Scream
A first-class satire invigorates the horror genre
Directed By: Wes Craven
Other Notable Films From Craven: A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes, Red Eye
Starring: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy
Screenplay By: Kevin Williamson
Movie Synopsis: A masked killer terrorizes a group of high school students.
Signature Line: “What’s your favorite scary movie?”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
One question changed everything.
In the opening scene of Scream, a high school student named Casey Becker (played by Drew Barrymore) receives a phone call from an unknown caller (a killer we’ll eventually come to know as “Ghostface”). Though Becker is initially uninterested in talking to Ghostface, his charm draws her into a conversation, at which point he asks her: “What’s your favorite scary movie?”
In and of itself, it’s an unremarkable query; something anyone might ask any other person, for any reason whatsoever. However, in the context that it arrived in, it was revolutionary.
We’ve lived in a post-Scream world for nearly 30 years now, and so it’s commonplace to hear a person in a scary movie make mention of another scary movie. Prior to that moment, though, that wasn’t really how things worked. Characters in horror films behaved like they lived in a world where the genre didn’t exist. That's why they did the things they did (like, say, earnestly investigating strange noises) or reacted to situations the way they did (like, say, unironically ignoring obviously bad warning signs).1
But Scream upended that idea immediately (from its very first on-screen conversation), and entirely (there is no point in Scream when you are more than a couple minutes away from some sort of reference to another scary movie, be it a direct name-drop or a more subtle homage). And almost three decades after its original 1996 release, the franchise is still growing, in both size and influence (next year will usher in its seventh installment and push it into the billion dollar club at the box office).
And it all started with that one simple question:
“What’s your favorite scary movie?”
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Scream
0:29: Drew Barrymore is here. She plays Casey Becker, a high school student who exists solely so someone can plunge a large knife into her over and over again. As mentioned, there are a ton of references to other scary movies in Scream. Taking the biggest actor in your movie, featuring her as the marquee person on the poster, and then killing her off in the first dozen or so minutes is straight from the Psycho playbook.
1:57: Ghostface called Casey. They’re talking about scary movies. I know that, generally speaking, it’s dumb to talk to strangers like they aren’t strangers, but I sympathize with Casey here. She’s clearly a movie enthusiast. And there's nothing more alluring to a movie enthusiast than the opportunity to talk about movies. I’d willfully climb into the back of Buffalo Bill’s kidnap van if he started asking me questions about Bloodsport or whatever.
2:25: This exchange here:
Ghostface (flirty): You never told me your name.
Casey (flirty): Why do you wanna know my name?
Ghostface (murder-y): Because I wanna know who I’m looking at.
Gah. I remember feeling like my stomach fell out of my butthole the first time I heard Ghostface say that line.
4:20: Ghostface calls Casey a total of five times during this scene. And guess how many times she answers the phone? All five times! STOP ANSWERING THE FUCKING PHONE, CASEY! CALL THE POLICE ALREADY!
5:41: Casey, who is all the way creeped out now, told Ghostface that her boyfriend was gonna be there soon. When Ghostface pointed out that she’d told him earlier that she didn’t have a boyfriend (back when the calls were flirty), Casey confessed to lying, then screamed, “HE’S BIG, AND HE PLAYS FOOTBALL, AND HE’LL KICK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!” The way she was talking about him, I was expecting a linebacker or defensive end to show up. But look at this dork:
Best case scenario, that's a slot receiver I’m looking at. You got a guy telling you he wants to see what your insides look like and you think he’s gonna be scared off by Cooper Kupp???
5:42: P.S. You know what I just noticed? Casey’s boyfriend (Steve) doesn’t have any patches or anything on his letterman jacket. No all-star accommodations or all-district designations anything like that—not even a patch for the seasons he’s played. He might be on the team, but he’s definitely not any good.
5:43: P.P.S. I’m gonna make another Steve/football joke later on so don’t forget his name or the fact that he was on the football team.
6:31: Casey has to play a game of movie trivia to keep Steve alive. Three things about this moment:
I would fucking crush at this game. There’d be nobody on planet Earth safer than Steve if his life depended on me answering some movie trivia questions. It’s the one life-or-death game I’d feel confident playing.
The first trivia tidbit that Ghostface asks Casey for is the name of the killer in Halloween, which she’d told him earlier was her favorite scary movie. As Casey struggles to recalibrate her brain, we hear a small piece of music from the Halloween universe in the background. Slick little touch from Craven.
Casey’s second task is naming the killer in Friday the 13th. She gets that one wrong, which means…
8:01: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand Steve’s dead. He probably went over to Casey’s house assuming they were gonna have sex, but he ended up with all of his insides on the outside (which is the worst place for your insides to be, by the way). Tough break for Steve.
9:37: Casey made it out of the house. She’s in the yard. Better still: She can see that her parents are about to pull up. IT’S TIME TO CLUTCH UP, CASEY. ALL YOU GOTTA DO IS STAY HIDDEN FOR TWO MINUTES AND YOU’LL MAKE IT OUT OF THIS ALIVE…
11:44: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand Ghostface caught Casey right as her parents were walking into the house. Four thoughts:
This is terrible situational awareness from the parents. Your daughter is RIGHT THERE. She’s running for her life. A killer is at her heels. And you somehow DON’T SEE HER???? Just TURN YOUR FUCKING HEAD TO THE LEFT, YOU DOOFUSES.
The moment when Casey tries to yell out to her mom but can’t because her throat’s all messed up from Ghostface strangling her a couple seconds earlier… fucking hell, man. If you knew nothing about Wes Craven or his legacy, this moment right here of Casey desperately (and ineffectively) whimpering toward her parents would’ve let you know you were in the hands of a director who really knew what he was doing.
There's a scene in Halloween 2 where a similar sort of scenario plays out (Laurie Strode is crawling toward a hospital and trying to call out for help but her voice isn’t working). I don’t imagine that was a coincidence.
This one is maybe a little controversial, but: I think at least 20 percent of the blame for Casey’s parents not seeing her has to fall to Casey herself. Clap your hands, wave your arms, throw the phone at your parents, DO SOMETHING.
12:18: There’s a lot of talk about how kids today are too addicted to their phones, but I just wanna point out that Casey (a) had a window busted out in her face, (b) got tackled while running full speed, (c) got strangled, and (d) got stabbed multiple times, and still never put her phone down.
12:28: Another fun little hat-tip: After seeing that their house has been wrecked and their daughter is missing, Dad Becker says to Mom Becker, “Get in the car, drive down to the McKenzies’.” Laurie Strode tells two little kids a very similar thing at the end of Halloween. (“I want you to go down the street to the McKenzies’house.”) And better still: The Halloween franchise repaid the shoutout a couple years later in Halloween H20 by having Laurie Strode tell her son and his girlfriend to drive “down to the Beckers’.”
12:51: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand Casey’s dead. Ghostface stabbed her a bunch of times, then hung her from a tree in her front yard. What an absolutely perfect movie opening. One thousand high-fives to Drew Barrymore for taking that role knowing that she wasn’t gonna make it more than a dozen minutes into the movie before being turned into a very gross piñata.
13:02: Neve Campbell is here. She plays Sidney Prescott, a high school senior haunted by the murder of her mother. There have been an almost uncountable number of Final Girls in the horror genre; I don’t think you could name two who are fuller, more compelling, more well-executed characters than Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott. I think it’s her, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode, and then it’s everyone else.
13:09: If you zoom in on this shot here you can see that she’s leaving a comment on the GOOD MOVIE Road House essay.
14:27: Skeet Ulrich is here. He plays Billy Loomis, Sidney’s very creepy but also very hot boyfriend. Two things about him:
“Skeet Ulrich” isn’t Skeet Ulrich’s real name. Skeet Ulrich’s real name is Bryan Trout. That means he had a brainstorming session to think up a cool name and somehow landed on “Skeet Ulrich.” (What unbelievably bad luck it was for him that the word “skeet” would eventually become a synonym for “ejaculate.”)
Casting Skeet as Billy was a brilliant move by Craven. Skeet just looks so much like a bad guy that, almost by default, your brain sees his him and goes, “Okay, well, clearly he’s not the killer. That's the face of a guy you cast in a role if you want the audience to think he’s the killer. But I’m NOT falling for it because I’m VERY smart.” What a bunch of chumps we all are.
17:55: This movie is so economical. Over just a three-minute stretch, we meet:
Gale Weathers, a tabloid journalist who is only ever interested in figuring out ways to exploit a situation for her own gain. (She’s played perfectly by Courteney Cox.)
Tatum Riley, a girl who looks and acts exactly like her name is Tatum Riley. (She’s played perfectly by Rose McGowan.)
Arthur Himbry, the semi-nutty principal of the high school all the kids attend. (He’s played perfectly by Henry Winkler.)
Dewey Riley, a goofy deputy sheriff and also Tatum’s older brother. (He’s played perfectly by David Arquette.)
Stu Macher, Tatum’s boyfriend and also Billy’s accomplice in the murders. (He’s played perfectly by Matthew Lillard.) (It’s really hard to explain to anybody who wasn’t a teenager in the mid-to-late-90s how big of a thing Matthew Lillard was. From 1995 to 1999, he was in FIFTEEN movies. He was fucking everywhere.)
And Randy Meeks, a horror movie-obsessed video-store employee who functions as the fifth wheel of the primary friend group.
22:51: Sydney is gonna spend the weekend at Tatum’s house while her dad is away on a work trip. If you’re Sidney’s dad in this situation, you gotta cancel that work trip, right? Like, it’s already pretty bad that you were planning to leave your daughter alone on the one-year anniversary of her mother’s murder, but also now you’re leaving her alone the day after somebody killed and gutted two of her classmates? There's a fucking murderer on the loose and he’s like, “Good luck, honey! I’ll be at the Hilton if you need anything!”
25:23: Tatum says that she’s gonna rent All The Right Moves for her and Sidney to watch. She mentions that if you pause it at the right time you can see Tom Cruise’s penis. I looked it up. She’s telling the truth. You really can see his penis if you pause it at just the right time. There's actually some dispute on the internet about whether it’s actually Cruise’s real penis or a body double’s, but I can tell it’s really Tom Cruise’s penis because the penis is just jumping out of a helicopter in the shot.
