Stating the obvious here, but Scream has some serious endurance.
Over its 25-year history, the series has seen steady growth in its fanbase. With its highs and lows, along with multi-year lulls between films, this perennial series remains one that fans, myself included, can be proud to say is their own.
This begs the question, what makes Scream so unique as to outlast so many others? The original film is lightning in a bottle, an inimitable movie that reignited the costume killer craze. Many have tried and failed to emulate the charm of the films, mostly due to the complexity of their charm.
Scream is a Recipe for Success
Many horror movies have a strong iconography: well-designed slashers, inspiring final girls, earworm soundtracks, and memorable kills. Scream, of course, has all this but excels because of the horror history in its framework. That history is the filmography of industry veteran Wes Craven.
All four films carry the innovative spark Craven is renowned for while retaining the spirit of his previous works. The cruelty and aggression from the various Ghostface killers harken back to his work in 1976’s The Last House on the Left, where he first shocked audiences with the depravity of the Stillos. The dark humor of Scream takes the bleak laughs the best of the Nightmare on Elm Street films could produce and elicits them through Kevin Williamson’s famously clever dialogue.
And what is a conversation on Scream without addressing the meta-commentary on horror film history? Something audiences were first treated to heavily in Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream was a film that was decades in the making, as its creation finds many roots in its predecessors. It’s fitting that a series inspired by so many others would end up influencing a score of horror films to come.
Heartfelt Love Letter to Slashers
As often as people brand Scream as satirizing the slasher genre, the movies feel like the most heartfelt love letter to slasher films because those films are its parentage. It knows where it comes from, looks back with pride, and paves a path rife with improvements.
On a technical and narrative level, all the Scream films are incredibly well constructed because of this. (Yes, even Scream 3. I would argue ESPECIALLY Scream 3 at some points, but that is a conversation for another day.) The cast of each of the films include some of the most charismatic and enjoyable actors to grace the silver screen. They’re fleshed out and three-dimensional, driving empathy in a subgenre where it feels increasingly easy to forget even main cast members in favor of the grisly spectacle of the villains. And in terms of villains, this series has the best chase scenes in all of horror and some of the best showdowns between killer and victim, due to how frenetic and high energy they can get.
But you, dear horror fan, already know all this, I’m sure. So, what is the secret ingredient then, if not all the above? What are its biggest improvements?
The Folklore in Scream
In other films, we get only a few lines about a killer’s legacy, a scene if we’re lucky, with a survivor or a victim. The gravity of a Voorhees massacre or a Krueger dream slaughter is largely relegated to the main cast and their interactions with the killer. But in Scream, we get to see the folklore of Sidney’s story spread. We’re presented with the relationship between the events of the films and the world around them to learn how the legend of Ghostface is transmitted. The Scream movies are a rarity that treats the town of Woodsboro, and eventually the world at large, as a character that grows with the rest of the cast.
This became most clear to me when I first heard Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” play in the films, a song I’ll forever associate with the movies. Despite how short the scene is, watching Woodsboro shut down for curfew in broad daylight was the scene that really got to me the first time I saw the movies. It was then that I recognized how rarely we get to see the outermost ripples of the shockwave created by a slasher’s rampage.
The Cultural Impact of Stab
And those shockwaves reverberate even further as the films go on. Woodsboro’s fear in the time between the first and second movies morphs into a morbid fascination that eventually spawns a series within a series, Stab. By Scream 4, there are seven Stab films with a fervent following; the teens of Woodsboro have parties to marathon the films, shouting lines back at the screen like it’s Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s especially fun to see characters behaving as I would with Scream, reciting its many quotable lines. I see myself in Scream 2’s rambunctious theater, worked up to a fever pitch for the next installment in their beloved franchise.
Every time this element resurfaced, I was reminded of the special nature of how the Scream movies interact with their audience. There’s a sense of endearing realism in the reactiveness of the Scream world, with Stab paralleling our world’s reactiveness to Scream. Ghostface is mythologized, not as Billy and Stu or Mrs. Loomis and Mickey, but as a cultural sensation, a legend that has spawned an indelible influence on the collective consciousness. The series doesn’t just become a meta-commentary on horror films, it becomes a story on the power of Scream’s story; the power that lies in change. The very same power it had over me when I first saw it.
Each of the Scream films gives us a sensation of growth; growth that parallels that of its audience. It’s one of the franchises that hasn’t gotten lost in its own hype or swamped down in trying to relive its glory days. The series is just as forward-thinking and in touch with its audience as it was back in 1996, making it highly rewatchable. It still has a strong fanbase because it looks to the future of horror and shows us the greatness of change.