When people talk about their favourite Halloween flicks there’s always the obligatory mention of Friday the 13th or Halloween (one of my personal favourites), but when I think of this genre there’s only one movie which jumps to mind, Scream. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s 1996 horror masterclass is probably one of my favourite horror movies. Although it’s not usually people’s first thought, Scream holds a special place in my heart. Back in the early 2000’s when I would spend my days surfing through the Sky cinema channels and trying to guess the password to my parents’ parental locks (luckily for me I realised pretty quickly it was just their wedding anniversary) the Sky Horror selection was dismal to say the least. Instead of the classics I mentioned earlier we had Friday the 13 Part 7 and Halloween: Resurrection, which for reference includes Busta Rhymes fly-kicking Michael Myers into electrical wires while saying the line “Trick or Treat motherfucker!”. Now I’m not saying there isn’t a market for this type of film (even writing this is making me really want to watch that scene from Halloween: Resurrection on repeat), but as a young film buff trying to explore the world of horror these were hardly enough to satisfy me. But there was a silver lining to these ‘dark times’, it helped me discover the Scream franchise. Scream 2 and 3 to be exact, they played over and over again, almost every weekend. Although in hindsight these are no way near as good as the first, they were fine art compared to the other drivel which was on Sky horror at that time. I can’t exactly remember what first drew me to them, I think it was Wes Craven’s name. I knew he had directed the original Nightmare on Elm Street, although I don’t think I had even seen it by this point, and I had became fascinated with his first film The Last House on The Left, mostly because I saw a poster for it claiming it was one of the most messed up films ever made (and that’s 70s messed up, so we’re talking real bad). I remember watching Scream 2 and realising that I was experiencing something different from the rest. These characters knew about horror movies, they knew about Freddy and Jason and knew about all the clichés that annoyed me so much about all the other films. I loved Scream 2 at the time, with its meta-narrative and it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy represent!), but there was always the nagging feeling that I was missing something, I had to see the original.
I remember writing it down on a shopping list (Scream DVD - 1996) and just hoping nobody would notice. My parents, always willing to indulge my film obsession, actually allowed this. I remember walking into HMV and finding my now coveted I Know What You Did Last Summer/ Scream double disk, to me it was a one in a million chance. This random movie that I was looking for just showing up at my next trip into town, could it be destiny? (Well no, I wasn’t aware at the time how popular Scream was, I thought it was this hidden little gem I had uncovered). I remember watching it on my tiny little DVD player and being absolutely floored. It was like Scream 2 (and 3) but so much better, unlike the sequels this film was an actually good horror film as well as a great satire. When I first saw the film the meta-stuff was what stuck out to me the most. Jaime Kennedy’s character was basically the most well-written thing I had seen at this point, the way he referenced other films and applied it to real life was scarily akin to what I was thinking while watching the film. Having them explain ‘the most important rules to remember in order to successfully survive a horror movie’ made me almost giddy, here was this genre I loved essentially getting deconstructed right in front of my eyes. This was my first notable experience with satire, obviously I knew about parody in the form of Scary Movie (a film that parodied Scream itself) and the ever-worsening Jason Friedberg/ Aaron Seltzer films, but here it was in a film that wasn’t necessarily a comedy. In this film, the satire amplifies the movie rather than retracting from its impact, acknowledging and downright making fun of the clichés present in most horror movies allowed the film to avoid these and even provide interesting twists on the classic formula. The final reveal of the killer is something that still blows my mind to this day (up there with that first time you finished Pulp Fiction and started piecing all the different parts together), I remember getting to that final house party, I had gone through every character in my head and out of the surviving characters almost everyone had been on-screen with the killer at one point or another, unless they pulled some weird supernatural rubbish at the end or introduced a character out of no-where the identity of the killer would have made no sense. But as many of you know, it wasn’t a single killer, but two. When I discovered that Billy and Stu (Matthew Lilard, who I really liked from his role as Shaggy in the live-action Scobby Doo, nowadays he’s still crying in Twin Peaks presumably) were actually both the killers, one on the phone, while the other committed the murders in the traditional Ghostface mask I was amazed that this prospect had never crossed my mind. It kept me and the rest of the audience constantly guessing as to who the killer actually was, it’s one of the biggest ‘twists’ in the horror genre and I have not seen it replicated at that standard to this day. So as I’ve covered, the reason Scream holds a special place in my heart is due to its successful use of satire to uplift the relatively standard material and to subvert the audience’s expectations but upon rewatches another great quality stuck out to me. The film actually has a genuinely engrossing, emotionally affecting story. The story of Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell, one of my main childhood crushes, mostly thanks to Wild Things) a daughter whose mother was raped and murdered about a year before the events of the movie was something that really affected me. Seeing her emotion as these painful memories are brought back in light of the recent murder spree always affected me. I also found it surprising how good a plot it had compared to most other horror movies at the time. The idea of a man, Cotton Weary, who had been wrongly convicted for the rape/murder of Sydney’s mother, and now the real killers had come back to torment Sydney for her mother’s sins. It really made the film stand out in my mind, the movie wasn’t simply an excuse to show a killer running around chopping up teens but it had a real message behind it and a plot which was genuinely intriguing. So why is Scream so great, the satire lifts the film above its source material becoming more than just a horror movie but a full deconstruction of the genre and what makes it so great. The film had a tense, thrilling story which really made me care about the characters, who usually aren’t very important in horror films and are more so there for maximum kills. In my mind it’s still the greatest example of satire outside of the comedic genre, and is the definitive example within the horror genre. It takes a lot to completely change someone’s perception of a genre and what it aims to achieve, but that’s what Scream was to me. It was a game-changer, and to this day is my favourite horror film because of the profound effect it had on me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
authorSo this is weird. I’ve made a website, I’m not expecting anyone to read it (actually I’d rather they didn’t.) Basically I’ve been struggling to write creative things recently, every idea I come up with, no matter how much I think I believe in it, leads me nowhere. I guess you could call it writer’s block, but it’s more so that I tend to overthink and second-guess myself down to the smallest details, this means it takes me forever to make anything and once I have I’m incredibly demotivated to continue it. So, after being inspired by an Australian writer, Gabriel Bergmoser, who’s blog and podcasts I’ve been reading and listening to for the past few years I decided this would be an interesting experiment to try out. Basically I have no idea what I’m going to write, it’s unlikely to be creative or short stories, more-so this kind of string-of-consciousness opinion piece based on the things I’m thinking about at the moment. From films to television or maybe books and music. Anyway I hope you find some of this stuff interesting. Let’s hope I don’t say anything too incriminating considering my name is plastered all over this. Granted, this is something I will probably only update about four times in my life, unless I really enjoy it. It’s more so to help me be more creative and actually produce something for once.
Archives
January 2021
CategoriesNot really sure? Opinions on the blog, mainly about entertainment. I'll also be posting some fiction or short stories eventually for your feedback and enjoyment.
|