Scream

Remembered for a misleading ad campaign that seemed to position Drew Barrymore as the star or the ways in which Jamie Kennedy's video shop clerk directly addressed the audience, Wes Craven's Scream - at least on this viewing - plays more like a film committed to detailing a particularly awful relationship. Neve Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, a traumatised teenager mourning the brutal murder of her gossip magnet mother. Her boyfriend, Skeet Ulrich's Billy Loomis, quivers with hormonal tension, absolutely desperate to trap Sidney in any situation conductive to him taking her virginity. Knowing the film's twist - that boyfriend Billy and his lickspittle, Matthew Lillard's Stu, are the killers - reorganises Craven's slasher film, magnifying the kind of pleading and placating inherent to any relationship in which one party is doggedly seeking some kind of access from another. 

Billy is consistently thoughtless throughout Scream, acting with a creepiness that is only really massaged by the proximity Sidney allows this boy to have to her. Sidney holds a certain kind of status within the film, apart from being the main character she's portrayed as forthright, morally good, and willing to take physical action when prompted. The character therefore works against a designation of one-dimensional victim. This standing has a knock on effect for Billy: if the clever and collected Sidney sees something in him, maybe we should too? Really, Billy isn't too far away from the hornier male characters present in screenwriter Kevin Williamson's contemporaneous TV series Dawson's Creek. Billy is pop culture (rather than emotionally) literate and, seemingly, sensitive enough to play the long game with a girlfriend who isn't currently comfortable having sex with him. This young man needles though. Beginning with an impatient hectoring, his arguments grow steadily over the course of the film. 

Billy's need to get his own way eventually reveals a complete absence of empathy. The ghost-faced Father Death costume that conceals Loomis and Stu when they are out on the prowl is not only emblematic of the stark psychological deficiencies driving these murderous teens, it also serves as a sustained structural wrong foot within the film: the warped Munch-mask is instantly identifiable as dangerous, but it's an anonymous and interchangeable kind of peril, equally likely to be a thoughtless prank as a violent haunting. Fully costumed, the killer's motives are chaotic and mysterious, an instant enlivening element for any scene threatening to sag. Unmasked though, the homicides that Billy and Stu have committed now clearly demand roots in human thought processes. What prompted these slayings then? Among the ex-girlfriends and love rivals are Rose McGowan's Tatum, Sidney's similarly direct best friend and the current girlfriend of Stu. Her murder - crushed in a malfunctioning electrical garage door - has a perverse curiosity about it, like a smug cat gloating over a dying mouse. 

When the subject of Tatum's absence comes up, it's positioned as convenient for Billy and his continued attempts to get Sidney on her own. Stu is also dismissive when asked where his girlfriend is, outwardly unconcerned but apparently happy to be either complicit to, or the active element in, her elimination. This casual approach to human cruelty echoes throughout a film filled with myopic, predatory boys and the self-assured women they hope to taint. In this way Craven and Williamson's film skewers a genre often noted for knuckle-dragging sexual politics simply by offering up plenty of confident, capable women. The whodunnit guessing game is subverted too. By focusing all of the film's male outlooks around lascivious intent, Craven and Williamson implicate all of them. Every male character is used in ways that align with some barely disguised ulterior motive, be that the bumbling cop happy to lead an attractive newscaster down dark country lanes or the high school student who raped then murdered his girlfriend's mother because, in part, he couldn't bully her daughter into bed.