Sidney becomes the target of a creepy serial killer (voiced by Roger Jackson) whose trademark is to call his victims on their cell phone and gradually freak them out prior to appearing, knife in hand, in a full-length halloween costume loosely based on Edvard Munch's famous painting, "The Scream."
The killer gradually eliminates much of the supporting cast, which includes "teenage girls" Drew Barrymore and Rose McGowan, high school principal Henry Winkler, tabloid television reporter Courtney Cox, hapless police deputy David Arquette, slasher film nerd Jamie Kennedy, and the boyfriends of Campbell and McGowan, respectively Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard.
Scream is directed by Wes Craven, a veteran of numerous horror films, including the auspicious feature debut of Johnny Depp, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1986). Little known actor Kevin Williamson received full credit for the screenplay, his first. Craven and Williamson make innumerable humorous references to horror films, especially Jamie Lee Curtis' role in Halloween.
How others will see it. This violent and silly movie is hardly fare for everyone. It made a fortune at the box office, presumably from teen and young adult ticket buyers. The generation gap was also evident in its lack of award nominations, except from the MTV Movie Awards. And the imdb user ratings, while generally high, decline with advancing age.
The demographics are understandable. The deep cynicism that permeates the screenplay appeals more to the young than to the old. Scream is about high school students, and is tailored to that audience. True, the typical 18 year old in 1996 would be too young to have seen Halloween or Friday the 13th, although, tellingly, screenwriter Williamson is the right age to have fully absorbed those two films.
How I felt about it. Clearly, Scream is better than most horror movies. It is certainly better than Scream 3, the worst sequel to a sequel I have ever seen. Scream is obviously a comedy, more than it is a horror movie. However, its pretense as a slasher film often gives it tremendous suspense, particularly when Neve Campbell ventures out onto the porch to see if the slasher caller is there.
The movie manages to work in an unexpected romance between dorky but charming policeman David Arquette and ambitious but sensual reporter Courtney Cox. Their chemistry was legitimate, and they subsequently married. The other surprise (or is it really?) is the ending, which reveals two slashers and three dead bodies that aren't dead. Oddly, the slashers exchange deep knife wounds to give themselves alibis, a crazy risk that could be avoided simply by not killing anyone to begin with.
But then, silliness of story is part of the parody, which elaborates the flexible and unspoken rules of the successful slasher flicks from the 70s and 80s, then breaks all of them. Neve Campbell survives, as she does in the sequels and in Wild Things, presumably because we enjoy looking at her so much. The same really can't be said for Rose McGowan.