Hacker Cinema
Scream
1996 · Film · 112 min
Part of Scream Collection
Directed by Wes Craven
A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a masked killer who targets her and her friends by using scary movies as part of a deadly game.
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20 comments on Hacker News
I effing hate horror movies/stories. I am not sure whether i am too psychologically sensitive or what, but i am different in this from most people i know. How people could produce and enjoyably watch slasher/Halloween/Scream/pointless-murder movies is beyond me.
All of us have a nameless fear of the dread and a darkness inside and it seems to me these sort of movies/stories over-stimulate this part of our mind/brain which i don't think is healthy for the society and the individual.
I kinda get why they think they don't want to enable this, but when I was a kid I once called 999 (in the UK) as a joke and let me tell you it was only once. My friends and I were there in the room watching films that we shouldn't and the uniformed and kitted-out Constables turned up and gave us an incredibly stern dressing-down about 30 minutes later.
Luckily, I am in the UK where a bunch of 12 year olds who've just watched Scream calling the police about shadows doesn't result in something getting shot, but still - I think I learned something about actions and consequences that day.
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I just did a quick search on Walmart.com for DVDs <= $6 and found plenty of mediocrity but also:
- Shawshank Redemption - Despicable Me 1 & 2 (for $5 total) - Scream 1-3 (again $5 total) - Beverly Hills Cop 1-3 (same) - Tombstone - Unforgiven - ET - A Star is Born (2018) - Sleepless in Seattle - The Thing (1982) - Seabiscuit - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Titanic
I would say any of these movies is better than 95% of the movies available for streaming on Netflix (conservatively).
To some extent, those sorts of motifs are a dramatization and personification of death itself. A very real threat that's usually rather immaterial and conceptual, cast as something you can see and touch. And that can chase you down an alley.
Nothing got you today. But something might have! And something definitely will sooner or later. It's always lurking, it doesn't rest, it's relentless in its mission, and it can strike at any time. If it hasn't taken someone you love, just wait, it will—in fact, it'll take everyone you love, eventually, if you stick around long enough.
You see similar use of the unstoppable-killer with marked victims (achieved via copycats and other trickery in Scream, but it's the same idea) for the purpose of representing other fears, traumas, or threats that have a degree of universality and don't tend to entirely go away, as in It Follows. You see this whole thing made perhaps a bit too on-the-nose in works like Final Destination—which is why, I think, you can have endless unstoppable-knife-guy movies and they may retain some appeal, but a little bit of a "cute" very-literal twist on the formula like Final Destination goes a long way; the world only needs so much of that, much as a joke that subverts a particular standard joke-form only works once or twice before it stops being amusing.
The fun thing about the Scream series, when the movies remember it, is that the killer's emulating this fictional trope of an unstoppable and possibly-supernatural-but-not-omnipotent killer on purpose, in "real life", which is good fodder for creative narrative, twists, and well-earned winks at the camera. The movies are meta not because they've arbitrarily chosen to be (though they do choose to lean into it, of course) but because they aren't about these kinds of fictional unstoppable-personification-of-death killers directly, but about "real people" doing the unstoppable-personification-of-death thing in "real life", in imitation of film (even in the first one, before the idea of copycats hunting the survivors entered the picture, there's a particular thing done in order to imitate not just a human knife-wielding killer, but specifically this kind of wholly fictional, unkillable death-dealer).
Actually, as with Final Destination, this is another thing the world only needs so much of, for similar reasons—I'm not sure the market would support a much greater rate of release for this kind of film than we already see. It's not as immediately-played-out, though, less of a one trick pony.
I always thought that aspect was the creepiest part of the Scream movies.
Imagine surviving a serial killer, and knowing there are good odds you're going to die at the hands of another copycat killer before you die of old age.
A while back I decided to see a movie in theaters after a night out and it was allegedly the billionth iteration of some horror franchise (Scream I think? Maybe Halloween?). Turned out to not even really be a horror movie, but some dopey drama/romance. Waste of my money, but thankfully it wasn’t much money.
Fans of the Scream movie franchise may prefer Type I.
This is the answer.
Sex scenes are usually bad. The sex scenes of prior movies are often distracting and dumb. Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s weren’t porn, and also they weren’t realistic. They were dramatizations of sexual encounters. They do not hold up.
Craig’s Bond character had a few AWFUL sex scenes and it just does not work for modern audiences. Not because audiences are prudes, but because they’re more savvy.
Slasher horror was built on this premise, although with more of a slant to punishing horny teens. Scream largely stopped it imo. Hell look at the recent Scream VI. Both female leads are clearly horny women. They don’t fuck on screen. They don’t go topless for no reason. And why would you want them to? It’s not shying away from anything. If anything it is WAY more grounded and honest than earlier stuff. The original Scream was super smart on this too.
If the movie or show is any good, most first-time viewers are likely too engaged with the plot to notice, and I suspect that the number who care to look out for it are fairly small. You seem to be in the position of a trained musician who cannot avoid hearing mistakes.
have you noticed how every scene of a wide-open or mountainous landscape must be accompanied with the screech of some raptor? (It sounds like a red-tailed hawk to me, but that's just what I am most familiar with.) This, I think, is more noticeable because it is usually a scene-setting shot in which not much is happening, while the Scream is backdrop to mayhem.
The ideas you’re proposing are the mainstream norms. I’m inclined to think the internet has played a large part in it. The social dialogue is simply much better. Earlier movies were overly simplistic and dumb.
I think Slasher films are the poster child of this. They began as this thing for the geekier men, with their idolization of the pure final girl in the 80s and 90s. But they all kind of portrayed this same dumb world view as lampooned in Cabin in the Woods. It mostly ended with Scream, which featured characters openly reflecting on the nature of such films and how they translated to pop culture and a final girl that fucked, despite still being kind and pure and unpunished. But it still kept this cultural narrative of the dorky guy protagonist.
The newer scream (number 6, which is unironically fantastic imo; best since the og) features a jock named chad who is not an obtuse asshole, horny girls that are not defined by being horny, and weird people with weird passions that are shown as sociable and well liked. This is good.
But this highlights the larger point. Being a jock was not the problem, it was being an asshole. It’s good that we recognize that jocks are not necessarily assholes. But assholes still thrive and environments where physical strength assertions to social power are probably the worst of them.
at the end of the day there is going to be a social hierarchy. If this shifts to favor intellect, academic achievement, and social skills; how do you support the dumber bigger kids who will geeked compelled to physically assert themselves into positions of social power? Very difficult. And it’s not like there aren’t a plethora of dumber, weaker kids who lack that option and also need support.
“Who will weep for the bully” is not easy to answer because being an asshole is often a survival strategy…
The shout out for scream is an amusing choice as it’s very intentionally designed to attack slasher horror film tropes. It’s a great film.
It was so genre savvy and ahead of its time imo.
You can’t make too many movies like Scream though. It has to be the oddity that exists apart from the rest to really shine.
I think the '90s had a bit more variety than the '10s and (for now) '20s. E.g. we seem to have lost good legal procedurals, thrillers, weird fiction, and "small scale" sci-fi.
Fo example, what are the'10s equivalents of "A Few Good Men", "Seven", "Dark City" and "The 13th Floor"?
There is _some_ stuff, but less than before, replaced by a massive amount of super hero movies or long-running franchises.
As a support clue, I invite you to consider the winners of the MTV Movie Awards, which are more "popular" than other Awards:
92 Terminator 2: Judgment Day 93 A Few Good Men 94 Menace II Society 95 Pulp Fiction 96 Seven 97 Scream 98 Titanic 99 There's Something About Mary 00 The Matrix (bonus: not 90s)
compare with the 10s
10 The Twilight Saga: New Moon 11 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse 12 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 13 Marvel's The Avengers 14 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire 15 The Fault In Our Stars 16 Star Wars: The Force Awakens 17 Beauty and the Beast 18 Black Panther 19 Avengers: Endgame
I have the feeling most "risky" movies, for lack of a better word, have moved to streaming services.
They have a lower-brow version of JUST SCREAM as the story arc for an episode. They make a website where people record farts, and then rate them.
Article claims that the 1995 No Doubt song, Spiderwebs, references Caller ID. Clearly, the song is about an implausible excuse recorded as an outgoing answering machine message, not Caller ID. "I'm walking into spider webs. Leave a message, and I'll call you back."
For the youngsters, an answering machine was the precursor technology to voice mail. It was a hardware device that you installed on a landline--the only kind of phone line most people had--between the demarcation point and your phone handset, that automatically answered a phone call after a programmed number of rings. The machine then played the outgoing message, sounded a beep, and recorded the subsequent audio as an incoming message. The machine could be set to play the incoming audio through a speaker, and if the call was from a familiar source, the phone handset could then be picked up. This was referred to as "screening your calls".
Equally clearly, the superior cultural documentation for Caller ID is the Scream movies. Scream came out in 1996, and Scream 2 in 1997. Sydney did not have Caller ID in the first, and had purchased it by the second, to combat crank callers. After the release of Scream, Caller ID use tripled in the US. (That may be coincidental, attributable to the adoption rate of a new and useful technology.)
I remember the footnotes in one Shakespeare play I read at school saying something like "[2] this is a humourous reference to Christopher Marlowe's contemporaneous play..." which I sort of rolled my eyes at and remarked how that was a bit of a stretch and was anyone really supposed to notice that.
My teacher drew the analogy to Scary Movie (which was relatively new at the time) and how we could all enjoy it just fine without footnotes explaining "this is a humourous reference to contemporaneous horror film Scream..." etc. It suddenly struck me the difference between studying culture historically and actually experiencing it "live". This analogy has only gotten better with time because I probably would need footnotes to get half the jokes in Scary Movie nowadays.
As a huge fan of his work I'm sad we don't get to see another reinvention of horror akin to what he did with scream.
Craven sort of puttered in the first 20 years of his career - first a professor, then a porn director (why not), then with a couple of smaller hits (last house on the left).
prior to Scream his big moment was clearly nightmare on elmstreet - he was 45 when it came out.
And I think the HN crowd that's gone through fundraising can relate to how this risky director with a big, crazy idea had to work to put it together:
"the film's original investors backed out at one point or another during pre-production. The original budget was merely $700,000. "It ended up at $1.1 million ... Half the funding came from a Yugoslavian guy who had a girlfriend he wanted in movies."[1]
How cool, will miss this guy who clearly brought the hustle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street
I watched Aliens with my 10-year-old daughter a few weeks ago. We had watched Alien a few weeks before. She had wanted to watch a real horror, but couldn't make it through the first few minutes of Scream, so we settled on Alien. She thought the alien bursting out of John Hurt's character was really funny. And it is. She thought the beginning of Aliens was too slow and it wasn't all that scary for her, but she enjoyed the film overall. I don't know if I would watch Prometheus with her - I'm sure she'd agree that film was terrible.
Except the Australian plugs look like one of the masks from Scream or Scary Movie or something.
Evidence: Socket: http://i.imgur.com/zwRYC25.jpg Mask: http://i.imgur.com/b0RAZ9k.jpg
In my mind the best zombie films are - Dawn of the Dead (modern version) - The first Resident Evil - 28 Days Later
The common theme in them is they are different and "non cheesy". I hate cheesy horror films (Scream made me laugh so hard ;)).
Dawn of the Dead has fast zombies in (Day of the Dead failed partly because they slowed down :() which is a great idea. The "gritty" camera work also works well with that (the sort of hand camera filmed look) speed as you really get the horror etc.
Resident Evil was just epic full stop. Verged on cheesy but elegantly avoided it. Not particularly scary but the sexy lead kicking ass = good :D Also it was somewhat intelligent - it explained the Zombies fairly logically (and mixed in an acutally good storyline - the memory loss etc.) and crucially kept them locked into one location. None of this "spreading across the world" thing. It could happen :D
28 Days Later is far and away one of the best. The Zombies only make up a small portion of the film and the rest focuses on humanity facing the end of life as they know it. It was an extremely good story (really, very very simple but hugely effective) and didnt push the reality enevlop too far.
So IMO what makes a good zombie flick?
- Realism (as far as possible)
- Good, sensible, logical story (it could happen!)
- No cheese (OMG were all gonna dieeee)
- Hot lead optional
- Gritty (camera work and writing)
Hope that helps :D
EDIT: oh yeh make it logical. Slow zombies are never really a threat - I always hate those films where they fail to avoid lumbering zombies. Please :(
Also, I never thought Shaun of the Dead would count. If it does this pips 28 Days Later as my fav zombie film. The writing/story is pure brilliance and the production is very very good. It nails it's genre perfectly.