“Now Sid, don’t blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.”-Billy Loomis
Halloween is almost here! It’s one of my favorite times of the year and watching scary movies is the best way to get into the spirit. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but until now I’ve somehow escaped watching Scream (1996). From director Wes Craven, it’s a Halloween cult classic. It stars Drew Barrymore, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, Neve Campbell, and more. It aired on CBS, so that’s where I watched it. I learned that after it was released the use of caller ID tripled due to all of the unknown calls made in the movie. After watching it on TV I decided to re-watch it because I wasn’t sure if there were things cut out of the made for TV version that I should see. It ended up being mainly the same besides getting to hear some f-bombs.
Scream opens with a teenage blonde, home alone, in a big house. Classic horror movie trope. She gets a call from someone she doesn’t know, but it soon turns into a nightmare when the voice reveals they can see her. By the end of the night her and her boyfriend are brutally killed by someone dressed in a Ghostface Halloween costume. The next day the news spreads around town. As the movie progresses more teenagers are murdered and everyone’s a potential suspect. The main character, Sidney Prescott, has a particularly hard time with all of the news because her mother was murdered, and it haunted her. She thinks the guy who did it is in jail, but by the end of the film she is shocked by a few truths that she never saw coming.
This horror movie is different from others I’ve seen. They’re all aware that they’re living through events that happen in movies and are consistently analyzing what they should and shouldn’t do in the situations they are put in. Even analyzing their situations as if they were in a scary movie, they still, inevitably, made the same mistakes. They even go as far as to reference other scary movies such as Silence of the Lambs, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street which is a film that Wes Craven also directed. Some people don’t like that it’s set up this way, but I love it. It’s such a different creative perspective. By the sound of it I expected it to be a little cringey, but it’s not.
Although it’s considered a ‘scary’ movie it didn’t necessarily affect me that way. Some parts made me tense and there was a few jump scares, but other than that I wouldn’t consider it horror. It’s more thriller/mystery. It was fun trying to figure out who the killer could be because, especially in the beginning, almost everyone was suspicious.
This movie gave us one of the most well-known and iconic killers in the film industry that has inspired many, many Halloweens to be filled with people dressed up as Ghostface.
If you’re one of the few people that haven’t had the chance to see Scream I would highly recommend giving it a watch, especially around this time of year. Or even re-watching it because it’s Halloween!
