Witty and subversive horror movie (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (25 August 2004)

"Scream" opens with a suspenseful ten-minute prologue where a plucky young teen (Drew Barrymore) is menaced by a mysterious phone-caller (a sinister Roger L.Jackson provides the voice) who quizzes her about scary movies. The threats quickly escalate into bloody carnage as the girl and her unlucky boyfriend are quickly gutted. This scene is a perfect summary of what is to follow: suspense, gore and horror movie references - within a horror movie.
The setting is the white middle-class country town of Woodsboro, and the characters who quickly realize they are caught up in their own 'scary movie' are high-school geeks Stu (Matthew Lillard) and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), local stud Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), perky blonde Tatum (Rose McGowan), and her best friend Sidney (Neve Campbell), whose mother was murdered only a year before. Getting involved in the chase for the killer are bumbling local cop Dewey (David Arquette) and ruthless tabloid TV journalist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). Anyone of these characters could be a suspect, and if they're not a suspect, they're a target...
Neve Campbell radiates strength and intelligence as the heroine of the piece. Courteney Cox, the compulsively neurotic Monica in TV's "Friends", turns in some good work as the ambitious Gale Weathers. David Arquette is appealingly goofy as Dewey, and he and Cox have a great chemistry together. Ulrich, McGowan and Lillard are all excellent in supporting roles. "Happy Days" Henry Winkler has an unbilled cameo as the high school principal.
The characters' self-awareness makes them unique for horror movie victims, and the script plays off this with funny consequences. The keynote speech here is in the final party scene where Randy (brilliantly played by series' favourite Jamie Kennedy) lays down the rules of surviving horror movies: never have sex, don't drink or do drugs and never say "I'll be right back". Needless to say, these rules are bent and broken with abandon.
Beneath that, though, there is a subtext about the supposedly safe middle class environment the characters inhabit. The film's setting, the fictional borough of Woodsboro, has a very utopian look, with wooden houses, white picket fences, and clean, well-built schools and offices. Director Wes Craven delights in showing us the ugliness hidden within the beauty of these surroundings, well-accentuated by Marco Beltrami's haunting score.
But such perfection can never really be true, so long as the surroundings (however beautiful) are inhabited by human beings with human issues. It is just such a setting like Woodsboro that creates bored, spoiled, desensitized people, a minority of whom may very well take to extreme violence as a means of enjoying or escaping their lives (the Columbine massacre is a good real-life example). The constant horror-movie references are amusing but in the end irrelevant. No matter how safe or perfect an environment seems to be, human impulses, always hidden beneath the surface, will threaten and undo the safety of that environment. That is the real message of "Scream" and one which it's closing song, SoHo's 'Whisper to a Scream', captures very well.
"Scream" was followed by two sequels, and then was shamelessly ripped off by a parody imitator, "Scary Movie". But above all of that, this first film remains the original and best.