In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream, released on this date in 1996, here’s how the movie revived a genre, previewed a defining characteristic of Generation X, dramatized the psychological toll of trauma with uncommon emotional honesty—and how it even offers a roadmap out of the prevailing narrative of our time: extractive capitalism.
For all the decades we’ve been together, my wife and I have observed a particular protocol, probably owed to how many movies we used to see at the two-dollar cinema in Hell’s Kitchen when we were dirt-poor college students: Upon exiting the theater, neither issues a comment on or reaction to the film we just saw. Instead, we save the discussion for when we’re seated at a nearby restaurant, at which point one or the other invariably asks, “Do you want to go first?” As far as I can recall, we’ve broken with that tradition but once.
“We just saw a classic,” she blurted as we staggered our way through the lobby moments after seeing Scream. “They’ll still be talking about that in twenty years.” (Such an estimate, in fairness, seemed like a glacially long time when you’re only as many years old.)
In fact, a full quarter century has now passed since the release of the late Wes Craven’s postmodern slasher masterpiece, and the movie has very much earned a fixed place in the cultural consciousness. That opening sequence alone, so shocking at the time, hasn’t lost any of its power to frighten and disturb; an entire semester could be spent studying it, from the exquisite camerawork to the dramatic pacing to Drew Barrymore’s heartwrenchingly credible performance as a young woman scared shitless—and this despite having no one in the scene to act against save a voice on a phone. Ten minutes into the movie, its marquee star is savagely disemboweled… and now you don’t know what the hell to expect next!
I really can’t say I’ve seen a horror film since that was at once so scary, clever, entertaining, influential, and of its moment the way Scream was. With eerie prescience, Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (born 1965) seemed to put their finger on an idiopathic attribute of Generation X that would, as Xers settled into adulthood and eventually middle age, come to define the entirety of the pop-cultural landscape over which we currently preside: that rather than using fiction to reflect and better understand reality—viewing narrativity as “a coherent design that asks questions and provides opinions about how life should be lived,” per Christopher Vogler—we more or less gave up on understanding reality in favor of mastering the expansive, intricate storyworlds of Star Wars and Star Trek, DC and Marvel, Westworld and Game of Thrones. And such figure-ground reversal started long before the Marvel–industrial complex capitalized on it.
In the early ’90s, as the first members of Gen X were becoming filmmakers, avant-garde auteurs like Quentin Tarantino (born 1963) and Kevin Smith (1970) not only devoted pages upon pages in their screenplays to amusingly philosophical conversations about contemporary pop culture, but the characters across Tarantino and Smith’s various movies existed in their own respective shared universes, referencing other characters and events from prior and sometimes even yet-to-be-produced films. That kind of immersive cinematic crosspollination, inspired by the comic books Tarantino and Smith had read as kids, rewarded fans for following the directors’ entire oeuvres and mindfully noting all the trivial details—what later came to be known as “Easter eggs.”
What’s more, the trove of pop-cultural references embedded in their movies paid off years of devoted enrollment at Blockbuster Video. Whereas previously, fictional characters seemed to exist in a reality devoid of any pop entertainment of their own—hence the reason, for instance, characters in zombie movies were always on such a steep learning curve—now they openly debated the politics of Star Wars (Clerks); they analyzed the subtext of Madonna lyrics (Reservoir Dogs); they waxed existential about Superman’s choice of alter ego (Kill Bill: Volume 2); they even, when all was lost, sought the sagacious counsel of that wisest of twentieth-century gurus: Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee (Mallrats).
For Gen X, our movies and TV shows and comics and videogames are more than merely common formative touchstones, the way, say, the Westerns of film (Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven) and television (Bonanza, Gunsmoke) had been for the boomers. No, our pop culture became a language unto itself: “May the Force be with you.” “Money never sleeps.” “Wax on, wax off.” “Wolfman’s got nards!” “I’m your density.” “Be excellent to each other.” “Do you still want his daytime number?” “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…”
Those are more than quotable slogans; they’re cultural shorthands. They express a worldview that can only be known and appreciated by those of us encyclopedically literate in Reagan-era ephemera, like the stunted-adolescence slackers from Clerks and nostalgic gamer-geeks of Ready Player One and, of course, the last-wave Xers in Scream:
The characters from Scream had grown up watching—arguably even studying—Halloween and Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street on home video and cable TV, so they had an advantage the teenage cannon fodder from their favorite horror movies did not: They were savvy to the rules of the genre. Don’t have sex. Don’t drink or do drugs. Never say “I’ll be right back.”
There was a demonstrably prescriptive formula for surviving a slasher movie—all you had to do was codify and observe it. That single narrative innovation, the conceptual backbone of Scream, was revelatory: Suddenly everything old was new again! A creatively exhausted subgenre, long since moldered by its sequel-driven descent into high camp, could once again be truly terrifying.
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