SCREAM (PG-13)
Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Neve Campbell), Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Courtney
Cox, Drew Barrymore, Rose McGowan, Kevin Patrick Walls, Henry Winkler, Jamie Kennedy, W Earl Brown
Running Time: 110 minutes.
Familiar clichés are neatly dissected and then deftly turned upside down in Scream, a gripping and yet strangely entertaining
homage to classic horror films that further enhances Wes Craven's reputation as one of the most consistent and imaginative
directors working within the genre. Over the past decade, Craven has established himself as one of the few modern masters of
the horror film, and his latest offering is, arguably, the best of his substantial career.
Scream is a chilling thriller set within Woodboro, a small Californian town gripped by fear when it seems that a mysterious
serial killer is murdering high school students. The film features a hot cast of exciting new talent, including rising stars Neve
Campbell (from The Craft, and hit tv series Party Of Five), Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Serial Mom's Matthew Lillard, and
veterans Courtney Cox, who plays a hard nosed investigative reporter, and Henry Winkler, who contributes an uncredited
cameo as the school principal. Drew Barrymore pops up briefly as the killer's first victim. Home alone at night Drew is terrified
by a mysterious phone caller who gives her a quick pop quiz in contemporary horror movies, threatening to kill her in
particularly brutal fashion if she fails to provide the right answers.
Campbell plays popular student Sidney Prescott, still dealing with the aftermath of the brutal rape and murder of her mother
twelve months earlier, who becomes the intended next victim of the killer. The unknown killer wears a gruesome halloween
mask and seems to know Sidney's every move. Her circle of friends are drawn into the nightmare as they try to protect her.
Craven opens the film with a riveting and tense sequence that effectively unnerves audiences early in the piece, before he sets
about relentlessly escalating and tightening the suspense. He maintains a fast and unsettling pace throughout Scream, and the
film climaxes in a terrifying chase that exploits and re-explores most of the accepted clichés of the genre.
Craven really knows his stuff, and he stages the gory mayhem in inventive fashion, judiciously punctuating the more gory slash
and dice mutilations with some unexpected but welcome touches of humour and several sly in-jokes, including such throwaway
visual gags such as the school caretaker dressed in Freddy Krueger costume. At the same time he cleverly takes a swipe at a
number of the clichés and conventions of the genre with a self deprecating sense of humour, punctuated by a number of sly
in-jokes and references to characters and scenes from the classic horror films of our generation.
An adroit and pacy mixture of traditional horror fare and teenage angst, Scream has been cleverly written by self-confessed
horror film fan Kevin Williamson, and the seemingly simple and straight forward scenario has been heavily influenced by his
own childhood love of scary movies, in particular Halloween and the original Nightmare On Elm Street. It seems apt that
Williamson's characters here are nearly all film literate students who are able to offer wry comment on the contemporary
classic horror film series, ranging from John Carpenter's seminal slasher pic through to Craven's own body of work, in a
wonderful example of the self-reverential humour that dominates this entertaining and genuinely unnerving film.