Scream (1996 film)

Scream
Scream
	Promotional poster for Scream
Directed by	Wes Craven
Written by	Kevin Williamson
Produced by	Cathy Konrad,; Cary Woods
Starring	Neve Campbell,; Skeet Ulrich,; Drew Barrymore,; Rose McGowan,; David Arquette,; Jamie Kennedy,; Matthew Lillard
Distributed by	Dimension Films
Running time	111 min.
Budget	$15,000,000 USD (estimated)

Scream is a 1996 horror/dark comedy film directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson. The film revitalized the slasher film genre in the mid 1990s by introducing a somewhat standard concept (teens being brutally killed off) with a tongue-in-cheek approach that successfully combined straight-forward scares with dialogue that satirized slasher film conventions. It is the first part of a trilogy; being followed by Scream 2 and Scream 3.

Synopsis

File:GHOSTFACE.jpg

A teenage girl (Neve Campbell) finds herself the target of a mysterious killer who has brutally murdered two of her classmates. A tabloid news reporter (Courteney Cox) insists that the masked murderer is none other than the man who raped and murdered her mother one year earlier. Sidney and her friends race to uncover dark secrets about their town's past, seeking any clues that might reveal the killer's true identity. In a town where no one is safe and everyone is suspect, can Sidney unmask her attacker before suffering her mother's fate?

Detailed plot

Template:Spoiler In the film, Sidney (played by Neve Campbell) attempts to cope with the anniversary of her mother's brutal rape and murder. Meanwhile, two teenagers at her school (one played by Drew Barrymore) have been eviscerated and killed. The next night, while at home alone, the killer, who calls his victims on the phone and taunts them before attacking, invades her house and attempts to kill her. He wears a Halloween costume reminiscent of the painting The Scream.

Sidney tries to sort through the trauma of being attacked and, in reaction to circumstantial evidence, points an accusatory finger at her boyfriend Billy (played by Skeet Ulrich). She decides to stay at the home of her friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) and Tatum's brother Dewey (David Arquette), a local police officer. While there, she receives a phone call from the killer. Billy is released, as he couldn't have placed the call from prison.

Already under considerable stress, Sidney is forced to deal with the scandalization of her own attack by ambitious local television newswoman Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). Gale is responsible for a tell-all book revealing the promiscuous affair between Sidney's mother and her convicted killer, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber). School is soon cancelled as a precautionary measure, leaving the building temporarily abandoned. Despite the closing, the school principal (Henry Winkler) is killed and Sidney encounters her attacker a second time, barely managing to escape. Unaware of their principal's fate, our teenage characters plan a party. They are joined by Randy (Jamie Kennedy), a horror movie buff, and Stu (Matthew Lillard). The party quickly becomes a bloodbath as the killer murders Tatum, who dies when her head becomes stuck inside an automatic garage door.

In the interim, Gale, sensing the potential for a major scoop, hides a camera inside the house. She then goes outside and begins searching for anything suspicious, with the help of officer Dewey. Meanwhile, at the party, Billy shows up and is confronted by Sidney; they eventually head upstairs and Sidney loses her virginity to Billy. The partygoers soon receive word of the principal's death, and head to the school football field to find his corpse. A bunch of drunken teens drive by Dewey and Gale, forcing the pair to jump from the roadside, at which point they find Sidney's father's car.

Back at the house, Billy is stabbed by the killer while getting dressed, forcing Sidney to run out of the room to escape the killer. She jumps off the top of the roof and sees Tatum's lifeless body hanging from the garage. Randy, watching television, narrowly avoids death when the killer walks up to him only to be interrupted by Sidney's screams. The killer leaves Randy and chases after Sidney instead. Inside Gale's news van, a cameraman witnesses the killer's attempts to murder Randy and watches Randy run out the door. The cameraman steps outside the van, only to have his throat slashed by the killer, leaving Sidney to run away in search of help. Gale arrives at the news van, and notices that she is standing in a pool of blood. As she is getting ready to drive off, Randy appears, only to be hit in the head with a phone by the on-edge news reporter. She turns on the windshield wipers to clear the van's windshield of a liquid which turns out to be blood. As she pulls away the body of the cameraman falls off the roof onto the windshield, and Gale speeds away. Her reckless driving leads her to wreck the van near Sidney, who runs back up towards the house, and spots Dewey.

Dewey is coming out of the door when he falls down to reveal a knife in his back. Sidney climbs into a car and looks around for its keys, managing to roll up the windows before the killer shows her that he has the keys to the ignition. The killer, undeterred, enters through the trunk, forcing Sidney to run back to the house where she is greeted by Randy and Stu. Not knowing who to trust, she slams the door in their faces.

Billy comes falling down the stairs, but Sidney helps him up and gives him a gun. Billy walks to the door, and a scared Randy comes stumbling in, only to be shot by Billy. Finally, the horrifying truth is revealed: Billy and Stu are both killers, sharing the part of the masked murderer who has been terrorizing the town.The murder of Billy and Stu made it almost impossible for a sequel but Wes Craven directed Scream 2 with Billy's mother and a college classmate of Sidney as the killers.

Voted in 1999 as the best film ever made.

Humor

The film features numerous in-jokes and references to other horror projects. For example: a character declares that the first A Nightmare On Elm Street film was good but "the rest of them sucked"; Scream director Wes Craven directed the first Elm Street film. Also, the victims in Scream are quite self-aware: they each make clear their familiarity with and poke fun at teen slasher and horror flicks, which sets up their fairly ironic responses to the film's situations.

Trivia

Drew Barrymore was originally cast as Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell). Due to schedule conflicts, however, Barrymore offered to play the much smaller role of Casey Becker instead.

Billy's surname, Loomis, is the same as that of Donald Pleasance's character in Halloween (1978), which in turn was the name of Marion Crane's lover in Psycho (1960).

The knife that is used in the Scream movies is the same knife that Mrs. Voorhies uses in Friday the 13th.

When Casey's parents come home and see that something is wrong, her father says to her mother, "Go down the street to the Mackenzies' house..." which is a quote from Halloween (1978).

The school janitor Fred (played by Craven) can be seen wearing Freddy Krueger's outfit from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The cheerleader in the washroom scene was played by Skeet Ulrich's girlfriend.

To keep Drew Barrymore crying and looking scared, director Wes Craven kept telling her real life stories about animal cruelty. She is a keen animal lover and vegetarian in real life.

When the phone slipped out of Billy's hand and hit Stu's head, it was completely unintentional. Wes Craven kept it in because of Stu's realistic reaction.

David Arquette's sister Patricia Arquette starred in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, written and produced by Scream director Wes Craven.

The killer was based on a Florida serial killer, the "Gainsville Ripper."

Legacy

The film opened to huge critical acclaim ([1], [2], [3], [4]) and financial success and spawned two sequels (Scream 2 and Scream 3) and a series of slasher movies (and spoofs), among them:

The film was believed to have single-handedly reignited the teen slasher genre and was praised for its original approach to the oft-clichéd format.

External link

Scream at IMDb