Cut to the next day and classmate Sidney Prescott meets the news with a sinking feeling. The year before, her mother was assaulted and murdered by a maniac whose presence didn't go to jail with him. When boyfriend Billy sneaks in through the window that night it's with a jump scare. When schoolfriend Randy at the videoshop answers why the cops let a suspect go he says it's because they haven't seen enough movies. When the killer is stalking the hallway it's to the soundtrack of Halloween, playing loudly from the living room. And so on, to the too many more examples in this packed horror outing. Why? Because this movie isn't just interested in making you scream, it's making history right in front of your popcorn.
Welcome to Wes Craven's Scream, the pike in the tent at the centre of the '90s, where art and life rip each other off until one character says to another that it's all a movie, you just don't get to pick your genre. Where did that come from? Well, decades of horror parody to start with from Abbott and Costello meeting Frankenstein in the '40s to The Munsters in the '60s, to the Carry On sendup of Hammer movies in '66, Wacko in the '80s all the way past this one to the Scary Movies of the '00s and beyond. It was the epoch of culture jackdaw Tarantino and the misshapen rock revivals on the radio, grunge and Britpop. The difference is, like all the otgher scientists at the convention in The Fly, they were all lying.
Scream was the movie where the characters could recite the rules of the movie they were in, making them ripe for both obedience and subversion: there is no outside the system. Wes Craven, as he had with Last House on the Left, then The Hills have Eyes, and then A Nightmare on Elm St, once again changed the game. He'd already done this to some extent by getting meta with his own creation when he made New Nightmare where he along with the real name cast like Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund found themselves in a Freddie Kruger-verse. But Scream had an extra edge.
Kevin Williamson's idea for the screenplay came from an incident when he was housesitting, saw an open window and feared someone was in the house. He called a friend for support, as he roamed the place with a butcher knife and they fell into a conversation stuffed with horror movie references, including, tellingly, one correcting the other on a reference. The play in this between wit and effortless cultural literacy is all '90s, all Gen X.
And that's what all those bright young up and comers were, too. This is the horror whose irony, this time, is driven by the sassy wisecracks of of the players whose online meta-cation had already given them armour against the boomer world (this is when boomer became a slur). Wasn't that happening in Halloween in '78? Not to this extent. When Sidney is asked who'd play her in a movie she rejects the "young Meg Ryan" with, "with my luck, it'd be Tori Spelling" to her friend Tatum, played by Tori Spelling. That kind of wink is as old as the talkies but here it's spiced with the possibility that that would actually happen.
The movie itself maintains itself slasher credentials easily and is one of the rare moments when knowing audiences can enjoy the horror as they pick up the refs like pokemon figures. The media are represented by the over ambitious Gale Weathers whose erotic fascination with Sidney's mother's killer is the kind of story that filled newsgroup discussions in that pre-commercial online world and the whacky news rags at the supermarket checkout. Seldom has cultural durability been so finely localised.
Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Drew Barrymore, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy and the rest of the cast call shine in their roles which toughen the average teen and soften the criticism of the nerd. They stroll through scenes pumping with Nick Cave songs as though in a heightened docudrama.
But, of course, it doesn't end there. This was how you made a teen horror for the next decade. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, Urban Legend, Cherry Falls, and so on, became the path to unirony, the selfaware young 'uns fighting relentless monsters who could quote Freddy Kruger. Of this, only the TV show Buffy stood the distance because its dialogue was dependably razor sharp, its characters solid and its allegory of the late teen years poignant to the point of heartbreak. The rest (including Scream's own sequels) feel like cover versions.
But other stuff was also in the clouds at the time. Hollywood went back into genre production and made the perrenial mistake of throwing more and more money at something that always worked better in the unsuperised shade of low budget land. And all the massive bloated mammoths that just got less and less scary were deflated by a thing made for a few maxed credit cards on 16mm and home video called The Blair Witch Project.
Scream movies are still being made. I passed on the most recent one but could have sat quite happily in front of it. Too much has happened since, found footage, new French extremity, the pleasing chaos of streaming where sui generis gems like Satanic can be found for free among the knock-offs and try-hards. A new glossy Scream movie just seems like another choctop.
Viewing notes: I watched my splendid local 4K release of Scream in Dolby Vision with robust audio and thrilled to it yet again. It's available, frequently at a good discount, on physical media, You can hire it or have it with your subscription on a host of streamers in great quality.
No comments:
Post a Comment