It recently occurred to us that IGN’s only been around for 30 years. Movies, on the other hand, have been around for a lot longer than that, and so many of them have never been reviewed by IGN. So in the interest of remedying that, frankly, horrific oversight, here comes our first Flashback Review.
We’re starting with director Wes Craven’s genre-revitalizing, franchise-spawning, meta teen-slasher, Scream.
Scream was released in 1996, making it 30 years old today, the age over which we’re supposed to stop trusting people. As one of the most influential horror films of all time, with more ink spilled online about it than blood spilled on screen, it’s a strange thing for the movie to not have an official score here at IGN. As an exercise, it’s just as strange to go back and review a film with the kind of legacy Scream enjoys today. So, for at least this first part, I’m just going to pretend that it’s 1996.
Bill Clinton just won the election for his second term in office, Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” is at the top of the charts and Wes Craven kind of needs a win. He’s coming off of Vampire in Brooklyn which was and, frankly always will be, considered a big ol’ flop. New Nightmare was just before that, and showed Craven’s willingness to break the fourth wall, or at minimum it showed an understanding that it needed to be broken. It’s telling that contemporary reviews of that film largely considered it a self-reflective breath of fresh air in a tired franchise. By and large in the mid ’90s, the bloom was to some degree off the horror movie rose.
So here comes Scream, a meta-commentary on the entire genre. It’s doing all the things we loved about slasher movies in the ’70s and ’80s and also making fun of them, but also it’s made by the guy that made most of those tropes famous in the first place with films like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and, most iconically, A Nightmare on Elm Street. All this adds up to Scream having its cake and eating it too. And it all starts with 13 of the best opening minutes a horror fan could ask for.
There’s an argument to be made that puts the opening sequence of Scream up there with the best in film history, not just horror. It would have been a legendary short film if there hadn’t been a whole movie attached to the back of it. It all at once played the hits (preying on youthful fears of being home alone and getting a call from a stranger) and modernized the discourse (quizzing Drew Barrymore’s panicked Casey Becker with a gotcha question about Jason Voorhees’ mom).
The camera work is brilliant as well, floating around the house, subtly tilted and stalking Casey with a slow, controlled steadicam. It pushes into a close-up to punctuate the more frightened beats of her performance instead of always cutting to those close-ups. The edit is just as deliberate, patiently waiting for the right moment to attack, exactly like the actual killer is doing outside. Barrymore plays her fear with a bit of disbelief, her panic with a little anger, while Roger L. Jackson, as the voice on the phone, shifts gears from playful and sexy to deranged and dangerous as he toys with her.
