Scream

Following the failure of Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), the logical step for Wes Craven to revitalise his filmography was to accept an offer to make a film conceived from the outset as satire—building on what he had already explored in New Nightmare (1994). Scream, scripted by Kevin Williamson, critiques the Hollywood horror industry, which by then had grown weary of the endless franchise sequels of the 1980s. Within genre traditions, evolutionary stagnation often occurs because tropes, styles and aesthetics are endlessly reproduced. Each decade tends to produce meta-horror films that engage in self-reflexive commentary—criticising, playing with and deconstructing the horror tropes of their time—a practice common in Hollywood studios. Although Craven had already ventured into this territory with New Nightmare, Scream was a breakout success with audiences and at the box office; as a commentary on the culture of violence in cinema, it goes beyond cataloguing tropes to conceptually interrogate cinema and violence themselves.

My memory may be faulty, but I recall first watching Scream on an Indonesian prime-time television programme at 8pm called Layar Emas Barat (literally, “Golden Screen – West”) around 1999–2000—roughly four to five years after its release in the United States. At the time, Indonesia’s political situation was in turmoil following Suharto’s downfall. Broadcast standards were being widely liberalised—both in terms of what was deemed fit to air and what was not—and American action and 1990s horror films became standard fare on television, as broadcasters sought to attract local audiences and tap into a growing interest in cinema. Scream did, in fact, open in Indonesian cinemas and was screened regularly, but attendance during that period was sluggish due to the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Although I had loved horror and genre cinema in general since the age of six, when I first watched Scream I did not grasp many of its references to various pieces of American horror trivia with which I was not yet familiar (or for instance, that the killing of the lead actress at the start was a nod to Psycho (1960)). Nevertheless, I sensed that the film was meta and markedly different from the slashers I had seen before, such as Halloween (1978) (another film Scream references extensively and playfully).

As a piece of meta-horror, Scream revived the American slasher tradition, which had slackened in the 1990s. This wave was more genre-conscious than the slashers of the 1980s, and Kevin Williamson played a significant role in ushering it in; after Scream, he wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), which, though not as meta or as referential as Scream, remained self-aware about slasher conventions. In Scream, the slasher formula is reworked by presenting a killer who is deliberately clumsy, almost parodic—unlike the virtually indestructible, semi-supernatural killers of 1980s American slashers. In line with the second slasher wave of the mid-1990s, Scream also foregrounds a strong whodunit structure, inviting viewers to guess the perpetrator. Aided by its satire of media culture at the time—channelled through the investigative journalist Gale Weathers (played by Courteney Cox, at the height of her Friends fame)—Scream highlights American popular culture’s obsession with true-crime television and documentaries (Kevin Williamson was inspired to write Scream after watching a true-crime television programme focusing on serial killer Danny Rolling). A viewing culture saturated with sensationalism—mirrored in a fascination with serial killers, murder cases, and death on camera (see also David Kerekes’s Killing for Culture)— becomes the film’s prime target of critique. A critique synthesised and voiced through the perspective of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who is haunted not only by her mother’s recent brutal murder but also hounded by sensationalist tabloid media seeking to profit from the case, all while repeatedly evading Ghostface’s attempts to kill her. Nearly every television broadcast in Scream features reports about the murders in Woodsboro, amplifying the sense that the film’s entire media apparatus revolves around violence.

Although Scream effectively marks an era in which violent imagery was endlessly reproduced on television and in cinemas, it is not especially critical of technology itself. Technology functions primarily as a conduit for fear: the telephone used by Ghostface to terrorise victims, and the mobile phone as a plot device. This contrasts with contemporaneous non-Hollywood horror—particularly Japanese titles such as the original television film Ringu (1995), the feature Ringu (1998), and the internet-horror Pulse (2001). In those films, technology itself is the very source of terror: a black box not fully understood by its users, producing a horror that resists easy interpretation. There is a technophobic undertone in these Japanese horrors—even if they too are often self-aware and referential to folklore. Scream’s commentary on violence in the media is more direct than that of its Asian contemporaries: while technophobic Asian horror leans on the dictum 'the medium is the message’, Scream treats the content that media circulates as the problem to be unpacked. Scream appears to question the relationship between media violence and real-world violence: does violent media make people more brutal, or does it merely render those already inclined towards violence more inventive in carrying it out? The film does not answer this definitively, but it serves as a prompt for continued reflection—especially now, nearly thirty years after Scream’s release, when real-world violence is increasingly visible to us, incessantly mediated through our screens.