'Scream' redefines slasher flick for the audience of 1990s

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Once upon a time there was a teenage nonconformist named Wes Craven. He attended the religious Wheaton College, felt suffocated, and started to break rules. One of the rules he broke -- sneaking into the nearest movie theater for a screening of To Kill a Mockingbird -- indirectly set him on a career path. He became a movie director.

And not just any movie director. In the 1980s, he gained cult status with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a gore-slinging movie which practically redefined the horror genre. America entered the "golden" days of the slasher flick, which saw screaming teenage audiences huddled in theaters to watch the latest psychopath slicing and dicing everyone in sight.

It wasn't always smooth sailing,, of course. Together with Halloween director John Carpenter, Craven had been subjected to a barrage of bad publicity regarding his genre's prominent role in contaminating public morality. In some ways, he even agreed with the public but he remained a disillusioned youth at heart. Rather than withdrawing from the genre that he had helped build, he chose a move more akin to his character. He resorted to self- parody.

In 1994, he showed this self-reflexive goodwill in Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Although the movie didn't fare too well at the box office, it was a daring move which saw Craven playing a screenwriter who portrayed evil as an entity seeking incarnation in other movie sequels.

Scream, which has been hailed by many critics as the first "postmodern" slasher flick, follows the same ironic formula, although the emphasis has changed from the brain behind horror movies to their primary consumers -- teenagers. Indeed, this movie is about teenagers who live, breathe and consume movies in such a way that the line between celluloid and reality is perpetually blurred.

On the one hand, Scream is the scariest, most violent celebration to date of the stock horror formula that Craven has helped make famous -- the standard suburban setting with a couple of rich white kids. On the other hand, its focus on teenagers who are so knowledgeable about horror movies, yet cannot save themselves in reality, is a full-blown deconstruction of the standard assumptions about the genre.

Scream opens with Casey (Drew Barrymore) who is home alone late at night in an isolated house. A mysterious caller keeps ringing her, at first flirtatious, then dead vicious. Warning Casey not to hang up on him, or else he'll "gut her like a fish," he quizzes her on her knowledge of horror movies. By then, poor Casey is too freaked out to come up with the right answers. She dies, as does her boyfriend who just happens to be passing by, gutted like a fish.

Be forewarned, however, that this prolog is quite easily the single most frightening horror scene you're likely to have seen for a long, long time. The killer wears an elongated, skeletal mask modeled after Edvard Munch's painting The Scream; it is guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of audiences. And for those hoping to see more of blonde, voluptuous Drew, well, she really is dead.

Enter Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, last seen in The Craft), an unhappy teen whose mother was raped and murdered a year earlier. Her testimony helped put a suspect on death row, yet glam TV scandal monger Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox of Friends fame) isn't so sure he is guilty.

As expected, more gruesome slayings follow. But the teenagers don't seem too perturbed. Excited that they are finally getting their dose of "reality" is more like it. For we are not talking about ordinary teenagers here. We are talking about a horror- savvy gang which includes Sidney, her grungy boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich, also in The Craft), Tatum (Rose McGowan), Stuart (Matthew Lillard) and video store clerk Randy (Jamie Kennedy).

They know, for instance, that characters who say "I'll be right back!" rarely ever do, and characters who have sex invariably end up dead. They also know just when to warn characters in the movies to look behind them ("Look behind you!") without necessarily applying it to themselves.

So it is all the more fitting that the movie should reach its peak in a video party hosted by Stuart, where more brutal murders take place, culminating in a rather unique finale.

The uniqueness of the end, however, can only be attributed to the starting premise that this is not an ordinary horror movie. For one, Scream is different in the sense that it is an "inside" movie that simultaneously puts you on the outside. You are invited to partake in all the in-jokes yet you are not privy to the movie's innermost secret -- the identity of the killer -- until the last reel.

True, it's not often that a horror movie tries also to be a thriller. Freddy Krueger was an entity in and of itself; the villain in Scream is a person wearing a mask, which implies that it could be a number of people. This guessing game naturally heightens the tension.

Most horror movies thrive on the assumption that killers don't have to have a motive. They kill for the sake of killing, and this is what makes them scary. Due to its thriller attributes, Scream gives the killer a motive, while proving that it doesn't make him any less scary.

The role of Gale Weathers is intended as a fun take on the shallow nature of tabloid television, a standard horror movie perspective. Yet, in this movie, superficiality is not rewarded by death.

Aside from its own well-crafted inventiveness, what further works in Scream's favor is the fact that the `90s audience has been fed with abstract enemies for too long. Although alien invaders, twirling tornadoes, two-legged mutants, ancient troglodytes and twisted megalomaniacs make acceptable escapist nightmares, real terror is still the domain of good horror movies.