Scream (1996) - Review
Originally published November 2015Wes Craven was one of my favorite horror movie directors. Not all of his films have been great. In fact, Craven has made probably more bad stuff than good. Nonetheless, I have always admired his rebellious attitude and the overwhelming creativity he showcased in his filmmaking, even in his crappier projects.
If you somehow don't know who Wes Craven was, the two most successful films he's known for are A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. Nightmare is easily his best work and it's still a surprisingly good horror film from the 1980's that holds up incredibly well. The special effects, the plot, and even the acting are still much better than you would expect from an independent horror movie from that era. In fact, it is probably because the movie was a cheap independent one that ended up being so good. The budget forced them to be creative and the independence allowed them a lot more freedom in their choices, excluding the stuff like the ending that no one liked, of course.
Scream, however, was a movie that I've never really liked. I never could get behind the hype around it and always thought it was rather formulaic and bland in comparison to other things Craven did. As a result, I only watched it once back when I was a teenager. However, as you might know from other reviews I've written, my taste in movies has since changed. So, in honor of Wes Craven's unfortunate passing this year, and my tradition of watching a horror "classic" on Halloween, I decided to give Scream another shot and see if perhaps my initial impressions of the film were unjustified...
Image: Dimension Films | What do you mean you don't like Scream?
Nope still don't like it.
Pros
The opening scene has its highlights, the main being the When a Stranger Calls line: "...because I want to know who I'm looking at."
The movie does not act like the typical slasher film where it takes a while for things to start happening. It starts and barely ever stops; the killer is very prominent in this film.
The premise of kids who are aware of the horror movie clichés and attempting to avoid those trappings had potential.
I enjoyed the fact that the killer gets the crap kicked out of him in pretty much every encounter, making him not quite the unstoppable killing machine from every other slasher film.
The mystery was a good idea, in theory.
Entertaining as a ‘90s time capsule.
Cons
I R ACT GOOD!
For a movie that was designed to be all edgy, self-aware, and ahead of its own game, the characters and plot are all archetypes and formulaic.
The mystery forces the story to use various red herrings that do more harm than good.
Man, the characters suck!
Not as funny or clever as it seems to think it is.
The self-aware nature of the film essentially asks its audience to think more logically and, thus, not suspend their disbelief, yet a lot of unbelievable and illogical things occur.
The twist doesn't really make sense, especially when you think about the motives of the killer.
The motives of the killer are skewed. It openly admits to the fact that psychos don't need motivation, but then we're given a motive anyway. It's like they couldn't decide.
Plot & Thoughts
I remember the advertisements for Scream when it first came out. There was a lot of focus placed on how the characters were well aware of horror movie tropes and that the movie was rather self-aware. It was supposed to be the Cabin in the Woods of its day in how it was making fun of the slasher sub-genre and its formula. However, a Cabin in the Woods this is not.
Image: Dimension Films
Cabin managed to be a mixture of comedy with its horror. It used the archetypes, clichés, and even the formula to its advantage in telling a story. Scream kind of takes the easy route of just having its characters talk about the formula and archetypes. It makes references to horror movies or things that happen in them and then does them anyway, expecting the audience to acknowledge the references and go along with them. This does not make your movie clever. It feels like it's just insulting the audience for not liking the clichés more, rather than letting them in on the joke.
It's really not doing anything different from the Date/Scary/Epic/etc Movie films that spawned out of the Scary Movie franchise, which directly spoofed Scream. These so-called spoof comedies have the same misconception about humor that Scream seems to have about being clever. In those films, they just throw references at you, without really putting any effort into it. They just expect you to laugh, as though having its actors interact with one another while dressed as a Kardashian and Iron Man is somehow funny without any jokes.
Image: Dimension Films | The intended demographic
I know I'm in the minority when it comes to my opinion of Scream, because everyone seems to hold it in high regard as the movie that revitalized horror films after they had stagnated by the end of the ‘80s. I just don't think it's able to achieve what it's trying to do. Calling our attention to the tropes and clichés of horror movies, and then doing the same thing doesn't excuse the behavior. It's lazy and it just shows that you're aware of how lazy it is. If I went to a party and told everyone that I was bound to offend someone or embarrass myself at some point, and then promptly said something offensive and awkward, it doesn't excuse the embarrassing moment, nor does it make me clever. It merely confirms that I'm aware of how foolish I am.
I challenge people who fondly recall Scream as this 4th-wall-breaking masterpiece of horror to just view it as the movie it actually is; ignore what Scream's marketing conditioned us into believing it was. The new Ninja Turtles movie makes just as many lazy and pointless references to other pop-culture icons and movies as Scream does, but it wasn't marketed as such. It shouldn't be judged as some clever self-aware movie anyway (it should be judged as the crap it is). Ignore all the moments when they mention Freddy Kreuger, or Silence of the Lambs, or Friday the 13th, because that's all they're doing. Instead just watch Scream and ask: is it actually doing anything innovative or interesting?
Image: Dimension Films | Best scene of the movie
From what I saw, every character was the same as any other from a horror film: a majority of the actors, who are definitely not teenagers, play cliché teenagers. The main protagonist Sidney, played by Neve Campbell, is a whiney white girl with white girl problems. She is traumatized by an event in her past she can't get over, or just chooses not to because she secretly likes the sympathy. Her boyfriend is played by Johnny Depp-wannabe, Skeet Ulrich, who acts creepy for no reason half the time and serves little purpose other than being an overtly suspicious heart-throb. Her friend, played by Rose McGowan, is a tough, one-note girl and pretty much the only one of the bunch I liked. Rose's character has a boyfriend who is a goofy, tactless douche, played by Matthew Lillard, who is bad in almost everything he's in. They also have a douchebag horror-movie nerd friend played by equally-terrible Jamie Kennedy.
Image: Dimension Films | Kennedy is practicing his acting technique alongside Lillard's
There's not much depth to this group of friends and we don't get much from the side characters either. Courtney Cox's bitch-journalist is just as one-note as the rest. David Arquette plays a dense deputy for comic relief. And Henry Winkler's principal of the high school serves little purpose other than a pointless red herring. This choice to make the various characters into suspects is something I didn't understand.
I know they were trying to make it into a bit of a mystery thriller to make its audiences guess who the killer might be, which isn't a bad idea, except that I don't recall any dialogue in the first 2 acts that indicated that it HAD to be one of the main characters. We just knew it was. By the time the characters started talking about who the killer might be, there were several other characters who had already been implicated in some way.
Image: Dimension Films
It doesn't help that they killed off a couple of those suspects almost immediately after making them suspicious. FYI, when writing a mystery, doing this kind of ruins the mystery part. Had they killed these people off-screen and didn't tell us of their demise until the final act, it would have just allowed them to be suspects in our minds and we would be more involved in trying to figure out the mystery. Instead, we're given a red herring and it's immediately snatched away, only leaving us with so many characters to choose from by the end. If you need them to be victims, let them be victims. If you need them to be suspects, let them be suspects. Don't make them both at the same time. The writers, unsurprisingly, were also apparently responsible for the horror clones I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, and it shows. They probably were really proud of their twists and turns, but as I mentioned, the identity of the killer and its motives weren't surprising, they were just difficult to believe.
Image: Dimension Films
The only thing that makes this movie noteworthy is Craven's direction, sort of. I feel like there are little pockets of quality scattered throughout Scream where he's able to add some actual tension to the moment. He still manages to do some simple tricks to make the scene a little more tense or exciting, but even that suffers if you aren't invested in the characters at all, which I wasn't. The best scene in the movie is the opening that everyone knows with Drew Barrymore. It sets things up well with the deranged phone call and a brief, but exciting chase. I'm on board with it because I haven't gotten to know how crappy the characters of the film are yet and the scene has some great tension. Unfortunately, once I met the rest of the cast, it was mostly downhill, with a few exceptions.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Craven's direction of Scream and why I feel it's not as good as some other stuff he's done. The movies Wes Craven directed that I found to be more creative and interesting were usually low-budget independent films. When he had more freedom as a director, the film might have dragged a little or lost its way, but it remained interesting, like The Serpent and the Rainbow for instance. Scream's polish and $18-million budget indicates to me that there might have been some restrictions in place that stifled creativity and forced everyone to make certain decisions around getting the film done, rather than going in more interesting directions. Or maybe everyone was really proud of the film they made and my theory is crap. I could be wrong.
Image: Dimension Films | Did he really just say all that about a classic?!
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Scream, much like I remember, is a bland slasher film that tries to excuse its repetitive and uninspired behavior by calling your attention to it. It sets out to be a self-aware, scary, mystery-thriller, but never quite achieves any of those. I was more annoyed by the characters and the attempts at cleverness than anything else. Had Scream been a low-budget horror and built more around its original premise, we might have seen a more interesting film from Craven. Instead, we got a formulaic film that somehow revitalized a dying genre with its overwhelming success. On a personal note: it's good to know that sometimes my teenage opinions aren't so far off from what I know as an adult, even if that means disliking a "classic."
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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