Scream: The film that saved a Genre

Directed by Wes Craven, Scream is a 1996 slasher film starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowen, Skeet Ulrich, and Drew Barrymore.

The film is set in the town of Woodsboro, California, where a masked killer with an affinity for horror trivia is picking off teens one by one. Sidney Prescott is the main protagonist.

We follow Sidney as she tries to survive and figure out who the killer is. The film has an all-star cast, a fantastic screenplay by Kevin Williamson, and an iconic director at his very best.

When the film released in 1996, it was released at a time when the only major horror films releasing were straight-to-video, or sequels to franchises, the horror genre was dead, until Scream.



The film, while turning traditional horror tropes on their head, found a way to appeal to nearly every fan of the genre: the film has a different style to its violence, it’s not a hulking supernatural beast stabbing camp-counselors or baby-sitters, it’s a person, brutally killing teens, primarily without motive.

…Needless to say, the film was controversial, used as an argument for the invalid stance that violent media creates violent people, and murderers saying they were inspired by it brought negative attention to the film, but not enough to prevent three sequels and a television series.

Now for my likes and dislikes

Likes:
1. The script is fantastic, great dialogue, and excellent characters make this film stand out against the sea of bad Halloween and Friday the 13^th sequels that were burned into everyone’s memories.
2. The cast and acting are phenomenal, even with characters that are in the film briefly.



3. The kills in the film are fantastic, though some of it is off-screen, it never ceases to be a brutal depiction of violence and murder, it’s punctuated by the acting and writing mentioned before, to make something truly unique to the genre.



4. The performance from Roger Jackson, the voice of Ghostface, made him one of the most memorable movie killers and all he did was provide a voice.

Dislikes:
I really only have one major dislike: the teens in this film are the victims we think of when we see Scream, but we ignore that the film itself was a victim of the MPAA, forcing quick cuts, edits, and removal of certain images deemed “too violent," it’s a shame we likely will never get any form of extended, unrated cut as we did with Friday the 13<sup>Th


While not the most iconic slasher film, perhaps, it is one of the best acted, best written, and best-directed works of the genre, and it's one of my favorites.</sup>