With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out.Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein’s monster) creates new life.
When a serial killer starts hacking up their fellow teens, the media-savvy youngsters of Scream realize that the smartest way of sticking around for the sequel is to avoid the terminal behaviors that inevitably doom supporting players in the movies. They’ve seen all the movies, and the rules of the genre are like second nature to them. One of the scariest/funniest setups features a kid watching John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween on video.
As Jamie Lee Curtis is shadowed by Michael Meyers and the kid on the couch yells at her to turn around, Craven reverses his camera and we see that the kid should be taking his own advice. The fresh-faced young cast (including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette) is fun to watch, and their tart dialogue is sprinkled with enough archly self-conscious pop-culture references to make Quentin Tarantino blush.
We’re talking a thriller filled with horror, suspense, action, and humor, combining it all into a great movie. Neve Cambell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox are a great team, and make the sequels excellent, as well. Sydney Prescott (Cambell) is at the center of a series of gruesome murders. She is a young woman with several skeletons in her closet, the doors ready to be opened by reporter Gale Weathers (Cox) who is in town to cover the murders. Sydney’s past and present collide when her boyfriend is the suspected killer, and yet the murders continue.
Character to watch: Neve Campbell as Sidney.
Journal your answers to the following questions after you watch the movie.
- How does this particular character’s journey compare with yours?
- Did the character develop certain characteristics during the movie that you have or that you would like to have? If so, what are those characteristics?
- What obstacles did this character face? What was his or her biggest challenge?
- What would you have done differently if you had been in the same position as the character?
- Is this character the type of person you would be friends with? Why or why not?