100 Scariest Movie Moments: #13 Scream

In analyzing Scream, it’s important to realize that it did not introduce self-awareness to the slasher genre. That honor, to the best of my knowledge, goes to later Friday the 13^th sequels; particularly Part 6, and Jason Goes to Hell. The latter actually made the FBI anticipating Jason’s slasher-film behavior a plot point. It’s this tendency that actually makes the later Friday the 13^th films a lot more fun than the earlier ones.

Scream was something of an ironic backfire for Wes Craven. He set out to destroy the slasher genre by making the cliches so obvious that no one could take the format seriously anymore. I somewhat wonder if he still would have made the film if he had possessed a crystal ball and known that the coming age of the internet would make almost all entertainment dependent on its ability to be enjoyed ironically.

What makes Scream still unique among black comedy takes on horror is that the film does not attempt to separate the horror from the humor. The scenes often contain mixtures of the two, but the film never feels disjointed. It would be useful to compare this to a more recent self-aware slasher, You’re Next (which I do highly recommend). In that film, you feel almost as if you’ve watched two movies; a serious horror film about a house under siege by killers, and a black comedy about those killers finding out that one of their victims is highly proficient with improvised weapons. (I’d say that the latter movie begins when one of the killers comes through a window, and is promptly thrown on the floor and beaten to death with a blunt object.)

In Scream however, the killers will spout off movie references even at the most dramatic, terrifying moments. This doesn’t take away from the drama or the fear. We realize that the movie references are an expression of the madness of Billy and Stu (Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard). They see life itself as a fiction that they’re creating, and because of this, they feel no remorse at killing.

Scream could be said to be the film that gave birth to the 21^st Century; a time when we’re all plugged into the formulas of entertainment and find them just as engaging as the stories themselves. We’ve realized, as much as we’re reluctant to admit it, that magic tricks are no less impressive when you can see how they’re done. They remain captivating, and often times even gain a certain element as you lose the false impression that they’re as simple as waving a magic wand.