The ‘Scream’ Series Is The Most Influential Horror Franchise Of The Last 25 Years

The first ten minutes of this film are incredible: a clockwork escalation of tension using familiar elements (a telephone, a pan of Jiffy Pop, a glass house) that culminates in a nightmare scenario where a high school kid (Barrymore) can’t call out to her parents and then her parents, answering a phone call, can hear her being murdered, but can’t help her either. It’s existentially cruel — frightening because it’s a young woman in peril, trapped in a gaze that objectifies her hair (a series obsession) and beauty while robbing her first of her appropriate object choice (her boyfriend taped to a chair), then her agency in choosing a new suitor. Its vision of high school is of a boilerpot of sexual frustration and sublimation. Video store clerk film geek (in a film produced by the same company that nursed proto-video store film geek Quentin Tarantino), Randy (Jamie Kennedy) famously sets out the “rules” of the slasher movie, betraying some awareness that he and his buddies appear to be stuck in one but even armed with knowledge, without the power to affect any kind of meaningful change in their respective outcomes.

That trope, embodied by Cassandra and Tiresias of Greek Mythology, in which no one believes you when you tell them something is about to happen. It’s wisdom that brings no profit to the wise. Least of all, in the case of Cassandra, the person making the predictions. The horror of being dismissed runs through the films as just one of its multiple throughlines. People don’t believe women when they say they’re being abused or, if they do, they’ll blame them for the abuse. Sydney, the center of the killer’s attention in each installment, is about to learn all about that. So many great horrors are about the dangers of knowledge and transgression — I’d argue the Old Testament is just a collection of this kind of regional horror story — and Sydney is the loci of sexual anxiety in her reluctance to give her virginity to boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) in part because she is “marked” with her recently-murdered mother’s “scarlet letter” for adultery and, more damningly, a general promiscuity. If there’s anything a violently puritanical American culture will not abide, it’s a woman with sexual freedom. Sydney then is stained by the blood of her deflowering and also her mother’s sexuality: she is the embodiment of original sin and the mandate that she must be made to suffer for it, not through Biblical childbirth, but through this constant re-enactment through an infinite return of the same Little Red Riding Hood story.

Where to stream Scream

Sydney is Ripley, the hero of the Alien films who undergoes a transformation from the Ripley of the first film, the cat lady no one listens to; to the masculinized Ripley learning to fire a pulse rifle and squaring off against a fertile bitch mother archetype (after Ripley has lost her biological daughter) in a repudiation of natural reproduction; to finally the moribund, resigned Ripley of Alien3 who is, to my eye, one of the finest representations of feminist defiance and power in all of the decade of the 90s.

Early in Scream 2, there’s a reference to Aliens as a sequel that’s arguably superior to the original — and while I take issue with that (as does a character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose run as Buffy on television would arguably not have happened without the success of Scream the year previous), I’m also of the extreme minority who feels like the Alien3 workprint is the best of the first three films. Sydney in Scream 2 is the Ripley of Alien3: understanding in an elegant moment in conversation with her college drama teacher Mr. Gold (David Warner) that, in his words, “the battle for the soul is fought in the forum of art.” Does Sydney know she’s in a movie? I don’t think these films are quite that meta, but she does understand that she’s a player in a larger, eternal design, and the things that are happening to her serve as cautionary instruction to everyone around her. I love how she’s at home now with crank calls seeking to further victimize her — with the fame she doesn’t want for just suffering her trials transmogrified into popular entertainments — primarily by chief antagonist, opportunistic journo Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox, never better than in this series). She has accepted that she is literally Cassandra: doomed to tell the tale that will eventually lead to the deaths of everyone she loves — and her own, too, eventually, if the story holds. It’s in this film, though, that she’s offered an escape clause in the death of the other Cassandra, Randy.

Scream 2 is tonally different from the first film. It’s more forlorn, fatalistic. I don’t want to characterize it as nihilistic because the survival of its central trio of Sydney, Gail and Gail’s on-again boyfriend, Deputy-eventually-Chief Dewey (David Arquette) suggests hope in proper allyship and co-dependence in tension with obviously inappropriate object choice and misjudgment. In each of these first two films, Sydney is involved in romantic relationships with dangerous, or potentially dangerous, men. In this second film, the grand fiend is unmasked as another “Loomis” (Laurie Metcalf), a character like Billy from the first, named after the Donald Pleasance character in Halloween who was himself named after Marion’s boyfriend in Psycho. It’s possible to list all the in-references to horror films and characters in these pictures, but the Shrek obsession with gathering Easter Eggs is the lowest form of engagement. I only mention the “Loomis” connection because these characters, so steeped in movie knowledge, never acknowledge this callback despite acknowledging, for the most part, a preponderance of others. In not acknowledging something this obvious, it forces us, the nerd audience, to consider that we are being let in on a joke made at the expense of the characters and, in the process, come to the awareness that we’re now a part of the unpacking of this drama in an organic way. It dissolves the barrier between art and spectator in a way that Hitchcock did and, notably, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom does – a picture the series references explicitly in Scre4m down the line. These Scream films are slippery. And they’re smarter than you and me.

Where to stream Scream 2

Replacing screenwriter Kevin Williamson with flavor-of-that-moment Ehren Kruger for the third installment proved among other things that what Williamson and Craven accomplished with the first two is as rare as it is delicate. The biggest misstep is in interpreting Scream as a joke, taking the Marvel Cinematic Universe route of peppering its product with audience-pleasing cameos and smug, smirky, obnoxiously in-jokey rib nudges in place of Williamson’s truly masterful creation of the world as a Passion Play. What it gets right is having Sydney as an operator for a battered women helpline, acting the role of a person who believes women. What it gets wrong is its desperation to imitate the rules-laying of the franchise without real knowledge or empathy for its subject material; and its introduction of a voice-changer device that allows the killer to, like Helen and the Trojan Horse, imitate the voice of any of the main characters. Wink-wink appearances by Jay & Silent Bob, Roger Corman, and most egregiously Carrie Fisher, undermine any pretense of self-respect, feeding into the feeling of it all being, for the first time, an audience-hating endeavor. Craven is still extraordinarily good at crafting a good chase — a scene in a “doll’s house” version of Sydney’s childhood home is fabulously sticky — but given a script that’s this callow, finds little he can do to save it. The dangerous thing about the concept of “meta” in art is that even in this resounding and obvious failure, there’s a case to be made that Scream 3 is constructed as exactly the kind of movie that this universe’s film-within-a-film franchise “Stab” is mean to be: the cheap, knock-off version of itself. That might be the case, but the fact of it is more interesting anything in it.

Where to stream Scream 3

A pity, because the third sequel is a bit of a recovery. Working from a script by Williamson again, a condition of Craven’s return, that was nonetheless rewritten a couple of times in the process of shooting it (including a pass by Kruger for reasons too Byzantine for me to unpack), Scre4m finds the series back on firm ground. The kills are brutal and intimate, the themes of Sydney’s eternal cycle of suffering is resuscitated, and a new generation of performers (Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Rory Culkin) augment returning stars and the addition of Mary McDonnell as Sydney’s grief-stoned aunt with aplomb. The script is tight, sharp with smart dialogue and possessed of a killer and motive that make sense given the arc of the series.

In the crosshairs now is the penchant for the United States to make heroes of otherwise undistinguished loners who betray psychopathic tendencies. Taken from films like Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands and most notably perhaps Taxi Driver, Scre4m posits that the only immortality possible in our culture is to have survived great calamity, whether or not, Kyle Rittenhouse-like, one was the cause of the calamity in the first place. Released eleven years ago, its prediction of a social media wasteland where, as the villain monologues, things like “college, grad school, work” are meaningless in terms of how a society now judges achievement. She says “I don’t need friends, I need fans” and the keenness of this series snaps immediately back into focus.

It bears mentioning that the real-life marriage and subsequent divorce of Courtney Cox and David Arquette give their relationship in these films a sense of pathos in keeping with the metatextual nature of them — and it occurs to me even as I go back over this series that the definitive pop work of this time addressing these issues might be the four Scream pictures and not the four The Matrix ones. Consider Scre4m’s opening sequence: a series of “nesting doll” openers in which three pairs of young women discuss horror conventions, get murdered, and then reveal that they’re each enacting prologues to late sequels in the “Stab” franchise. The last of them has one of the girls try to figure out the layers that their own reality is built upon, up to and including how the murderer in these dramas is able to deploy a kind of omniscience in their tracking and murder of their victims.

Scream isn’t the first fiction to operate with this level of self-awareness. My favorite of the early cinematic attempts might be the three Walking Tall movies starring Joe Don Baker and culminating in the last of the trilogy, Final Chapter: Walking Tall with Bo Svenson taking over starring duties, but opening the film watching Baker play his character in a packed movie theater — and you can almost see Kruger reading the Cliff’s Notes for Pirandello while writing the third. But the Scream films, in their ability to marry the high-minded with the animal pleasures of its bloodletting, is the prime popular example. For Craven, it marries the uncanniness of his A Nightmare on Elm Street films with the exploitative brutality of his early Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. They are, along with The Blair Witch Project, the most influential horror films of the last twenty-five years. I can’t wait for the new one.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Scream 4 (SCRE4M)