“Be careful,” Randy says near the end of Scream. “They always come back for one last scare.”
He might have been talking about the genre itself. Horror has existed nearly since the beginning of cinema, but in 1996 it was on its last breath due to a series of declining sequels to slasher classics such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. When young writer Kevin Williamson teamed up with old master Wes Craven for a film that took its cues from seminal modern horror film Halloween but added a postmodern twist that made it resonate with a younger, hipper audience, the genre got a breath of new life. But here’s where the metaphor falls apart: Scream wasn’t a last scare. It inspired six sequels and set the stage for the horror movie’s return to prominence. In 2024, it might be cinema’s most reliable genre. The prestige and popcorn horror movies of today all owe their lives to Scream.
The film hit different back then. Every generation gets their high school movie, and Scream is mine. I was 16 when it landed in theaters, and although my friends and I were never terrorized by a psycho killer in a mask modeled after an Edvard Munch painting, the world of the film reflected our own upper middle-class existence. Like the smart-ass teenagers of Scream, we were bored. We had no cause to fight against. We weren’t oppressed at school. The stock market was high, the country was at peace, and the houses in the suburbs were getting bigger. The only excitement came when someone’s parents went out of town so that we could invade one of those unreasonably large houses, drink cheap beer, and watch movies.
The high school kids in Scream are so bored in fact that when two of their classmates die—in a riveting 10-minute opening sequence where the hottest talk show host of 2024 bites it—it’s treated as a novelty rather than a threat. The kids run around in Ghostface masks, and they cheer when an attempted murder at the school inspires an early dismissal. The only one who takes it seriously, of course, is Sidney (Neve Campbell), whose mother was brutally murdered a year prior. Conveniently, her father is out of town for the weekend, so she decides to spend her time with her idiot friends, including her seriously horny boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich), rather than sit at home and wait for the phone to ring.
Williamson’s script spreads its focus beyond the kids to an ambitious reporter (Courteney Cox) and a boyish police officer (David Arquette), who provide light romance to play against the gruesome kills. At various points, you might suspect either one of them of being the killer, as one of Scream’s key innovations is how it blends the slasher flick with the whodunit. Instead of simply waiting for the next scare, we monitor the comings and goings of each character like a detective. There’s no real hope that the police will solve the murder, so it’s incumbent on the viewer to suss out Ghosface’s identity ourselves. Getting to play Poirot while watching intricately staged kills added, at the time, a fresh layer of tension.
If anyone could have solved the case, it should have been the aforementioned Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the dorky cinephile who essentially recognizes that he’s in a slasher movie and uses his knowledge of the movies to stay alive. One of the film’s great jokes is that he’s too dumb and horny to really take charge of the situation. Still, it’s easy to see him as a stand-in for Williamson, since it’s the writer’s fondness for the genre that animates the screenplay. References to movies as diverse as Prom Night, The Exorcist, and Psycho pepper the dialogue, forging a postmodernism that culminates in a climax where the characters actually watch Halloween at the party while oblivious to the real-life killing spree happening in other areas of the house (including one perfectly meta scene in which Randy yells at the film: “Behind you, Jamie,” to Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in the film, when Scream’s audience is yelling the same thing at him). If you squint, you can see a pointed critique on the dehumanization of a generation raised on media violence, although Williamson is more interested in making a great movie than curing society’s ills.
Scream puts Williamson in the same class as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, a generation of young filmmakers who gorged on VHS tapes, watching and rewatching their favorite classics until those films were stitched onto their souls. In retrospect, it was the only way to reboot a genre that was on the verge of bleeding out. Scream bridged generations through Craven’s craft and Williamson’s wit, turning a surprise hit into new life for a genre that simply refuses to die. Scream all you want, the killer will win in the end.
Scream (also a Fall Arts Guide pick from WCP Arts Editor Sarah Marloff) screens Oct. 11 at 9:30 p.m.; Oct. 12 at 10:25 p.m.; Oct. 13 (TBA); and Oct. 16 (TBA) at Alamo Drafthouse DC. drafthouse.com.