Jon Solo Sebastian 10/21/2024:

“What’s your favorite scary movie?”

That’s an easy question for me to answer. I don’t know if I can call it a scary movie because none of them are ever scary, but I love this film. I’ve seen it so many times, including a couple times when it released in the theaters in 1996. Scream is my favorite horror film by a mile. This Wes Craven film took a tired and cliché-filled genre and revived it by reinventing the way scary stories are told, but used familiar beats in order to not completely throw us off as viewers.

The opening sequence shows a girl, Drew Barrymore, alone in her house getting popcorn ready for her night-time scary movie watching. She has this weird phone conversation with an odd and flirtatious guy who claims he called her by accident. He’s asking her questions about herself and about scary movies. She hangs up on him a couple of times, and he keeps calling her back, and he insists on asking her what her name is—she finally asks him why, and he responds by saying, “’Cause I wanna know who I’m looking at.” Things pick up from there as she races around the house to make sure all the doors are locked. He calls her again and has shed his friendly tone. He’s now yelling at her and saying horrifying things to her. She then hears a knock at the door, and asks, “Who’s there?”

She picks up the phone to try to call the police, but the guy calls again just as she picks up the phone *insert a scream*. What he says to her is funny, and it’s also the first friendly stab it takes at the horror films that came before it. He says to her, “You should never say, ‘who’s there?’ Don’t you watch scary movies? It’s a death wish. You might as well just come out here to investigate a strange noise or something.”

The first twelve minutes of this film sets the tone that this will be scary, gruesome, funny, and most importantly—refreshing. Drew Barrymore knocked it out of the park with her acting. The suspense blended with the atmosphere and the music all clicked beautifully. That’s just the beginning of the film. We go on to introduce the main character, Sidney, played by Neve Campbell, and from there the rest of the characters are introduced.

The writer Kevin Williamson, and director, Wes Craven, took all the things we horror fans always shout at the TV and implemented them into this film in a masterful manner. It goes a step further with the Randy character who uses past horror movies as a guide to try to solve the murder case; and to gauge who is next on the hit list. It’s a brilliant way to tell the story and it works flawlessly in my opinion. In one scene near the end of the film, the characters are watching Halloween (1978) at a party, and implementing a scene within a scene moment. Randy winds up watching the film alone as most of the other kids left. He’s telling Jamie Lee Curtis to look behind her. Meanwhile, the killer is slowly approaching the couch behind him. Fortunately for Randy, the killer is distracted and runs off leaving Randy to his movie.

There’s a discussion among fandoms of different genres about actors playing high school kids and how it doesn’t always go over well. Grease is a film that comes to mind for it not working too well, even though I’ve enjoyed that film. My point of mentioning this is most of the main actors were in there twenties when they filmed Scream, and it didn’t raise any eyebrows or questions because they looked the age they were hired to play.

One of my favorite moments is near the end when Sidney tells the murderers they’ve been influenced by too many horror movies, to which one of them responds by saying, “movies don’t create psychos; movies make psychos more creative.” The reason I like this line so much is because it describes this movie and its influences. How do we make a horror film unlike anyone has seen before? This is what Scream was. Horror movies have always been there, they just needed a jolt of new blood, or new creative energy to get audiences interested again.

I feel like there was a little bit of Joseph Campbells reluctant hero in this film with Sidney trying to get away from her past or hiding from it. She was pushed into fighting back due to the persistence of the killer coming after her and everyone around her. She was a strong heroine, but not without weaknesses or flaws. You find yourself rooting for her as she’s consistently placed in awful situations, or when she discovers another fallen friend. The weight of it all pushes her down, but she doesn’t give up and ends up winning the fight… but at what cost?

If you’re a fan of the genre and haven’t seen this film, don’t worry, I didn’t spoil much. I do recommend you watch it. The 1990’s brought us a lot of great films, and this one is no slouch. If I had to rate it out of five stars, I’d give it five out of five.

Now, what’s your favorite scary movie?