film since 1989. With “Scream,” he revitalized a genre he helped pioneer, and also satirized it and America’s fear of the coming millennium and supposedly more violent pop culture landscape.
I didn’t know any of that history at the time when I first watched this movie. I came to it fairly late, in college. I actually saw “Scream 4” first, in a packed theater full of rowdy college students during my freshman year of school. I knew nothing about the franchise except that the killer wore a Ghostface mask and that the series heavily referenced other horror movies.
I ended up liking that one a lot, which led me to check out the other “Scream” movies. This first one in the series is a scary, fun, thrilling good time, a movie that is both Peak ‘90s Entertainment and also timeless, because teenagers never change, with a script that stays one foot ahead and off to the side of you. At points, it’s more of a deranged whodunit than a slasher film. It’s also a challenging look at how we as a society claim to hate violence and clutch our pearls at shocking crimes all day, yet will consume that violence without a second thought if it shows up on the 6-o’clock news.
Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson make those points through humor, though, which is why I love this movie and keep coming back to it. It defies your expectations at every turn. It’s still the only movie I’ve seen that can properly manage a self-referential tone and not have it be annoying. The references to other Craven movies and other horror movies in “Scream” aren’t just the “hey, I recognize that” mentions that get thrown around a lot in movies today, they actually move the plot forward. Jamie Kennedy’s Randy even riffs on the supposed rules that Craven laid down for his old slasher films:
Sex=Death. If you have sex, you die
Never drink or do drugs, or you’ll die
Never say “I’ll be right back,” or you die
That he mentions these rules just scenes before he’s shown watching Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” while yelling “Watch out, Jamie! The killer’s right behind you” as Ghostface lurks behind him in real life, is exactly the type of meta, self-referential moment I love so much about “Scream.” It ends up folding back on itself with all of the layers of that moment, but it helps move the plot along.
But all of that inside baseball aside, I really connected with this movie on a first watch because the characters in this movie were acting like they knew what was going to happen to them because they had seen enough movies themselves. Movies were, and still are, how I make sense of the world sometimes. I saw myself in the way these characters analyzed and examined different parts of movie culture in ways I only thought were possible if you were a filmmaker yourself. “Scream” made me realize I wasn’t alone in that thought process.
And, once I learned more about Wes Craven, “Scream” inspired me creatively, too: It is possible to reinvent yourself without abandoning what made you successful in the first place. Maybe all you need to do to get inspired is to break down the thing you’re doing and look at it from a different point of view and put it together again. Because if there’s one thing “Scream” taught me, it’s that the sequels are always bigger.
Up next: Do aliens exist? I think so! I’m going to talk all about it after I watch 1997’s “Contact.”
Letter of Recommendation
If you like “Scream,” might I suggest “Fear Street: 1994” on Netflix?
That’s all, folks. If you liked what you saw here, click that subscribe button (promise I won’t send any annoying emails) and tell all your friends!
This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, let me know!
You can find me in other corners of the internet as well, if you so choose. There’s my personal website (which focuses on pop culture, faith and my journalism clips), a Twitter account and a Letterboxd account. Subscribe away.