Scream (5 Stars)

Revitalising the Teen Slasher and Reimagining the Victim

By the mid-1990's, the American slasher film seemed creatively exhausted. After the explosive success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), the genre descended into formula: interchangeable masked killers, one-dimensional teenage victims and endless sequels that dulled the impact of the original innovations. The archetypes – the "final girl", the sexually active couple, the killer's traumatic backstory – had become so familiar that they no longer provoked fear. Into this stagnation entered Wes Craven's Scream (1996), a film that not only revitalised the teen slasher but also transformed the role and meaning of the victim. Through its self-aware script, complex characters and layered treatment of violence, Scream resurrected a dying form by allowing both its characters and its audience to understand and question the very rules that had once defined it.

Reviving the Rules

Kevin Williamson's screenplay for Scream is built on the premise that its characters are already fluent in horror. They know the "rules" of the slasher film – never have sex, never drink, never say "I'll be right back" – and they recite them with a mix of irony and affection. Yet, despite this awareness, they are still drawn inexorably into the same deadly pattern. This self-referential structure revitalised the genre by acknowledging its clichés while using them to generate new forms of tension.

Director Wes Craven, whose earlier "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) helped shape the original slasher boom, uses this meta-approach not as parody but as reanimation. He brings intelligence and energy back to the genre by blending comedy with genuine horror. The film's opening sequence, in which Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker is terrorised over the phone, encapsulates this new sensibility: the scene references "Halloween" and "When a Stranger Calls", but its execution is sharp, cruel and emotionally devastating. The audience expects irony but gets terror. In killing off its biggest star within the first ten minutes, Scream announces that its rules will not be predictable and that its victims will matter.

The Significance of Each Victim

One of the ways Scream revitalises the slasher is through the individualisation of its victims. Rather than treating them as disposable archetypes, Craven and Williamson give each death emotional and thematic significance, transforming what was once mechanical slaughter into commentary on horror itself.

Casey Becker, the opening victim, is the ultimate meta-casualty. Her playful conversation about favourite horror movies turns fatal when her knowledge fails to save her. Her death represents the futility of media literacy in the face of real violence. Casey's murder re-establishes fear in a genre that had become predictable; it shocks precisely because it violates expectation. The visceral brutality of her death signals a return to the raw horror that the 1980's sequels had diluted, while simultaneously marking the death of the passive horror audience.

Principal Himbry, stabbed in his office, serves as a symbolic victim of adult authority's impotence. His death, though played partly for dark humour, underscores how the adults in Scream are powerless to protect their students. The slasher's focus shifts firmly to the teenage sphere; adults are spectators, not saviours.

Tatum Riley, Sidney Prescott's best friend, embodies the genre's gender politics. Smart, witty and assertive, Tatum might in earlier slashers have been reduced to the "promiscuous victim" stereotype. Yet Scream complicates this by making her death tragic rather than moralistic. Killed in a garage door – a grotesque mixture of humour and horror – her death highlights the absurdity of slasher violence and the audience's uneasy complicity in enjoying it. Craven's staging transforms what could have been a punishment for sexuality into a critique of the genre's misogynistic conventions.

Kenny the Cameraman, representing the voyeuristic media, dies because of his proximity to spectacle. His murder outside the van literalises the film's central anxiety about watching: the line between observer and participant collapses. In Scream, to watch horror is to risk becoming part of it.

The final victims, Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, invert the genre's traditional moral dichotomy. They are not supernatural monsters but horror fans turned murderers, consciously modelling themselves on cinematic killers. Their revelation exposes Scream's central paradox: that violence in the media and violence in life are entwined in a cycle of imitation. The killers' self-awareness reflects the audience's own, implicating viewers in the very horror they consume.

The Final Girl Reimagined

At the centre of this landscape of victims stands Sidney Prescott, the quintessential yet redefined "final girl". Unlike her predecessors, Sidney is acutely aware of the horror narrative she inhabits. Her trauma – rooted in her mother's murder and the town's moral hypocrisy – gives her depth and resilience. When she eventually turns the camera on her attackers, reversing the gaze of the slasher, Sidney symbolically reclaims agency for the genre's victims. Her survival feels earned, not formulaic.

Through Sidney, Scream revitalises not just the slasher's structure but its emotional core. She is not a mere survivor but a participant in the film's deconstruction of horror, embodying both the genre's past and its future.

Cultural and Genre Legacy

The success of Scream was immediate and transformative. It rejuvenated box offices, inspired imitators like "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997) and "Urban Legend" (1998), and brought horror back into mainstream teen culture. More importantly, it made the slasher self-conscious without making it sterile. By turning victims into characters with symbolic weight, Scream restored emotional investment to a genre that had become hollow spectacle.

Each victim's death carries meaning – about youth, media, sexuality and spectatorship – so that the film becomes both a critique and a celebration of horror. In recognising the constructedness of its world, Scream paradoxically makes that world feel more real, its violence more shocking, and its victims more human.

Conclusion

Scream revitalised the teen slasher genre by reintroducing intelligence, emotional depth and cultural self-awareness. Its victims are not interchangeable bodies but reflections of the genre's own anxieties: about spectatorship, morality and identity. By giving meaning to each death, Scream transforms the mechanics of horror into a meta-narrative about the genre's rebirth.

Nearly thirty years later, Scream remains the definitive bridge between the classical slasher and the postmodern horror film; a blood-soaked love letter to the genre that refused to die.

Success Rate:  + 10.4

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