SCREAM

The Thriller You've Been Craven

Director Wes Craven has long been obsessed with the idea of exploring the boundaries of fantasy and reality through the medium of horror films. His pop classic A Nightmare on Elm Street was about a ghost who could inhabit people's dreams and strike out at the real world through them. In The Serpent and the Rainbow, he mixed the Twilight Zone of magick, hypnosis, and biochemistry. Shocker featured a villainous ghost who lived on in an electronic reality. More recently, Wes Craven's New Nightmare blurred the boundaries between reality, film reality, and fictional film reality as no other film ever has. Scream continues this exploration of the relationship between cinema and audience, and manages to be a tremendously fun thriller while doing it.

The setting is purposely stereotypical to the point of outright cliché. In Italian giallo thrillers, a figure in black goes about committing grisly murders - but in the American variation, the killer's targets (and often the killer himself) are teenagers, bringing them closer to horror's core audience. The teens here are well-off California Valley Kids. A masked killer begins knocking off teens (including gorgeous Drew Barrymore), but the center of his attention seems to be Neve Campbell. Is the killer her boyfriend? Her father? The nerdy video store clerk with a crush on her? School principal (and unbilled) Henry Winkler? The guy she sent to death row for her mother's murder the year before with her testimony? Stalking tabloid TV reporter Courteney Cox?

Everyone knows that murder thrillers are half shocker and half guessing game. Cheap thrills and gags are strung together by the fun of guessing the killer's identity - and guessing which character will make the mistake of wandering off to be butchered next. The twist to Scream is that all the characters have some level of knowledge about this, too. In fact, slasher film history and trivia are woven deep throughout Kevin Williamson's script. The killer tortures his victims with trivia questions over the phone before attacking. Police deputy David Arquette seems to know that the police are usually no help in these cases. Horror fan Skeet Ulrich declares his viginity to everyone, believing this will give him a better chance of surviving through the final reel.

All this multilayered detail adds greatly to the fun, especially for horror fans depressed with the doldrums the genre has been suffering from the past few years. Heroine Campbell is wised up enough to fight off her attacker time after time, yet she can't help attending a big party the next night - a situation where we know she'll be unsafe.

In an era where the only theatrical horror films to be released are either disguised as science fiction and psycho thrillers or smothered by "respectable" Classics Illustrated renditions (ala Mary Reilly), Scream is a welcome self-examination - and a just as welcome unapologetic shocker.

Masked psycho killer; knife fu; scream queens; mucho horror references; p-star Craven; quality kills.

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The Movie Madness section and its contents are ©2007 Brian Thomas