Scream

"What's your favorite scary movie?" A comfort movie of the most bizarre sorts. I remember where and when exactly that I saw Scream for the first time and for the past eleven years, I have carried this movie with me as one of my very favorites. Pound for pound, Wes Craven's seminal 1996 update to the subgenre that is the slasher film ranks right up with John Carpenter's Halloween as probably my favorite entry into this type of horror flick. I've loved this movie from the moment I saw it, but I notice more and more about it with each rewatch. The original Scream has this air of cultural importance about it, like it's one of the flagpole pieces of entertainment of its decade. And, indeed, although it made its debut rather late in the game, any 1990s horror flick after this wore its influence on its sleeve. Using an all star cast of beloved and young 1990s acting names (all of whom excel, but the star of this recent viewing was Neve Campbell, whose career making work as Sidney Prescott cannot be praised enough) and a biting, sharp sense of humor, Scream picked apart from the slasher film and rebuilt it from the inside out. It's witty, it's comedic, it's meta, it dissects the tropes that everybody loves to point out now in ways that had not been incorporated into plots in such a way before. It was a fresh, young, intelligent and quite honestly cool brand of horror film and it very well saved the genre from a long, stagnant rest. But what I think makes the original Scream the best of the bunch (in what's probably one of the most consistently quality horror franchises) is that it still has a mean streak. For every time it winks and nods at you, every time it stops to anaylze the machinations of a horror film, it grabs you by throat and pulls you right in, trapping you in the middle of one hell of a straight and simple slasher. Wes Craven was a master of horror, and he shows it all the way through. You'll be hard pressed to find an opening sequence to any scary movie that punched as hard and as fast as the one in Scream. Unstoppable, unrelenting, full of dread and without any interest in reeling back its mean, palpable cruelty. Thanks for everything, Wes.