What is it trying to be?

Rating: 5/10 (27 May 2000)

After everybody else on the planet had seen this movie, I felt I should give it a try too. My decision came too late and I had to rent it on tape.
Well the experience at the theaters would probably have been the same. There were a few parts where I jumped but aside from that, nothing really stood out about this movie.
Scream tried to be a mystery in a way since the villain was never revealed to the audience until the very end. In most horror movies, the audience gets a third person perspective that's privy to almost everything. So Scream doesn't do that and therefore, it's a bit like a mystery. But the storyline never gave the audience enough information. When the movie finally reveals the killer, I got the feeling I was cheated since I probably would have been able to figure it out had the movie given more info. The motive the killer gave really sounded tacked on too.
Scream also tried to be a horror movie but it got its' thrills through cheap ways (like loud and sudden noises). Nothing about the movie itself was really scary. There was gore, but that's not scary. Scream's stuff doesn't make you spooked from bumps in the night.
So Scream isn't a horror movie, and it's not a mystery movie. I think it's more a drama but the vague character development (everything we learned about the main character's past was pretty much from the last 15 mins of the movie in the killer's big ending speech) doesn't qualify it for that. This movie gets low marks in my opinion.