Third Time's The "Harm"...

Rating: 8/10 (4 December 2008)

By 1996, horror films were at a low-ebb again in terms of originality and the number released in theaters. But as this always happens every few decades or so, a young hotshot director and/or writer shows up with something that shakes things up again, if only temporarily.
However, in this case the "young upstart" was actually an old hand at the game. Wes Craven had "rebooted" the genre twice before, with the uncompromising LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and then again with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. And how would he launch a new trend in horror? By tapping the talents of a then sizzling-hot 'new' writer named Kevin Williamson, the creative force behind the hit teen dramedy DAWSON'S CREEK.
What made the first installment of SCREAM so unique, is that it took all the conventional rules of horror that an entire generation had learned by seeing "FRIDAY THE 13th", HALLOWEEN and Craven's own ELM STREET series on home video, and gave them a playful, self-referential tweak. And the twist started with an opening sequence that horror fans are still talking about to this day.
Hitchcock stunned the movie world back in the Sixties, by killing off his lead heroine halfway through the classic PSYCHO. Craven and Williamson took his established rule and ran with it, going the Master one better...by killing off the 'heroine' in the FIRST TEN MINUTES!
If it had been some bit player from a soap or a sitcom, the scene wouldn't have made much of an impact. But it's DREW BARRYMORE, an immediately recognizable face playing the doomed Casey Becker, who learns the hard way not to play 'Horror Movie Trivial Pursuit' on the phone with a knife-wielding psychopath...especially if your answers are WRONG!
The audience is then thrust into a slasherific whoddunit as a group of Casey's classmates, all relatively unknown actors at the time, try to figure out who's doing the killing...and who may be next, all the time aware that they are in their own "real-life" horror movie, where the killer knows the rules as well as they do.
And as if to underscore the irony, there are several prominent cameos that are a nostalgia and/or trivia lover's dream, from Linda Blair and Henry Winkler, to Joseph Whipp (who sort of reprises his brief role in ELM STREET) to the director himself (look closely).
It was a surprising and engaging way to "freshen up" time-tested horror conventions, and even now, ten years later, it still holds up pretty well. Only many of the actors have moved on to become bigger stars (Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Courteney Cox-Arquette, husband David Arquette, Liev Schreiber) or major players in Tinseltown as well, (Drew Barrymore, Jamie Kennedy).
The brilliant scenario dreamed up by Williamson and Craven then is something of a cliché now, (with the satire parodied again in the SCARY MOVIE franchise), which somewhat explains the current lean of Hollyweird towards remaking classics and B-movies alike. Nothing this original would really surface again until a few bright sparks burst on the horizon, like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or Lucky McKee's challenging MAY. Which brings us to where we are now.
Pop in a copy of SCREAM today, and enjoy your ride "back to the future" of the genre.