2024 October Horror Challenge #39 "Scream"

I have a big announcement for you all. "Scream" is a good movie. I know, I know. next I'll be announcing to you that water is wet right? But I think it's an important announcement because sometimes I forget it. There was so much hype surrounding the movie Scream when it came out that what sometimes gets buried in the midst of all the crap is that it's actually not a bad little horror movie. I mean, sure it's dated, but it's dated for the mid-90s which is the Aaron which I was a teenager, so it's dated for my youth and it brings back some fairly good memories of time spent watching the movie with my mom and one of my best friends and I don't have very many good memories with my mom so I do treasure that. What happened was my friend saw the movie and recommended it to us, and my mom doesn't normally watch horror movies but she agreed to watch Scream with us so we all watched it together and my mom actually got into it by the end of the movie it was a little too gory for her but she was intrigued so she watched it with us and guessed who the killer was right along with us and she was wrong. I remember the first time we watched it she thought the killer was Sydney's dad, and I thought the killer was Gail weathers, which is funny to me now because when I watch the movie now, it's glaringly obvious to me what is going on and the identity of the killer and all of that but at the time that I saw it I was only 15 so cut me some slack I was young, and I hadn't seen many horror movies. Now I've seen so many that scream sometimes gets lost in the shuffle but it was one of my first horror movies so I should definitely appreciate it for that if nothing else. The story of Scream is pretty well known by this point. It's about a small town where some high school students are brutally slaughtered in the beginning of the movie and we get to watch The killer call and torment them and then stalk them and kill them on screen in pretty violent ways for my mom to be watching because she just doesn't like gore so you can imagine that the Gore in this movie was a lot for her. honestly it's not that gory but it is kind of sadistic the way they torment the victims on the phone, before they go in for the kill and that is something that I appreciate. Like I always say, I like my slashers mean spirited. What I mean by that, is that I like to see murder portrayed as something sadistic and evil when it's calculated like this because that's what murder really is you have to be a callous human being to take another human being's life in such a way and I like to see things portrayed on screen the way they are in life. I don't necessarily like to see violence that is sanitized for public consumption, and I don't like to see killers who kill their victims cleanly because that's not what murder is like in real life you would trip over the coffee table knock over a plant make a mess while you were trying to stalk your victim through the house and this movie shows that kind of thing the killers actually look human so I vibe with that kind of portrayal. I'm not going to spoil what happens in the movie even though most of us know all of the twists and turns of this movie pretty inside out. at this point the movie has been around for almost 30 years! Think about that; 30 years. What the hell have we been doing for 30 years? where did 30 years go It doesn't seem like it's been 30 years and yet it has I guess it's true what my friend always says about time Time is like toilet paper the closer it gets to the end the faster it goes so now that I'm a little older time seems to be flying by me and I see these big gaps and I look back and blink and it seems like years have passed and it's surreal but I appreciate anything that can hearken back to my younger years and made me see them in a positive light because I had a lot of tragedy and trauma and my younger years and the monsters and horror movies, the fake monsters that I saw on screen and read about in books, helped me deal with the real monsters that I had to deal with in life. So I needed an outlet and these movie is provided in outlet and scream showed me that you could fight back against a killer You could fight back against the evil and possibly win. which to me is an important lesson. I like the characterization that I missed when I was younger now when I'm watching the movie it's hard for me to miss how the characters of billions do really did look like they were in a relationship. I mean come on they were two seconds away from kissing every time they were together on screen It's a little ridiculous but it's not something that I would have noticed when I was a kid it went right over my head but it's something that I noticed now and I appreciate it now because it added to the story that they had chemistry between them. And I appreciate seeing the character of Dewey the cop and Gail weathers the reporter being real people with real lives and real problems and real attraction to each other that just kind of built organically from their interactions with each other. Even though I know that it ended badly, I know that Courtney Cox and David arquette were married so they met on the side of the movie and fell in love and it makes their scenes cuter and it makes their scenes ring truer for me knowing that this happened so that is another reason for me to enjoy this movie. The movie's not perfect. It's a little ridiculous how Sydney takes so long to figure things out because I was watching the movie so you can say I was stupid for not figuring it out but she was right there in the middle of everything and she didn't figure it out either So I think I should get a pass if you give her a pass for not figuring it out. I definitely appreciate the sadistic nature of the violence, the rebelling against authority that I see the teenagers doing this movie, which comes to a head when the principal is murdered graphically on screen. I'm sure that scene was satisfying for a lot of people who hated their principles in high school. Mine wasn't so bad so I wouldn't have wanted to stab her but I know some people who might have at least had a cathartic reaction to seeing a high school principle be stabbed on screen so that helps the movie ring true as well. overall I have to say that the movie works. The tongue in cheek sarcastic dark humor and the awareness of the culture in which the movie was released is something that a lot of movies tried to copy after scream came out to mixed results obviously most of the time it produced lower quality films but Scream was special because it rose above its flaws to become a cultural phenomenon so it's well worth checking out now even if you've seen it before and appreciating it for what it is and for what it did for horror movies and for horror culture. You can't go into a Halloween section of a store without seeing those ghost face masks now and that's a testament to the ongoing popularity of the screen franchise. So check this movie out and see where it all started and where all that popularity came from and give it a chance if you've never seen it before because even though it isn't perfect, it's a good little slasher and that's exactly what it's supposed to be and that's what I love it for.