The Movie Room

Scream 1996, directed by Wes Craven

Rating: 10/10

When it comes to horror, I think it is hard to find an example of the genre that is better than Scream. The craftsmanship on display here is masterful, it is effectively scary, it is refreshingly hilarious, and it was so good at what it did that it changed the horror genre forever. 

Part of what makes this movie (and the series, but especially so here in the first installment) so great is Ghostface as a killer. With his mask, cloak, and knife he appears like the older classic slashers like Michael Myers, Freddy Kreuger, or Jason Voorhees. What separates him from those three (and the many others like them) is that he is fallible—he can trip or be winded or knocked down by a blow that isn’t a million bullets. Those other killers often need supernatural rituals and over the top executions to make them die, and even then, nothing is promised. With Ghostface, there is never a question about if this killer can himself be killed which makes the stakes feel more urgent. He is very capable at slashing, but the threat against him is felt more than when you shoot a gun at Michael Myers and he just keeps walking towards you. This villain is able to be conquered, and if you injure him without killing him that is just going to make him angrier and more prone to murder you in a gruesome way. Beyond the real-world stakes, this fallibility also gives the film(s) some of its best humor. The first time Ghostface takes a hit and has to pause to recover, it is unlike anything seen before and makes you laugh both at the slapstick as well as at the audacity, and the bit never gets old—every time a potential victim gets in a hit, I want to both cheer and laugh. Ghostface is thus able to be scarier and funnier than most other slasher villains, even without resorting to cheesy gag lines like the Nightmare on Elm Street films.

Another part of its horror-comedy balancing act is Kevin Williamson’s script. He wrote a bunch of meta-horror around this time with The Faculty and I Know What You Did Last Summer also being good, but not as good, examples. By having the characters know the rules of horror, describe the situations and clichés as they approach them, and try to knowingly subvert the tropes as they happen, Scream set off a reaction that meant horror could never really be the same again. Any film that came after Scream would be laughed at if it just fell into the same traps that Scream lampooned so thoroughly, and most of the films that tried to mimic the knowingness were not written as smartly and so come off as pale comparisons—once Scream happened, the old formula was immediately outdated and it did not provide a viable blueprint for others to copy, thus forcing any horror film that wanted to be good to try and find a whole new way about it. Similar to how Daniel Craig said that after Austin Powers came out they had to completely rethink the James Bond formula, Screamboth serves as a slasher exemplar and also ruined slashers for almost everybody else.

Scream is not the first meta text and it is very consciously not the first slasher film, but the way it uses those two styles in conjunction with each other made it a classic of both. It is hilarious and horrifying, realistic and heightened, old-fashioned and revolutionary. It is because of these reasons that Scream holds the place of the highest ranked horror film in my collection.