Misunderstood Cinema: Scream

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” These famous lines were spoken at the beginning of the 1996 film ‘Scream’ directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson. The film grossed almost half its $14 million budget in its first weekend, and opened on 1,413 screens nationwide. But there is a major problem with this slasher horror flick and it’s not in the content of the film. It’s the way the film is perceived and viewed. This is a prime example of the underrated, underappreciated films of cinema. This film is a classic, but it is brushed to the side and lumped in with other slasher horror films such as Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. But Scream is so much more; it is a modern classic and should be appreciated as one.

There are four levels to the film Scream. The first of those is the most basic. You are on level one if you turned the film on, watched it, got scared by the stalking scenes and the brutal killings, finished it and thought ‘Wow that was a scary movie.” and then forgot completely about it. This isn’t a wrong way to view the film; in fact viewing the film in this fashion is one of the most popular ways of viewing this film. But if you only view it in this light, you are doing the film and the filmmakers a large disservice.


The second level is the ‘Who Dunnit?’ element. Scream works on this second level brilliantly. It takes the basic horror theme and twists it into a Who Dunnit? The cleverest part of this level though is that every character gets a motive: The kid who loves horror movies too much, the guy who dated the first victim, the boyfriend who’s caught at the scene. And the killers don’t turn out to be the supermarket clerk who got pop thrown at him and goes berserk and we only see him one time. It’s the boyfriend and the best friend of the boyfriend. The killers are at the very core of the group of main characters. And every time you think you figured out who it is, you get a contradiction. Upon a second viewing you (much like I did) will feel like an idiot because it is so blatantly obvious, but it is also very subtle and convincing.

The third and fourth levels are the homages to other horror films. This is the most complex and hardest to grasp level. Writer Kevin Williamson has said his favorite genre is horror and this is clear and true in Scream. Williamson references horror films from Friday the 13th to Prom Night. But the film with the most reference is Halloween. Halloween is largely referenced and paralleled. In one scene at the beginning, a character says “Go down the street to the McKenzie’s house, call the police” which is a direct lift from Halloween. Halloween plays on a TV in the background throughout the films climax and at one point the soundtrack on the TV substitutes the actual soundtrack on the film. Another clever bit is when Randy is alone on the couch watching Halloween. As Michael Myers, the ghost faced killer in Halloween, comes up behind an unsuspecting Jamie Lee Curtis, Randy yells, “It’s behind you Jamie, it’s behind you.” All the while, the ghost faced killer in Scream is standing behind Randy, played by Jamie Kennedy, as we the audience catch ourselves yelling the same thing. Then the guy in the TV van outside watching the hidden camera with a 30 second delay yells ‘It’s behind you kid, it’s behind you.”
The reason Scream works in this fashion is because unlike previous horror films, Scream acknowledges their existence, and what they represent. In one of its most famous scenes, Randy explains the rules of surviving a horror movie. Rule 1: You can’t have sex because you need a virgin hero. Upstairs, Sydney, played by Neve Campbell, is losing her virginity. Rule 2: No drinking or drugs. Everyone at the party is drinking and getting stoned. And Rule 3: never say “I’ll be right back’ and as he says this Stu, played by Mathew Lillard walks backwards out of the room saying I’ll be right back. Cut to the next scene, Gail Weathers played by Courtney Cox hops out of her TV van and says these words as well. And the result is, nothing happens. Stu comes back, Gail comes back, Sydney is alright, and so are the kids at the party. Craven and Williamson manage to point out, and then destroy a genre cliché in one scene.


Scream and its four levels is the perfect example of a piece of misunderstood cinema and an underrated classic. The Webster’s Dictionary defines a classic as “a work of enduring excellence” and underrated as “rated too low”. Upon review, Scream falls under both these definitions. It may not be an Academy Award winning film, or a classic that defines a generation, but at its core, Scream is what it mocks: a horror film and a damn good one at that.