Watching the trailer I’ve already praised for Isn’t It Romantic I repeatedly thought “This is like Scream for romantic comedies.” So how well does Scream pull of parodying a genre while simultaneously being an example of a film in that genre?
Quite well! Most of the laughs are provided by Jamie Kennedy’s character Randy, who points out horror movie clichés that seem to surface as “Ghostface” terrorizes their hometown while proving to be a film buff. Like Isn’t It Romantic, Scream has more subtle laughs to complement the times it explicitly spells out the rules of the genre it’s skewering. A popular example is when Rose McGowan’s character Tatum gets stuck in a doggy door because her breasts are big, like a typical horror movie heroine’s. As a teen watching the film when it first came out on video, I didn’t catch all the references like that but I still loved loved loved the movie.
Perhaps I could gain more in that regard if I watched it now but the problem is that the tropes to which Scream drew attention understandably became outdated after that. At this point citing “having sex means you die in a teen slasher film” as a cliché has itself become a cliché. Really the movie was just parodying the subgenre of horror that had existed since the original Halloween and there’s only so much to say about less than 20 years’ worth of movies. Even Scream’s sequels had little to say and resorted to random movie jokes instead. Then of course there was the parody of Scream, Scary Movie, followed by four sequels and a bunch of other movies from the writers of Scary Movie (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans, Vampires Su…oh God I’ll stop because I’m already in pain just reliving all those). Those just “parody” films by recreating specific scenes on a much lower budget and sticking utterly random “jokes” in there. That honestly requires no imagination or ingenuity.
Actually mocking tropes regularly turning up in a specific type of movie is another matter, however, and Scream does it brilliantly! But once it’s been done it’s been done and I doubt people who didn’t grow up with the original Halloween series, Nightmare on Elm Street series, Friday the 13th series, Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, or their knockoffs will appreciate Scream as much for its comedy.
That leaves its horror that is still great. Wes Craven is not a director of whom I was generally a fan. The original Nightmare on Elm Street, while widely praised, came across to me as a typical slasher flick that squandered its potential to become a deeply unsettling psychological horror movie. Last House on the Left is referred to as a movie hard to watch and I agree…because it’s so terrible.
In Scream Craven brought his A-game though. The fear is consistent without his ever resorting to jump scares or manipulation. It’s particularly hard to do all that while making fun of the same clichés you are using so major props to Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The latter soon become the stuff of 90s teen culture legend as the creator of Dawson’s Creek. In fact maybe the person who actually started a real 90s teen culture by casting people high school age or close to it in that show. Scream is the worst offender not named Grease as far as having people well into adulthood play teens and it negatively affects moments the characters are supposed to be vulnerable. While no role was recast in the sequels, they did rectify the situation somewhat in Scream 3, when the characters were older, by adding actual teen Heather Matarazzo as Randy’s 17-year-old sister.
That was probably the thing I liked most about that film though! The Scream franchise ran out of not only laughs but scares by the sequels. Scream 2 got rid of the only great character and basically just invented a character in the climactic scene. Scream 3 took itself way, way too seriously and was just worthless overall. Scream 4…they were still making Scream movies in 2011? Seriously? Well at least it seemed much better than Scream 3.
This post is about the first one though. Still a great film you should watch for its significance.
Final Verdict: Funny, scary, and smart!
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