Scream (1996)
There are plenty of books written about horror that have documented the impact Wes Craven’s Scream has had. The 1996 reboot of the slasher genre followed Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) as she attempts to outwit a masked killer we’d come to refer to as “GhostFace.” For ‘90s kids raised on the chastity myths of the “final girl” in the ‘80s, Craven’s take on the material attempted to look at features like that. What makes a female heroine positive or negative in these features, and who determines that? Campbell’s Sidney is smart, but the killer at the center enjoys rigging the game as much as he can. For Craven, Scream is all about deconstructing the slasher formula and finding out why it works so well. Every one of the characters within Scream has an awareness of horror movies and even in 2018, it’s hard to find a movie that acknowledges the history of horror at all. (Pet peeve, anyone in a movie who has to google “vampires” or something equally obvious.)
In 2018, this meta deconstruction only makes the movie — and its subsequent sequels — more interesting. The first Scream looked at the role of sexuality and feminism in creating the slasher mythos and its 2000 sequel, Scream 3, was the first movie to pretty much declare the rampant sexual harassment and exploitation that would precede the #MeToo movement.
Watch now on Amazon Prime or Starz.