Backing away from the mysterious staring organist you turn and wander further into the fog, still travelling North, you think…

Another sound pierces the air and draws you like a moth to a flame, a telephone, an old fashioned ring with an odd flat sound like it’s being played through a speaker. Eventually the mist begins to clear and a deep blue colour fills the horizon, the sea.

A rusting white ironwork barrier borders the promenade above the sandy beach below, with slatted wooden benches spaced at 50 meter intervals receding into the distance. The ringing is coming from a mobile phone discarded on the bench closest to you.

Wandering over you slowly reach down and pick up the phone. Unknown number. You answer.

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“Hello. You answered…you must be new here…”

The voice on the phone is odd, strangely grating, like each word is the first uttered after a long sleep. The speaker sounds calm, relaxed, as though speaking to an old friend.

“What brings you to our fair isle? Adventure? Escape? It doesn’t matter I suppose, the end result is always the same, one way or another…perhaps you could be different though, come and meet me at the cinema on Elm Street. I hope you like scary movies”

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Set in the town of Woodsboro, California. Scream follows a group of high school students as they deal with a string of murders perpetrated by a masked killer who likes to taunt his victims on the phone and really that’s all I’m going to say. The film is a combination slasher and murder mystery where the identity of the killer is unknown to us, something that works particularly well as we find ourselves unsure who to trust and we never truly relax.

Probably the most important aspect of Scream is that it’s self-aware. The characters discuss horror films…in a horror film, particularly the character of Randy, a horror geek, who at one point lists what you should and shouldn’t do to stay alive in a horror film. This doesn’t stretch as far as the characters knowing they are in a film it just allows them to acknowledge everything that we at home are thinking.

I’ve not mentioned his name yet and it’s his first appearance on my site but you all know the director of this film. His name is legend in the world of Horror. Wes Craven. Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and of course A Nightmare on Elm Street are just a few of the films he’s directed and despite those big names, other than probably Nightmare, it’s Scream he’s most known for. This film really had a huge impact, it feels like it made horror films something to take seriously again as a genre. Despite shining a discerning spotlight on the horror movie industry as a whole, this clever film did more to revive and breathe new life into the genre than anything since The Exorcist. It showed that horror didn’t have to just be a bunch of teens being picked off one by one…though…that’s essentially the plot of the film…but it’s the WAY it’s done, there’s so much more to it and you find you’re not just waiting to see what inventive way somebody dies next, there’s actually a plot.

Now take what I’ve said above with a pinch of salt. Obviously not all horror films were mindless slashers or rubber monster pics. Plenty were, and that’s great, I LOVE those kind of films, I have a time and a place for almost all horror. There were other clever, fun, brilliantly directed horror films being produced. Scream though, Scream managed to cross over into the mainstream. Everybody was aware of it, you couldn’t not be, it was a phenomenon. It increased the number of cinema goers who would be willing to watch a horror film and that was brilliant for the industry.

This wasn’t horror lite though, this film is gory, this film is scary at times, especially if you live on your own, this film takes itself seriously. Despite the level of violence none of it seems over the top, and that’s what makes it worse. You believe the deaths in this film could happen and that makes them hit harder. Maybe it’s a personal thing but I find more mundane injuries or deaths in films much harder to watch than ridiculous kills, I find myself more likely to imagine it could happen to me if it doesn’t involve suspension of disbelief or for me to be in a very specific situation. Hey, you watch horror films…probably…think of it as the difference between the opening scenes of Final Destination 2 vs 3. Hey, both of those events could happen, but one is far more likely. Having said that I’m probably not going to watch Final Destination 3 before going to a theme park.

The acting in the film is good. I wouldn’t say there’s a standout figure, though I do enjoy Matthew Lillard. There’s no super high highs, or super low lows and that’s perfect for a film like this. We want to feel like the characters are the boy or girl next door, regular people like you and me, that’s what makes the characters believable and relatable, not actors in a film.

Believe it or not this was another film where I struggled a bit with my final score. It’s an important film, a hugely successful film and a film that, should you ask them to name 5 horror films, many people would include. Is it a good film though? Is it a great film? Well if you’d asked me to score it on the spot based on my memory of the last time I’d watched it many years ago, I would have scored it lower than I have. My memory of the film was cheesier than it is, more comedic than it is, my memory, I realised after my re-watch, was some strange agglomeration of the real Scream and 2000’s Scary Movie, a film which parodies it. Scream is clever, Scream is dark, Scream is brutal, Scream is a 5 kernel out of 5 film.

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**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

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Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

“What’s your favourite scary movie?” Let’s talk about that opening scene. It’s iconic, it’s maybe one of the most iconic scenes in all of horror. Girl alone in a house with a stranger on the phone isn’t something new but the fact they’re discussing horror films in a horror film is the first sign that the film is a little different. I know in 2023, or whenever you’re reading this that we almost expect our films to do something clever or have an angle, but in 1996 this wasn’t really the case, we expected jump scares and some gore.

The scene also pulls a Psycho on us. Drew Barrymore is one of the more famous people in the film and her character Casey dies roughly 10 minutes into it. The scene has been parodied many times but the real scene is pretty brutal, Casey’s boyfriend is disembowelled on the patio and minutes later Casey herself is stabbed, strung up to a tree and gutted like her boyfriend.

This is the case for most of the film, as I said earlier, I think a lot of what I recalled had been ‘tainted’ by all the times the film has been referenced in other films or TV shows and the reality is that the deaths don’t feel like the common slasher victim fare, we’re not just gleefully waiting for the next ridiculous kill. Even the most over the top death, Tatum’s death by garage door, feels brutally real. Ghostface doesn’t make a one liner, the shot isn’t hugely gratuitous, her head isn’t chopped off to roll down the driveway, she’s just dead.

The reveal that there’s 2 killers is a brilliant device which makes it very hard to guess their identity, as one or the other can be present when Ghostface is sighted, making the viewer discount them as a suspect. Billy and Stu make an interesting pairing, Stu in particular is not one of the characters you would expect to be a killer, he in fact fits a common victim archetype, the Joker. Again I think I need to emphasise that in 1996 we weren’t all expecting twists like we do now and the internet was in its infancy so the ending of Scream was truly a surprise for most people.

That’s it for this review, but don’t worry…I’ll be right back!