This is the natural closing to my personal journey because it was released during winter break of my first year in college. So I was at the beginning stages of becoming a full-fledged adult and being finished with things like getting scared by horror movies. That said, this was a cinematic experience that genuinely frightened me. This was a slasher film to put a cap on a generation's worth of slasher films that relied heavily on certain conventions. I still think it's a fantastic horror movie, but its effect has certainly worn off and been done to death in the intervening years.
Click here for a list of other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.
By the end of 1996 it had been so long since a genuinely
scary horror movie had been in wide release that it seemed like the genre might
be dead forever. Our old friends Freddy, Jason, and Michael had been flogged
into oblivion and people were well attuned to the genre conventions resulting
in audiences that were a lot smarter than those going to see slasher films 15
and 20 years earlier. These conventions included things like the couple that
has sex getting killed; the drug users getting killed; dumb female characters
always making the wrong decisions and getting dead as a result; idiot police
officers; revenge motives rooted in a complicated back story; obvious suspects
as red herrings; and on and on. Kevin Williamson was an aspiring screenwriter
when he wrote Scream and eventually
sold it, after which legendary horror director Wes Craven was hired to direct.
