Scare-o-meter: 3/5
Scream’s (1996) brilliance as a Halloween movie stems from its ability to tell a compelling narrative, filled with thrills and scares, while also engaging with and celebrating horror as a medium by which to tell stories.
With its tongue in cheek references to rules and its breaking and making of cliches – very few films are as good at deconstructing the genre as Scream is. It’s meta-textual in plenty of ways, but more importantly expects the audience to use their own experience with horror films to enhance their enjoyment of this one. Other classic horrors like to pretend that scary films don’t exist and often use this premise to justify their characters illogical behaviour but Scream wants you have this knowledge – in fact, the more you have of it the better! Scream builds it characters with this in mind too – the town of Woodsboro having already experienced real-life terror through the murder of Maureen Prescott which occurred a year prior to the film’s events. Fundamentally, the characters in Scream know just as much about horror films as we do; so, when someone asks ‘what’s your favourite scary movie?’ – what better answer than one that champions horror films themselves.
“halloween screaming mask” by creepyhalloweenimagesis licensed under CC BY 2.0.