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Scream (1996 film)

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Scream
File:Scream movie poster.jpg
Theatrical poster
Directed byWes Craven
Written byKevin Williamson
Produced byCathy Konrad
Cary Woods
StarringDavid Arquette
Neve Campbell
Courteney Cox
Matthew Lillard
Rose McGowan
Skeet Ulrich
Drew Barrymore
CinematographyMark Irwin
Edited byPatrick Lussier
Music byMarco Beltrami
Distributed byDimension Films
Release date
December 20, 1996
Running time
111 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
BudgetUS$14,000,000 (estimated)
Box office$173,046,663[1]

Scream is a 1996 horror film directed by Wes Craven from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, and the first of the Scream series. Filmed mostly in Santa Rosa, California, the film tells the story of the fictional town Woodsboro, California being terrorized by a masked killer who enjoys tormenting his victims with phone calls and movie references. The killer's main target is Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a teenage girl whose mother Maureen fell victim to a brutal murder one year earlier. The film takes on a "whodunit" mystery, with many of her friends and townspeople being fellow targets and suspects.

Scream revitalized the slasher film genre in the late 1990s, similar to the impact Halloween (1978) had on late 1970s film, by using a standard concept with a tongue-in-cheek approach that combined straightforward scares with dialogue that satirized slasher film conventions.

Plot

High school students Casey Becker(Drew Barrymore) and her boyfriend Steve (Kevin Patrick Walls) are brutally murdered by a killer who taunts them on the phone, using famous horror movie clichés. The timing of the tragedy is hard on their classmate Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who is attempting to cope with the upcoming one-year anniversary of her mother's rape and murder. The following night she is contacted by the same person who killed Casey and Steve, a mysterious man dressed in a ghostly costume named Ghostface, who taunts Sidney over the phone and then attacks her in her home. Reacting to circumstantial evidence, Sidney accuses her boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) of being the attacker. Because her father is away on business, she spends the following night with her best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) and her brother Dwight "Dewey" Riley (David Arquette), a deputy on the police force. While there, she receives another taunting phone call from Ghostface, who tells Sidney that she "fingered the wrong man...again," implying that the man convicted of killing Sidney's mother, Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), was actually innocent. This phone call seems to clear Billy, who is still in jail. Suspicion falls on Sidney's father (Lawrence Hecht), who turns out to be missing. Sidney is forced to deal with the scandalization of her attack by tabloid television newswoman Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who previously authored a book accusing Sidney's mother of having an affair with Cotton Weary and essentially calling Sidney an outright liar, leading to bitter mistrust between Gale and Sidney.

With the killer still loose, and a number of students wearing Ghostface masks as pranks, school is canceled as a precautionary measure, and the principal (Henry Winkler) is killed there. Unaware of the principal's fate, Tatum's boyfriend Stuart "Stu" Macher (Matthew Lillard) throws a party; among the guests are Billy and Sidney, who reconcile through sexual intercourse, and film buff Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), who explains to the other party-goers the genre conventions a movie character is required to follow in order to survive a horror film. Tatum goes into the garage to get some more beer for the party, but instead fights with the killer before having her head crushed by the garage door and dying. Meanwhile Gale, sensing the potential for a scoop, crashes the party and hides a video camera inside the house. As Dewey and Gale investigate the mysterious appearance of Mr. Prescott's car, the party-goers receive word of the principal's death and most of them head to the school. Ghostface starts to stalk those who remain behind, murdering Gale's cameraman Kenny (W. Earl Brown) and wounding Billy, Dewey, and Sidney. Meanwhile Gale, after discovering Kenny's bloody corpse, drives but loses control and crashes the car down a hill.

Sidney encounters Randy and Stu, who both accuse each other of being the killer; not knowing which one to trust, Sidney locks them both out of the house. Billy falls down the stairs, seriously injured, and lets Randy into the house. Randy claims that Stu has gone mad, but Billy replies that "we all go a little mad sometimes" (quoting a line by Norman Bates from Psycho) and shoots Randy. Billy and Stu reveal that they are both the killer, and have been using a voice-changing device to make them seem like just one person over the phone. They also reveal that they murdered Sidney's mother the previous year, as she had an affair with Billy's father and caused Billy's mother to leave; Stu claims "peer pressure" as his motive. They framed Cotton Weary for the crimes; similarly, they plan to frame Sidney's father for their current murder spree by planting evidence on his body. They stab each other to create the illusion that they have been attacked by Sidney's father, but Billy cuts too deeply, and Stu starts to die from blood loss.

Gale attempts to rescue Sidney and her father, but she is easily subdued when she fails to disengage the safety on her gun. However, Gale's interference does serve as a distraction which allows Sidney to escape. She returns to taunt and attack Billy and Stu; in the struggle that follows, she is subdued by Stu and Billy, she kills Stu by pushing a television onto his head ,and seriously injures Billy. Randy regains consciousness after surviving his gunshot wound, but is then punched in the face by Billy, stunning him. Just when Billy is about to kill Sidney, Gale saves Sidney's life by shooting him. Sidney, Randy, and Gale take one last look at Billy's body. Presumably dead, Billy springs to life one more time (a horror convention which Randy had predicted), but Sidney kills him quickly with a bullet to the head ending the murder spree of Billy Loomis and Stu Macher.

In the epilogue, Dewey is carried away on a stretcher, wounded but alive, and Gale makes an impromptu news report on the events of the previous night as the authorities arrive.

Cast

References to horror film genre

The film features numerous in-jokes and references to other horror projects. The victims in Scream are self-aware and each make numerous references to teen slasher and horror films.

Two of the most common references are to A Nightmare on Elm Street and its director Wes Craven. Fred, a janitor in the film played by Craven, wears an outfit resembling Freddy Krueger's. Later in the film, Tatum tells Sidney that she is "starting to sound like a Wes Carpenter flick", a fictional name created from compounding Craven's name and John Carpenter, director of Halloween.

In addition to its director, Halloween is referenced many times throughout the film. Billy's surname, Loomis, is the same as that of Donald Pleasence's character in Halloween (1978), which in turn was the name of Marion Crane's lover in Psycho. In a similar fashion to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Scream's highly-billed star Drew Barrymore dies early in the film.

In addition to mentioning several horror films throughout the film, many minor characters were portrayed by actors who have worked with Wes Craven before and have also appeared in prominent horror films. Linda Blair, who played Regan in The Exorcist, also plays the obnoxious reporter who approaches Sidney when she first returns to school after being attacked by the killer. Joseph Whipp, who plays Sheriff Burke in Scream, also plays a deputy sheriff in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Release

Critical reception

The reaction to Scream was generally positive among film reviewers, who appreciated the shift from the teen slasher films of the 1980s and their "endless series of laborious, half-baked sequels."[2] Williamson's script was praised as containing a "fiendishly clever, complicated plot" which "deftly mixes irony, self-reference and wry social commentary with chills and blood spills."[3]

Roger Ebert appreciated "the in-jokes and the self-aware characters", but was confused over whether the level of violence was "defused by the ironic way the film uses it and comments on it."[4] The New York Times says "not much of 'Scream' is that gruesome", but observes that Craven "wants things both ways, capitalizing on lurid material while undermining it with mocking humor. Not even horror fans who can answer all this film's knowing trivia questions may be fully comfortable with such an exploitative mix."[5]

Scream ranked #32 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies and #13 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly dubbed the film a "New Classic" by ranking it #60 in their list of the 100 Best Films of the Last 13 Years. The film received an 81% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com.[6] The film ranks #482 on Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time.[7]

Box office

The film opened in 1,413 theaters, taking $6,354,586 in its opening weekend. The film made almost $87 million in its initial release, and was then re-released to theatres on April 11, 1997 and went on to make another $16 million, making total a domestic gross of $103,046,663,[8][9] with, as of 2007, a worldwide lifetime gross of $173,046,663.[10] It peaked at number 13 in the U.S. domestic box office. The film's success made it the highest grossing slasher movie as of 2009.

Awards

The film won several awards, including Best Movie at the MTV Movie Awards 1997, and Saturn Awards for Best Actress (Neve Campbell), Best Writer and Best Horror Film. Craven was awarded the Grand Prize at the Gérardmer Film Festival.[11]

Soundtrack

Untitled

When Billy comes into Sidney's room at the beginning of the movie a cover of Blue Öyster Cult's song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" performed by Gus Black is played. This song is played in the first Halloween film when Annie and Laurie are on their way to baby-sit.

The theme song for all three movies is "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

An alternate version of the music video "Drop Dead Gorgeous" by Republica featuring clips from the film was shown on music networks such as MTV. Although the song can be heard in the film, it does not show up on the soundtrack album. The song was also used in one of the television promotional spots for the film.

Although the original version of "School's Out" recorded by Alice Cooper, was featured in the film, the soundtrack contains a cover version performed by Sebastian Bach's old band The Last Hard Men.

The soundtrack album was released on December 17, 1996 featuring songs from the film. A CD featuring Marco Beltrami's orchestral music for Scream and Scream 2 was released on the Varèse Sarabande label in 1997.[12]

Track listing

  1. "Youth of America" — Birdbrain
  2. "Whisper" — Catherine
  3. "Red Right Hand" — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
  4. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" — Gus
  5. "Artificial World" [Interdimensional Mix] — Julee Cruise
  6. "Better Than Me" — Sister Machine Gun
  7. "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)" — Soho
  8. "First Cool Hive" — Moby
  9. "Bitter Pill" — The Connells
  10. "School's Out" — The Last Hard Men
  11. "Trouble In Woodsboro"/"Sidney's Lament" — Marco Beltrami
  12. "Blasphemy" — Immediate Music (Bonus track)

References

  1. ^ "Scream (1996)". Box Office Mojo.
  2. ^ Satirical 'Scream' Is Out for Blood — and Lots of It
  3. ^ Harrington, Richard (December 20, 1996). "Go Ahead and 'Scream'". Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-01-27.
  4. ^ Ebert, Roger (December 20, 1996). "Scream". Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved 2007-01-27.
  5. ^ Maslin, Jant (December 20, 1996). "Scream". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-05-31.
  6. ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1074316-scream/
  7. ^ http://www.empireonline.com/500/4.asp
  8. ^ Scream (1996)
  9. ^ Scream (1996/I) — Box office / business
  10. ^ "Scream". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2006-12-27.
  11. ^ "Awards for Scream (1996/I)". IMDb. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
  12. ^ Carlsson, Mikael. "Scream/Scream 2". Music from the Movies. Retrieved 2007-01-27.
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