Scream at 30: Wes Craven’s meta-horror stays smart and scary

By Grace Kim

The original Scream, directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, returns in a 30th-anniversary re-release. The review’s verdict remains positive: the 1990s film is still self-aware, smart and scary. The reviewer treats it as a defining example of self-aware horror.

Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis, a high-schooler, announces that reality is “all one big movie – but you can’t pick your genre”. The review calls this the meta-slasher equivalent of Jacques Derrida’s belief that there is nothing outside the text. A meta-slasher (a horror film that comments on its own rules) can warn us and still leave us vulnerable.

The plot opens with a ghost-masked killer’s assault on Casey, played by Drew Barrymore, in the bland Californian town of Woodsboro. The review describes his chilling calls to people’s landline phones, which once pinned them to an approximate location. Mobile phones, it adds, were still an exotic novelty.

Sidney, the teenager played by Neve Campbell, faces the killer after her mother’s brutal murder. Cotton Weary, played by Liev Schreiber in a brief cameo, has gone to jail for that crime. The review raises, rather than settles, the question of his guilt, leaving Sidney at risk like everyone else.

Three rules govern survival, according to a local horror fan cited by the review: stay a virgin, avoid drink and drugs, and never utter the hubristic (overly proud) phrase “I’ll be right back”. The review notes differing vulnerability between blondes and non-blondes. When Sidney has sex, she puts herself in mortal danger, the reviewer says.

The investigation brings Courteney Cox, already a star from Friends, as Gale Weathers, the brash local television reporter. Weathers tries to crack the case wide open and shows a tendresse (romantic fondness) for the goofy young cop deputy Dewey Riley, played by Cox’s future husband, David Arquette.

The self-aware machinery runs throughout. The review counts many genre references and notes how Scream’s action is wittily juxtaposed with narrative sequences from a classic such as Halloween. Its sharpest example is the killer’s smug challenge to a victim: a trick question about who the killer is in the first Friday the 13th.

That exchange supports the review’s least comfortable argument. Male movie fandom can seem obnoxious and possibly sadistic in itself, perhaps not entirely by accident, the reviewer writes. The film remains brash and smart in a distinctive 1990s way, and its title, the reviewer concludes, sounds like an order.

One possible influence stays absent. The reviewer suggests Truman Capote’s reportage history In Cold Blood as one horror classic Scream could have drawn on without acknowledging. The omission may reflect the book’s non-canonical (outside the genre’s core) status in the purist slasher-film sense. The reviewer links that thought to a character who dismisses motive.

What does the re-release change for viewers?

It puts the film’s operating rules back in plain view: sex, drink, drugs and a repeated phrase determine who stays alive. The re-release also renews the review’s uncomfortable account of male movie fandom and the killer’s use of genre knowledge against his victims. The practical challenge is to learn those rules before the killer turns them against you.