Scream (1996)

The Scream franchise is a piece of 90's pop culture that I only glimpsed at a distance at the time, I was not watching R rated movies back then. Watching it now Scream tells me that I might almost be ready to embrace some real 1990's nostalgia, in contrast to my present preference for the 1970's.

Scream was considered very inventive at the time of its release, and at the that time it honestly was rather innovative. It was a meta- horror  movie, credited as the first horror film in which the characters in the film had seen other horror films (that's not entirely true, off the top of my head I can site Return of the Living Dead as an example of this from about a decade earlier). The film takes horror movie conventions and lightly satirizes them, while at the same time still working as an example of the genera at which it takes these knowing glances. Interestingly this a Wes Craven film, and Craven of course helped shape many of the horror movie clichés this film and its sequels have fun with. Though Craven had apparently first done this meta sort of thing  in one of his later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the Scream franchise is where this really took off.

I liked Neve Campbell in this, she's a good actress, and in fact having an actresses of her caliber in these films is itself a meta commentary on earlier slasher and franchise horror films, which of course are known for using lesser caliber actors. Scream has some pretty good 90's names in it, with Courtney Cox, Matthew Lillard, and David Arquette being the best remembered. Of course Drew Barrymore has a memorable cameo role at the beginning of the film, a sequence that really got a lot of pop culture attention at the time and starts the film off strong. The ending of this movie, an even longer extended sequence is also quite good, its the middle that feels a little stretched out and doesn't have all that much to offer. On the whole though certainly this was something of an achievement, it plays well now but seeing it at the time of its initial release you know it packed more of a wallop. ***