I Scream, You Scream

Opening Argument: I Scream, You Scream

Normally, around this time of year I’ll seek out some old, putatively scary (but really, whom are we kidding) Roger Corman films. The Raven, say, with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre as three bitchy sorcerers plotting against each other. Or The Masque of the Red Death, a gorgeously, garishly-colored fantasia about a deadly plague that forces people to quarantine indoors and yeah you know now that I think about it maybe not that one, this year.

This year, I dove into a horror franchise that I’d never bothered with, due to both its cultural ubiquity and my abiding status as a cat of the scaredy breed: 

The Scream movies. The first three, anyway. 
I know, I know. You’ve seen ‘em. Everyone’s seen ‘em. I avoided ‘em.
 

• They’re famously meta, with characters ticking off the “rules” of horror movies even as they fall prey to them. 
•  The cold open features characters who don’t make it through the cold open.
• The TV tabloid journalist played by Courtney Cox at some point attained Gay Icon Status (or at least Gay-Twitter Icon Status, which is a very different, lesser thing.)

Here’s what I didn’t know. What I was NOT PREPARED FOR.

• Courtney Cox’s hair choices. Bold! Severe! Puzzling!
• The “rules” in question (Don’t have sex, Don’t do drugs, Don’t say “I’ll be right back”) are surprisingly obvious, even basic. Even I, a shunner of horror flicks, already knew them – and, more surprisingly, already knew them back when the Scream films were made. I’d assumed they’d coined these rules, but I should have remembered that critics like Roger Ebert and Danny Peary had started ticking them off as far back as the early ‘80s.
• Scream 2’s the best of the original trilogy, by far, due to the presence of:  1. The best set of rules, 2. Lines like “Hi. And I really mean that,” and 3. Laurie Metcalf. 
• These films are shot in EXTREME CLOSE UP. Unnervingly so. (Scream Trilogy? More like PORES! Trilogy.) And there is so much close talking. It’s easily the creepiest thing about them, if you watch them during a global pandemic. Every character talks to every other character like they’re juuuust about to make out, especially Matthew Lillard and Jaime Kennedy.
• In 1996 you could cast Skeet Ulrich, at Peak Squirreliness, as a romantic interest and somehow expect that revealing him to be the killer would surprise your audiences. Imagine. We were such sweet summer children.

You can rent these movies on Amazon Prime, if you’re looking to trade your base-level inchoate pandemic anxiety for something more specific and gratifyingly tangible – a source of scariness that you can point to (and that other characters can punch on your behalf, which happens … just a whole lot, to Ghostface).