In Which It’s the Millennium and Motives are Incidental

The 90’s were an odd duck of a decade for the horror genre. Since, oh say about the mid 50’s, horror films enjoyed an existence of being the mainline to the cultural id. A genre that could be made at any level, for any budget, and cut to the quick of what we fear. It might be nuclear annihilation, of the shift in sexual mores, or economic collapse. Whatever the unrest, it could be produced and sold to audiences around the world.

But after a certain genre high in the 70’s and 80’s, something odd happened. The horror film kind of got brushed aside for a while. The last decade of the 20th century saw a dip in the world of straight horror. Instead the angst of the time began to be sublimated into other genres. The indie film boom of the 90’s helped greatly in expanding content boundaries for a wide variety of different styles. No longer was the horror film the sole arbiter of blood and guts good times at the cinema, in fact a Tarantino movie has enough tension and gore to compete with any quality slasher. Nudity was now the topic of a whole new genre of film, you don’t need to swing by Elm Street to get your fix of big screen bare skin.

And the roiling subconscious of the time was caught up in every genre imaginable. Tech thrillers spoke to a fear of the future, domestic dramas caught the dreary day-to-day life in global liberal capitalism, and comedies scooped up the wide swath of cultural shifts. It’s not to say that horror movies went away, but that they occupied a different, and diminished space. So what to do with a genre that seems to to be on the outs. Well, turn the form of the horror film itself into the source of terror.

Wes Craven’s Scream is kind of the perfect horror movie for the mid 90’s. A knowing piece of metafiction that warps the previously conceived structures of its genre while deliberately playing to them. An interrogation of the fears born from new technology and the quickly coming century turn, and a bit of the old “TV is bad” media satire as well. The fact that Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson are able to both juggle all these ideas while creating a thoroughly effective thriller speaks well to their talents, and how a bit of rewiring can make any genre or idea engaging when placed in the right hands.

The interesting thing here is that the form of the movie Scream is what makes the movie Scream so scary and fun. It’s a movie about movies, yes, but it’s also about how an audience relates to the movies they are watching, and the expectations we bring to the world of genre filmmaking. The masterful opening sequence is a beautiful evocation of Craven and Williamson’s MO. The scene is perfectly self contained on its own, a thrilling cat and mouse game between the Ghost Face Killer and Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore). Craven elegantly frames the action in a fashion that begins the scene with the home antiseptic and comforting, before transforming it into a house of terror.

But this sequence was a huge shocker when Scream was first released. Based on all promotional material it seemed like Barrymore would be the lead of the film. Her face is on the poster, her name is all over the trailer, and the opening section has enough footage to make it seem like she was going to be in the whole film. Instead the introduction is a structural call to arms, reversing the expectations of the audience while playing everything straight, they thought that the big name actor famous for genre films of the previous decade would make it through the credits. Scream says otherwise.

This balancing act of metatextual commentary and intricately constructed thrills is a difficult balancing act to pull off, and with decades of films pulling from Scream’s textbook there’s always the chance that what once was novel is now rote. Luckily Scream has weathered the test of time for a couple of reasons: the foremost being its incredibly solid structure and willingness to subvert it’s own knowing games.

For all the wryness about genre and story, Scream is essentially a whoddunit. A mystery procedural where we are introduced to the crime, paraded through a series of suspects, given motive for every main character, and have the masks pulled off in an isolated country house. The twist is even worthy Agatha Christie: there’s not one killer, but two, a bit of sleight of hand mischief that would feel right at home with Poirot or Holmes. This structure grounds everything in the immediate and keeps things from getting too far into pontificating. Every sequence lays out clues and possibilities, before brutally removing them from the board with a gleeful amount of blood.

Scream’s legacy as the “meta” horror movie is also a lot more rich and complex. Scream was far from the first film to toy around with horror conventions (hell it wasn’t even Craven’s first that decade as he made New Nightmare right before it), but it does so in a way that emphasizes the knotty structure of the plot while subverting the expectations it sets up. Take for example perhaps the most famous scene in the flick, video nerd Randy Meeks (Jaime Kennedy) gets up in front of an audience at a party and explains the rules of horror films: 1. Don’t have sex 2. Don’t drink and do drugs 3. Don’t say “I’ll be right back.”

This being a horror movie means all these rules are going to broken. First of all everyone at the party has consumed plenty of alcohol, secondly this sequence cross cuts with our heroine Sidney (Neve Campbell) finally consummating her relationship with boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich), and it ends with local joker Stuart (Matthew Lillard) mock stating that he’ll be right back.

So according the rules of the movie these people have got to get the ax, but Scream’s way ahead of that. These are the expectations of the horror genre, not laws set in stone, and Craven and company can do as they damn well please. So Sidney makes it to the end alive without being the virtuous virgin, Randy gets roughed up without biting the dust, Stu gets knocked off, but only because he’s one half of the murderous duo with Billy. Scream actively uses the expectations it builds against the audience.

Such games feel perfectly in line with the world of Pulp Fiction and The Simpsons, a place where pop culture cache can be transliterated into a functioning form of art. Scream excels because of how well Craven handles the material. He directs with the assurance of an old hand (employing anamorphic lenses, swooping single takes, and shifting dutch angles) while acting spirited and vivacious with the material. Throw in the subtle commentaries about the use of the cell phone as a device of terror, a bit of the residue from OJ Simpson coverage, and a sprinkle of teen movie glow, and it pretty rightfully stands as the iconic full bore horror piece from the decade.

Odds and Ends

• This is the first time I’ve this flick from beginning to end in one sitting. I saw about 80 percent of the thing on random cable channels and knew all the twists beforehand, but it truly is a terrific singular piece of entertainment.
• Oh hey Henry Winkler plays the uptight principal who gets got about halfway through.
• It’s a bit odd that the terrible parody franchise of Scary Movie decided on Scream to be its first major target. Hard to turn something that’s already fairly winking and in on the joke into a full blown parody.
• I highly recommend checking out the chapter of Down and Dirt Pictures about Scream’s production, which unsurprisingly makes the Weinsteins look fucking terrible.
• All of the Scream movies are on Netflix. I haven’t seen the sequels, but I’ve heard that they are quite interesting even if they are not all good.

As always, twitter, letterboxd, and I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokemon).

Next week our mind is broken in two by in David Lynch’s 1997 horror noir Lost Highway.