Films: 1990s
(1996) Scream
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Scream
Director: Wes Craven
Release: 1996
Postmodernism crashes into the horror film as Wes Craven turns his lens on the very stuff of the genre in his 1996 return to the spotlight, "Scream."
The plot is Craven's brand of simple: A masked killer terrifies a tony California superb, disemboweling its pretty girls and carving apart its athletic young men. The murders start randomly but seem to swiftly focus on high school student Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell).
Kevin Williamson's script casts Sidney as a survivor of family tragedy. Her mother was raped and killed, and while her testimony put the suspected perpetrator away, she is haunted by the notion that she may have fingered the wrong fellow.
Courtney Cox appears as newscaster/author Gale Weathers, at once pursuing the next chapter in the Prescott family disaster, and snooping for evidence that the current slasher may be the actual killer from the past, seeking to finish off the Prescott lineage.
Sidney and her friends are drawn into a cat-and-mouse game of phone calls and false alarms, until the town shuts down in the wake of the murder of its principal (a demented performance by "Happy Days'" Henry Winkler). In response, the high school class turns out for a celebratory party at classmate Stuart Macher's (Matthew Lillard) prefab mansion. There, the ghost-masked murders reach a fever pitch and a dark secret regarding Sidney's past is revealed.
Williamson and Craven unpack their general disdain for the state-of-affairs in horror films as early as the first 10 minutes. While the stalker prepares his assault on home-alone teen Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore), he quizzes her on the genre films with which she has presumably grown up. The effect is twofold: Becker says she liked the first "Nightmare on Elm Street" film, but that the rest "sucked." Williamson and Craven expose her diluted knowledge of crucial genre mythology and suggest her ignorance is punishable. She mistakenly answers that Jason was the killer in the first "Friday the 13th," thereby condemning herself in the killer's system.
It was, he cackles, not Jason but his mother Pamela.
This theme of frustration at modern disengagement from the actual act of being scared is the central idea in "Scream." Gen-X adolescents, desensitized and jaded with their horror movies, have become cool and precocious dissectors of the plots and narrative tricks of the genre. Craven and Williamson set their ghostface killer loose on them, attempting to restore the inherent cruelty and terror to the structure.
"Scream" is a nasty film, but it never manages to pull its tongue quite far enough out of cheek to become mean-spirited. It punishes its snotty subjects mercilessly, but surrounds the events of violence with Chaplin-esque physical comedy. It's a strange mix.
The ghost-mask knifer is very different from preceding slashers. Williamson and Craven do not embellish the character with back story. The only mystery is that of his identity. The ghostface character is simplified to an almost crude cipher - a punitive force inflicted upon these characters by their creators.
The ghostface interacts with his victims in two ways, a kind of phone-counseling-session on angel dust, in which he calls his victim and taunts them for their scooped-out jaded existence, and then he confronts them in person.
Whereas Craven's Freddy punished Elm Street teens for the sins of their fathers, "Scream's" ghostface killer punishes teens for their intellect and cynicism. The chief sin in "Scream" is a lack of respect for the universe around oneself. In the teens' overstimulated and multiprocessed milieu, nothing is scary because everything is considered to exist in metaphysical quotation marks.
As his victims suggest all the ways ghostface is not frightening, it tilts its death mask condescendingly, patronizing his victims' savvy before brutally stabbing, slicing or crushing them in garage doors. This is the slasher character as vengeful creator, teaching his creations how to honor tradition once more.
What is additionally innovative about Craven's script is the specific physicality of the character. Craven proposes, in "Scream," that the lineage of killers, since at least John Carpenters 1978 "Halloween," is a lineage of clowns. Like the circus act, these characters are partially alien, masked and strange and of mysterious motive. What they do defies time and space, in the way that too many clowns fit in too small a car.
When the ghostface character in "Scream" is humbled, Craven directs the scenes to emphasize the broadest parts of the falls and various punishments to which it is momentarily subjected. Clowns, Craven emphasizes, should scare us - and then they must be humbled before us to confirm our control over the universe.
As a revenge film, Craven and Williamson succeed. In its class, "Scream" is artful and effective, full of luxurious Craven camera work (note the gorgeous multi-cut sunset behind Sidney's house).
As a pure horror film, however, the snarky hipness of "Scream" works against it. The physical and broad comedy, the self-referential/reverential vibe - these things only work for "Scream" if the audience is on the inside.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
