Nearly 25 years may not seem like a long time – historically speaking – but when it comes to the history of filmmaking it’s completely different.
Movies can get old really quick, so it’s especially impressive when they stand the test of time and manage to appeal to the audiences of each new generation.
The Horror genre in particular has some cult classics, with its countless subgenres, decade spanning sequels and franchises and more recently soft reboots and remakes.
Enter Scream – no not the Netflix series, not the recently announced 2022 sequel – but the original 1996 Scream. The movie launched at a time where “slasher” was already a well defined concept within the film industry, and where audiences already knew what to expect when they saw a masked lunatic with a sharp object.
Scream was all of those things the audience expected, and none of them at the same time. The film satirizes the horror movie tropes without betraying the core of the horror experience, it lays out everything you’ve come to expect but only twists and bends the few sections it can to still retain the horror element.
One of the things that makes it standout amongst its peers is its whodunnit type structure along with its long selection of somewhere between whacky and insane support characters. Like any good whodunnit, the key to why Scream works so well as a horror comedy is in how all the side characters interact with one other and the main cast. The movie is smart in keeping Sidney Prescott mostly grounded during the majority of the runtime because it makes everyone else stick out like a sore thumb.
It sounds like something you might not usually want, but in a murder mystery setting that’s exactly the thing that brings the movie to life, and it engrosses the viewer into trying to figure out who in fact dunnit.
Another way Scream shines is in the acting department. It sometimes might seem unbefitting of a horror film, it’s extravagant and over the top but its campiness is also why it works so well as a comedy. The actors do a great job at discreetly creating tension when they need to, and subsequently at highlighting the bizarreness of their situation, all without compromising the horror component of the film.
All of this said it’s not like Scream is this perfect subversion of the horror/slasher genre. There are several times in which the jokes fly a bit too close to the sun and risk breaking the suspension of disbelief.
Some jokes just consist only of semi-self-aware winks to the audience without actually adding or changing any of the tropes they’re built on. It’s easy to point out common flaws or clichés in media but doing that while partaking in those very same tropes isn’t exactly comedic and in some cases makes it more intolerable to take in.
Has Scream aged perfectly? Not really. Not all jokes or plot points are going to translate to contemporary context, but they don’t really need to. To this day I have never seen stove cooked popcorn outside of this movie and to be frank I’m not 100 per cent sure it’s a real thing, so in a way a lot of its aged components feed into the movie’s aesthetic and into what makes it unique.
Not the best at horror and not the best at comedy but it’s a pretty good mix of both. If you need a bit more fun in your Halloween movies, then you should probably give Scream a watch. In the words of Stu Macher: “You’re gonna love this one, it’s a scream baby!”.
By Francisco Santos
Feature image: Paramount Pictures