Scream (1996)

By the time Wes Craven's Scream arrived in cinemas in December 1996, the slasher film was a genre that had largely exhausted itself. The great cycles of the late 1970s and 1980s had wound down into diminishing sequels and straight-to-video knockoffs, and horror as a mainstream proposition felt genuinely spent. What Dimension Films and Woods Entertainment released that winter was something rather different: a horror film that knew exactly what a horror film was, and used that knowledge as the engine of its plot. Written by Kevin Williamson, the film follows Sidney Prescott, a teenager still living under the shadow of her mother's murder, who finds herself targeted by a masked killer whose taste for the genre runs to the homicidal. The central conceit, that the characters themselves are fluent in the rules and conventions of slasher films, gave Scream an unusual self-awareness that felt fresh at the time and proved enormously influential on everything that followed it.

Craven was hardly a newcomer to the genre. He had already reshaped horror once with The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and again with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and his reputation as someone capable of producing smart, unsettling work within commercial genre filmmaking was well established. Scream represented a slightly different mode for him: polished but unremarkable in its visual style, leaning into suburban ordinariness rather than the expressionist dread of his earlier work. The result was something more accessible, more MTV-era in its pacing and its pop-culture references, which was either a feature or a limitation depending on your view of what horror ought to do to you.

The cast is a reasonable cross-section of mid-90s film and television talent. Neve Campbell anchors the film as Sidney, bringing a grounded quality that keeps the more heightened moments from tipping into pure absurdity. Courteney Cox, already well known from television at that point, plays a sharp-elbowed television journalist whose presence adds a media-commentary strand to the story. David Arquette provides some comic relief as a good-natured local deputy, while Matthew Lillard and Rose McGowan fill out the ensemble with contrasting energy: Lillard loud and manic, McGowan memorably present in what is relatively limited screen time. None of the performances are career-best work, but the ensemble functions well as a group, which matters in a film that is partly about the dynamics of a friend group under pressure. If you are curious how Scream sits alongside other horror films from different corners of the genre, it is worth having a look at what the site has made of You Won't Be Alone (2022) and Tiger Stripes (2023), both of which take horror in rather more unusual directions.

What's your favourite scary movie? Not this. By the mid-90s, the slasher genre was basically on life support, and then Scream came in and jump-started the whole thing like a knife to the chest. For a newer player in the mix, its impact was massive. Ghostface went from being the new kid on the block to standing shoulder to shoulder with Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. That’s legendary status. It’s clever, self-aware, and packed with great horror moments… but let’s be honest, Scary Movie probably did just as much for Scream as Scream did for Scream. You can’t unhear “Wassssup” when Ghostface makes a call now. Still, even with that baggage, this film works. It’s a love letter to horror, a deconstruction of the genre, and a revival all in one. Not perfect, but undeniably iconic.

For me, the Scary Movie point is one that genuinely does colour a rewatch now in a way it simply could not have done in 1996. There is a particular kind of cultural override that a parody can achieve, and that franchise managed it so thoroughly that some of Ghostface's most iconic moments now carry an uninvited comic echo. That said, it has not actually broken the film for me, and I think that is a testament to how sturdy the bones are. The self-awareness that Williamson built into the script was always a kind of armour, and a film that already refuses to take itself entirely seriously is harder to puncture with mockery. I keep coming back to the idea that getting the audience to care about the genre's conventions while simultaneously laughing at them is a genuinely tricky balance to hold, and Scream mostly holds it. Not every horror film gets to become a reference point. This one earned it.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1996  | Watched: 2025-04-02

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Scream (1996) on YouTube

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Wes Craven: The Hills Have Eyes (1977) · A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)