Scream
- If nothing else, it's a great popcorn flick. I suppose I'll touch on the spectacle and visual elements of the film first.
- The gore is pretty average for a horror in my opinion, not too amazing but also not bad at all, really comes into effect in the 3rd Act where everyone gets covered in it and it looks cool #ashell. Sidney also has crazy aura and is overall awesome.
- Performances are all decent to great, Sidney's great, Dewey is pretty good, Gale is alright and everybody else is just decent I suppose. I think the best performances after Sidney are probably the 2 murder boys, they're pretty one-note characters but they pull off that psychotic note pretty well, as well as both giving good physical acting performances as Ghostface.
- Unfortunately, I don't find this film very scary, maybe I'm too desensitized to gore but I don't find it particularly scary or disturbing in this film it just comes off as goofy a lot of the time. Maybe it's because Ghostface is so engrained in pop culture as the Scary Movie guy but I can't take it seriously.
- Of course, the final scenes in the house party are best but I'm a big fan of the school as a set piece, acts as a microcosm of how society (mainly the media) treats people like Sidney along with making this movie definitively a teen movie.
- I'm pretty happy with the thriller and mystery portions of this film, the mystery is executed extremely well and it's relatively sound logically.
- There's still some horror movie trope-y nonsense though, like Ghostface waiting for cameraman to fall over and die before attacking Gale but it's mostly forgivable stuff.
- Thematically, I see Scream as an exploration of how the media treats victims of extreme violence and general oversensationalism. This is the most prominent and obvious theme throughout the film mostly explored through Gale's relationship with Sidney. In my opinion it's not a very deep exploration past "the media exploits people and sensationalism pushes more people towards violence and psychopathy than fiction", but it's explored nonetheless.
- I think the more interesting theme in Scream is that of hypermasculinity and the dehumanization of women. Being a film produced in 1996, every conversation about women has some form of misogyny, through objectification, overt sexualization or anything of the like. There's also a bit of fridging (done by the characters, not the story), where they pretend that the trauma women have gone through can justify their psychopathic tendencies. Finally, Shaggy's ultimate motivation of peer pressure plays into a very homoerotic trope, committing extreme acts of depravity or terror solely for validation from male peers. Interesting stuff.
- Ultimately, I think I should've seen more classics before this. While I can get the references they point out (turning around, running upstairs etc), I think I should've watched the classics which include the tropes Scream deconstructs.