Self-aware romp through the genre is redolent of the 90s but its ghost-masked killer is as alarming as ever
The 30th anniversary re-release of the original Scream, from screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, brings us to a locus classicus of the 90s: a self-aware romp through the horror genre. It features Skeet Ulrich’s high schooler Billy Loomis announcing that reality is “all one big movie – but you can’t pick your genre”, which is the meta-slasher equivalent of Jacques Derrida’s belief that there is nothing outside the text.
A ghost-masked killer is murdering and terrorising the bland Californian town of Woodsboro, and we begin with his gruesome assault on Casey (Drew Barrymore); he makes chilling calls to people’s landline phones, in an era where that meant you more or less had them pinned them down to a certain location. (The existence of “cellular” phones was still an exotic novelty.) The mother of teen Sidney (Neve Campbell) had been brutally killed previously, a crime pinned on local man Cotton Weary (a cameo for Liev Schreiber) who is now in jail. But was he really guilty? Now Sidney is at risk like everyone else.