Breaking the Rules of ‘Scream’

Scream is the quintessential 1990s horror film. Whenever anyone mentions the best horror movies of the decade, almost every time the first film they are going to mention is Scream. And there’s a reason for that. Scream was far from the first slasher, it was not the first ’90s slasher, it was not even the first meta slasher that commented on the tropes and trappings of the genre. But what it did to revitalize that genre in the ’90s after the oversaturation, censorship and general pushback had killed slasher in the ’80s cannot be overstated. Scream brought masked killers back to the box office in a huge way because it was a movie that understood the audience, and it understood the audience because it was about the audience.

So much of that success begins with Kevin Williamson’s script. There was a bidding war in Hollywood for that script, and for good reason. Eventually, it landed with Miramax and their burgeoning horror label, Dimension. They wanted Wes Craven to do it, which, being a famed director of this kind of movie, feels like a no-brainer. However, he turned it down at first largely I’m sure because it felt like such an obvious idea to get him to do it. Thank God he finally agreed, because I think the unique combination of Williamson’s witty script and Craven’s assured direction is what truly made Scream lightning in a bottle.

The film follows teenager Sidney Prescott, who is trying to move on with her life as she approaches the one year anniversary of her mother’s brutal murder. When two teenagers are killed, it sets off a chain reaction, forcing Sidney to confront the past and question who she can truly trust. In the words of horror aficionado Randy, “Everybody’s a suspect.”

The thing that immediately sets Scream apart from most mainstream slashers is not the meta commentary on horror movies or the way the characters speak in extremely quotable film references, even though those things are recognizable right out of the gate. It’s the fact that Sidney is already going through something. She has already effectively survived a horror film we never got to see, by presumably being the one to find her mother’s body. All of this is happening on the one year anniversary of that crime, a time when a teenager would no doubt be at her most vulnerable, be struggling to get by even if this were simply just another week at school.

But of course, it isn’t. I think in many ways, because of the trauma Sidney is carrying at the start of the film, even though this is the ’90s horror film, Scream could even play better today than it did then. There’s a reason so many teenagers of the 2020s still list this as their favorite horror movie. Protagonists like Sidney were rare then but are genuinely the norm now. Horror is always reflective of the time. Most slashers used to be about characters experiencing something truly horrible and confronting death face-to-face for the first time in their lives.

It is messed up to say, but that’s not the world we have now. It’s easy to see why, given all American teens have grown up with regular school shooting drills if they have not survived an event like that themselves, and have also spent some of their formative years living through the pandemic, teens now would not respond to those characters in the same way. That’s why so, so many modern horror films introduce us to a protagonist who have already survived some kind of horrible tragedy. And in 1996, that was Sidney Prescott.

The meta commentary on slasher films is still the backbone of Scream, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s the way that mixes in with this stark portrayal of the mechanics of media sensationalism, how stories like this are not only generated but how they are kept alive, that is the true key to Scream’s success. Honestly, Scream is as much a satire on true crime as it is on horror movies. That’s why Gale Weathers is such an atypical horror heroine, one that has never been replicated since. She’s a commentary on a completely separate thing. Gale is the face of the media’s bottomless hunger for violence, and as the series goes on Gale herself both confronts and embraces that in truly interesting ways.

When it comes to the commentary, the references and jabs at the expense of classic horror films, that’s where I think a lot of people misread Scream. The “rules” are the most famous thing about this entire franchise, let alone this film, but many viewers miss their purpose. As Randy notes, the rules to survive a horror movie are to never have sex, to never do drugs, and to never say “I’ll be right back.” They’re extremely general, certainly tropes that have come about by following some kind of pattern, and yet most of the great ones break them.

First of all, there’s the fact that Randy’s rules only even apply to slashers in the first place. I don’t think anybody’s watching Poltergeist with these three things in mind. But even just looking at slashers, the one who says “I’ll be right back” is the final girl as much as it is a random victim. In the quintessential slasher series, Friday the 13th, which somehow became seen as the mascot of the “have sex and die” trope, almost none of the surviving heroines are virgins. In Jason Goes to Hell the female lead is literally the mother of a newborn child. And in Halloween, which is the movie Randy is watching while he gives this speech, the heroine smokes pot.

The rules are loosely defined, and all the great ones break them, and that’s extremely important to point out, because Scream breaks all three of the rules it defines. The person who mockingly says “I’ll be right back” does it knowing he will, for sure, be right back, because he is one of the film’s two killers. Sidney has sex and survives. Randy gets drunk and survives. The entire climax is designed to drag us out of the stylistic slasher film we’ve become engrossed by to serve the blunt reminder that this is a pathetic revenge plot orchestrated by two suburban white teenage boys.

Even the “rules” established by the killers are immediately broken. Billy tells Sidney that it’s scarier when there’s no motive, and then lays his heart bare just a moment later, explaining that his reason for embarking on this spree is simply because Sidney’s mother had an affair with Billy’s father that caused his mom to leave, and he never got over that abandonment. There’s a moment during that exposition which is my favorite bit in the whole movie and most people never even notice it: when Billy explains his reasons for doing this, Stu is clearly hearing all of it for the first time.

That’s even stated outright in the script. Stu never even thought to question why they were killing their classmates and principal. He never once asked if there was a reason for doing it. He was just along for the ride. It’s especially worth pointing out because Stu is sometimes thought of as the most one-note character in the film and yet that single moment changes everything about him.

That is the magic Kevin Williamson tapped into with Scream. Like the slasher films that inspired it, Scream spawned countless imitators, but none of them ever came close to duplicating its success. It’s a marvel of both writing and directing (Wes Craven is at the top of his game, a major victory after the previous year’s Vampire in Brooklyn had flopped) and it’s easy to see why it changed the entire landscape of horror for the rest of the decade.