Scream, Rinse, Repeat

"You see, it's a lot scarier when there's no motive, Sid."

Horror was having a bad time of it in the 90s. The grisly slashers of the late 70s and early 80s were gone, and unless your last name was King or Barker, chances are most American horror up until 1996 was relegated to home video.  Despite sticking to genre in 1995's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS and 1996's CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED, John Carpenter wasn't having any success at the box office.  Wes Craven was faring even worse.  After trying to mix genres in THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991) and his return to Elm Street with WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994) he hit a personal low point with the Eddie Murphy vehicle VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN.  Things clearly needed to change.

Enter SCREAM. 

It's hard to look back almost through 15 years of countless imitations, parodies, and direct sequels to see the original film for what it was: a clever, hip (at the time) take on the traditional slasher film, self-aware and yet completely serious in trying to build tension and suspense during its dramatic moments.  Written by new kid on the block Kevin Williamson and directed with a nice pace and eye to style by Craven, SCREAM boasts enough of its share of great character moments and set pieces to qualify it as a minor horror classic - you can't put it on the same shelf shelf as HALLOWEEN, DEEP RED, or even Craven's own NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET - but to dismiss its merits would be to deny its impact (lamentable at times to be sure) on films both inside and outside the genre.

A lot of the credit goes to Williamson's sharp script, which manages to mix its horror references on multiple levels, provide more than a cursory bit of depth to its supporting characters, and weave a twisted plot that keeps everything on its toes until the climactic reveal.  It also doesn't hurt that Craven makes the most of his R rating, reveling in the splattering of blood and intestines that permeate the death scenes.  Watching it again for the first time in years I was surprised by how fun the movie continues to be despite knowing the "twist" ending.  The Drew Barrymore opening is a ballsy homage to PSYCHO and a great introduction to the overall tone of the film, the performances are all good, with extra props to Neve Campbell and Rose McGowan, who subverts the female horror stereotype even as she falls into it.  And the ending is full of great moments - Stu and Billy stabbing each other, the who "motive speech", the copious amounts of blood - by the time we get to the first rays of dawn, everything has wrapped itself up in a tidy little package.

But now here's where things get a bit dicey.  SCREAM showed studios that, with the right mix, horror can be financially viable again.  Within a year Kevin Williamson was practically diving back in the well, first with I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, a script based on Lois Duncan's novel of the same name and actually written prior to SCREAM, and then with THE FACULTY - both films capitalizing on the things that invigorated SCREAM: a young well known cast from television, in-jokes and a self-aware hipster sense of dialog (in some ways Williamson feels a bit like the Diablo Cody of the 90s), and inventive if increasingly diluted violence, suspense, and horror.  SCREAM 2 came soon afrer, and was unable to achieve anywhere near the same sense of fun and danger the first film had.

But they all made money, and anyone who watches the trends of the Hollywood machine knows that once you find a formula that works, you use it for all your washings.  And so the cleverness and freshness that was SCREAM begat I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which begat DAWSON'S CREEK (work with me here), which made a start out of Joshua Jackson so he could suffer along with everyone else in URBAN LEGEND,which in turn came around the bend with dreck TEACHING MRS. TINGLE, FINAL DESTINATION, I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, URBAN LEGEND 2, SCREAM 3, and a myriad of PG-13 films starring CW and WB television that would dilute horror so much it would seem like a step backward for the genre, eerily mirroring what would happen in the 2000s with the "J-Horror" craze (a term which itself is misleading, since so many of the films were also coming out of Korea and Thailand as well as Japan). 

Perhaps the biggest nail in the coffin of SCREAM's short-lived horror resurgence came from something completely outside the genre.  Seeing a way to get mimic the success he had parodying films with I'M GONNA GET YOU SUCKA, Keenan Ivory Wayans took the best parts of SCREAM and other horror/suspense films and turned in SCARY MOVIE, which killed at the box office, the scent of which aroused the sleeping machine once again to take notice and repeat, again and again, thus paving the way for such gems as DATE MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE and every other kind of MOVIE that did just as much to murder the fun of going to the movies as the endless SCREAM imitations did.

Horror being the cyclical beast it is, we'd same the same thing happen again after THE SIXTH SENSE, obligating every film to have a "twist" ending.  SAW, now up to its sixth sequel, paved the way for HOSTEL (and its sequel, and WOLF CREEK and TURISTAS and and....), making "torture porn" (another misleading catch-all) a viable sub-genre.  And in another few years something else will come around that we'll burn into the ground through countless repetition.

Scream, rinse, repeat.

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A quick thought I didn't think to write down when I was originally prepping this review: when I sat down to re-watch SCREAM, it was for the first time since originally seeing it in the theater.  I searched and (luckily) found it available for Instant Viewing on Netflix.  As I moved my cursor over to the Play button I noticed my rating of the film: two stars.  Was I really that dismissive of the film originally?  After seeing it again I bumped it up to four stars (although really would put it at 3.5...how my soul laments at the absence of half-stars), and can only think that the enormous pile of crap that spilled forth after the success of SCREAM not only muddied the waters of both mainstream horror and comedy for a number of years, but also unfairly maligned the very film that spawned them.

And Here Is Why

My earliest memories of the movies don't take place in a drive-in or a crowded theater.  They're not filled with lightsabers and light-cycles, they don't have explosions, stereo sound, or even color. 

My earliest memories of the movies all start with a small, brown, corduroy pillow just a little larger than my head.  If I close my eyes and focus I can still smell the combination of dust and sweat that does more to remind me of my childhood than photographs I can't recall being taken, than toys I can't remember playing with. 

We lived in a raised ranch in upstate New York, which means the lower level of the house was partially underground.  It was split between my bedroom, the laundry room and the den, where we had an enormous television built into a cabinet that never worked except as a make-believe computer for me when I was pretending to be an astronaut or a scientist.  Its other function was to hold up the smaller television that actually worked.  And it was that television, and that pillow, nestled up against my father in the darkness of the den, that I recall my earliest memories of movies. 

My father wasn't around very much during my childhood. His job required a lot of travel, and when he was back in town he tended to hang out at the local bar more than the house. But when he was around, there was little he liked doing more than settling down in the dark of the den and watch movies. We watched everything, my father P.T. Barnum, masterminding my exposure to all of his (and consequently) my heroes.  The curtains would part, and with a wave of his whip (or beercan in this case), we both became the same age, reveling to the exploits of Bogart (our favorite), Wayne, Flynn, and Grant. I fell in love with the cool cynicism of Sam Spade, the "true grit" of Rooster Cogburn, the merriment of Robin Hood, and the suave sophistication that was the trademark of so many of Cary Grant's characters. 

But more than the larger than life characters and witty rejoinders, it was the shine in my father's eyes as he watched the screen, explaining to his nine year old son who everyone was, what was going on. And all the while I soaked this in, I nestled my head in that brown pillow, that tiny pillow that was always at my father's side. 

Last week after a short and sudden illness my father died. I flew to Florida to see him and say my goodbyes.  When I got to the hospital they told me he couldn't really respond to me other than with some twitches in his fingers, but that he could hear me.  For reasons which in retrospect seem monumentally stupid I hadn't seen or spoken to my father in about two years, and the time I had to say goodbye, to say all the things that should have been said but weren't, was simply too short.  But I did the best I could, and one of the last things we talked about, or I talked about, was the movies I grew up loving because of him, and how it won't be the same seeing anything now. 

Over the years my taste in films have been informed, expanded, and enlightened my many sources, some of which I'll point out in the next few weeks.  But none had even a tenth of the impact my father had on me, and now that he's gone it's almost painful to sit in front of a screen and feel the light on my face, my head falling back onto a small brown pillow that's no longer there.