Horror

After an anonymous killer guts two high school lovers, a mysterious rise in fear and rumors rise in a peaceful Californian town. A killer starts killing high school teenagers, with a young teenage girl, an eccentric and dramatic cop, and a selfish and ambitious reporter trying to investigate the murders. A strange number of events starts to happen around Woodsboro and the people of the small town, including a group of high school friends, an accused killer, a suspicious boyfriend and, of course, the mysterious killer with a ghost face mask. Suspenseful, clever, and a little gory.

Watching this old favourite again for its 25th anniversary re-release, I was struck less by the multiple references to other horror movies — although they are still a lot of fun — and more by what a neatly constructed whodunnit it is. This mystery aspect also marks a departure from the big teen slasher franchises that preceded Scream: in Halloween, we know the killer is Michael Myers, ditto Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy and Friday the 13th’s Jason (although yes, Jason's mother Mrs Voorhees was the original killer; Jason didn't show up until the sequels).

The very best whodunnits are those which are even more fun second (or tenth) time around: where knowing the twist doesn’t spoil but actively enhances the viewing experience. Scream falls into this category: it’s a fun watch with great entertainment instincts, but it’s also a masterful exercise in red herrings and double fake-outs, and there’s almost as much enjoyment to be derived from an appreciation of its construction as there is from its plentiful visceral thrills — it’s like taking a look at the workings of a perfectly constructed Swiss watch.

Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself, and really it's all an excuse to wallow in nostalgia, an undeniable pleasure of this most quintessentially ‘90s film. It’s set just before the near-universal adoption of the internet and mobile phones, but during an era that had started to blend aesthetic sensibilities and fashion influences with the magpie proficiency that defines our 21st century resistance to strictly-defined genre. The characters’ insistence on seeing their lives as different kinds of unfolding movie narratives seems prescient of a world where people talk about their personal “brands” and one of the the worst things you can be is overtly “performative”. The killer in Scream references Psycho, a movie made only 36 years earlier that the film he’s in, but it is a little startling how wide the gulf feels between the cultural worlds in which Psycho and Scream were released, and how comparatively narrow the gap is between Scream and horror movies released now feels. Perhaps Scream was simply very ahead of its time — or perhaps cinema is not changing as quickly as it used to.

This review was sourced from Film of the Week