With the new Scream opening tonight theatrically nationwide, I am using science, math and dark magic to correctly rank all five theatrical Scream films in order of “very bad” to “excellent.”
in not letting the legacy characters take over the movie. Yes, Sheriff Dewey plays the Han Solo-in-role while Campbell and Cox put in their time. The spotlight mostly remains on the newbies. Sam must return home after her sister is attacked, while also confronting a dark secret that A) is blessedly revealed quickly and B) isn’t intended to be a defining character attribute.
Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s original leggy Christmas blockbuster still holds up. The infamous prologue, featuring teen boys emotionally torturing and eventually murdering an attractive teen girl just for the hell of it, is as brutal and subtext-made-text incisive now as it was 25 years ago, while remaining, as a horror set piece, the best thing Wes Craven has ever directed.
It also helps that the film buff-ery is confined to a few key characters as opposed to later sequels where everyone’s a self-aware film nerd. And the firstis plays fresh enough that viewers weren’t going to constantly try to deduce who the killer might be, since there was no guarantee that it was a closed-room mystery.
The shocking mid-film demise of the audience surrogate character still stands as the series’ boldest move, with the brief argument between Sidney and Dewey over who must call Randy’s mother standing as the most heartbreaking moment in the franchise. The movie premiere prologue works as audience-implicated meta-commentary, while an attempt to escape a crashed car stands as the series’ most suspenseful set piece.