Scream

Scream is the only self-aware horror film that is also frightening, and the reason is that Craven never lets the commentary take a scene off.

The opening twelve minutes are the proof. Casey Becker answers a phone, plays along with a flirtatious stranger, and is quizzed on horror trivia with her boyfriend's life as the stake. It is funny, then it is not, and it ends with a teenager gutted and hung from a tree while her parents arrive home. Drew Barrymore was the biggest name in the cast and the film kills her before the title. Craven understood that the joke only works if the knife is real.

Williamson's script is genuinely well built. Every character is a suspect and every suspect has a reason, the exposition is delivered as teenagers showing off, and the rules-of-horror monologue works because the person delivering it is annoying rather than authoritative.

Ghostface is a bad killer and that is the point

He trips. He is winded. He gets hit with a phone, a door, a television. Every other slasher antagonist is implacable; this one is two people in a costume who are improvising badly, and the fights are scrappy rather than stately. It is the single biggest departure from the formula and almost nobody noticed because the mask is so good.

What it did to the genre

It rebuilt a market that had collapsed. The slasher was dead in 1996 — the franchises had run to parody and the audience had gone — and Scream made a hundred and seventy million dollars by treating the audience's genre literacy as the subject rather than a problem. Everything from I Know What You Did Last Summer to twenty years of meta-horror follows it.

Where it shows

The commentary occasionally stops the film to make a point. Some of the supporting performances are broad. And the film's final-act tone swings between farce and brutality in a way that works for about seventy per cent of viewers.

For the slasher it is deconstructing, Halloween; for the same meta-attitude with the volume up, Terrifier 2 is the modern end of this axis.

The short answer: there are two killers. Billy Loomis, Sidney's boyfriend, and Stu Macher, his friend. Billy's motive is that Sidney's mother had an affair with his father and broke up his family, so he killed her a year earlier and framed an innocent man. Stu's stated motive is peer pressure. Sidney kills both — Stu with a television, Billy with an umbrella and then a gunshot from Gale — and Randy survives being shot.

Who is Ghostface in Scream?

Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, working together, which is how the film sustains alibis that would otherwise collapse. One is on the phone while the other is in the room; both take genuine injuries to appear to be victims. The two-killer structure is also what lets the film play fair — every clue points at one or the other.

Why does Billy kill Sidney's mother?

Because Maureen Prescott had an affair with Billy's father, which caused Billy's mother to leave. He killed Maureen a year before the film begins, and Cotton Weary was convicted of it on Sidney's own testimony. The whole plot is a year-old murder being finished, and Sidney's role in convicting the wrong man is the reason the killer is interested in her.

What is Stu's motive?

He does not have one, and the film makes a joke of it — asked why, he says peer pressure. That is a real answer within the film's logic: Stu is a follower who found something to follow. It also lets the film decline the thing it has been mocking, which is the slasher's habit of supplying a tidy psychological reason.

Do the rules work in Scream?

They are stated and then selectively broken, which is the design. Randy's rules — never say "I'll be right back", virgins survive, never assume the killer is dead — mostly hold, and the film enjoys honouring them. The one it breaks hardest is the opening: the famous actress dies first, which is the rule nobody had thought to state.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 096 is the highest in the index. Only 1 work scores higher. There is nothing supernatural anywhere in Scream — two teenagers in a costume with a knife and a mobile phone — and the film is explicit that this is the point.

Tone 072 is remarkably high — 103 works score lower, which makes this one of the least bleak films we hold. It is a comedy for long stretches, the hero wins, the killers are humiliated before they die, and the film is having fun.

Viscera 052 is just above the median film — 59 works score lower. The gutting in the opening and the garage-door death are both explicit; most of the rest is quick.

Pace 072 is fast — 95 works are slower. The film opens with a twelve-minute set piece and does not slow down.

Era bias 026 reads analog — 39 works score lower. 1996 film stock, a Panavision look, and a plot that depends entirely on landline and early mobile technology.

Reality anchor 016 is grounded — only 4 works score lower. Everything in it is possible and most of it is mundane.

On jump scares: many, and they are well made. The closet, the cat flap, the garage.