“Movies don’t create psychos — movies make psychos more creative!”
I’m a horror movie fan from way back. I couldn’t tell you the first one I ever saw, but I know it was something very ’80s and very gory, and I likely sneaked off to watch it. For the most part I love horror movies of all kinds, but I’m particularly fond of the teen-slasher films that were so prevalent in the ’80s, though they’d all but died out by the early ’90s.
When I first heard about Scream (1996), which came out the winter of my freshman year of college, I was excited. All the buzz and reviews I’d read said this was going to be the movie that would resurrect the teen-slasher horror subgenre. I mean, how could it go wrong? It was directed by horror master Wes Craven, the man responsible for bringing Freddy Krueger into our lives with the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Who better to bring us a kick-ass slasher film than him? OK, maybe John Carpenter. But I digress.
Besides having a heavyweight horror director at the helm, Scream also had a cast full of hot, young, up-and-coming stars of the day, including Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy, and Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore makes a much-hyped appearance at the beginning of the film, a la Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The film also features a snappy, smart script by Kevin Williamson, who created Dawson’s Creek soon after.
