Director: Wes Craven
Rating: 8 out of 10
Well, for my generation, this is the flick that either resurrected or killed the horror movie genre, depending on your point-of-view and general opinion of horror movies. This is the one that made films more self-aware by exposing the worn-out cliches that had run rampant in horror movies through the years. But, I'd like to point out, this wasn't the first flick to skewer the genre's predictable nature or exist in a universe where horror movies are present within the movie (Wes Craven did it himself a couple years before with the underrated Wes Craven's New Nightmare). I saw Scream in the theater when it first came out 14 years ago, and I've probably watched it 30 or 40 times since then. The slightly older generation has the slasher franchises (Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street), the newest generation has the torture-porn (Saw, Hostel) and reboot craze, but that middle gap is firmly occupied by Scream.
I'm of the opinion that the film was a fresh breath of air in an era of stale films. The major horror franchises of the 80's had long ago run out of steam, the reboots hadn't nearly come into play yet, and sadly, horror films were not considered the cash-cows they are now. In fact, they were the exact opposite, they were usually considered a risk not worth taking. The only decent horror movie I can think if in the early 90's was Candyman, which didn't find an audience until long after it's initial release. You could call Silence of the Lambs and Se7en horror movies, as many people do, but I would categorize them as psychological thrillers with only a few gory elements linking them to the horror genre. So Scream came along, trotted out some fresh young faces, genuinely scared audiences, was witty and clever, made a bundle of money, and all of the sudden it was cool to make horror movies again. And I have to believe that was a good thing. Suddenly horror writers had to come up with new conventions to make an audience take the movie seriously since Scream laughed at the old staples of the genre.
In the years following the release of Scream the industry finally started churning out some more creative horror flicks (The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project), which may not be the greatest movies but at least they threw away the conventions and snapped audiences out of their horror slumber. And for that we should all thank Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, otherwise horror might just have faded away into B-movie, direct-to-video obscurity.
You may notice I'm not going into the details or plot of the movie, but the fact is I don't know anyone who hasn't seen it. So instead of writing a bunch of crap that you'll skim over I decided to instead stick to the impact the film had on the industry.
Next up: A zombie feature of some sort
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