The Scream Generation

Sounds of Cinema took a look at the movie Scream on the occasion of the film's twentieth anniversary with a series of commentaries about the film, its influences, and its legacy. For more, click here.



There are a handful of movies that define each decade. In the 1990s, titles like Clerks, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Fargo, and Boyz n the Hood shaped or captured the cinematic and cultural landscape of that time. Scream ought to be placed in that company as it was one of the defining cinematic moments of the 90s. But as a horror film, Scream was uniquely able to address the darker side of the decade.

As of late there has been a nostalgia for the 1990s. The most popular films of that decade have received sequels like Dumb and Dumber To and Jurassic World and fans have been treated to supplementary seasons of favorite 90s television shows like The X-Files and Full House. But looking past lighthearted fads like boy bands and Beanie Babies, the media and culture of the 1990s was characterized by anxiety.

The major artistic works of the 1990s reflect this. Music albums like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral provided a soundtrack for a generation that had lost the optimism of the 1980s. Books like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild didn’t inspire hope for the future. Scream was of a piece with these other works. It reflected and reinforced the nervous worry that something within American culture was rotten.
 
After the conclusion of the Cold War, America turned inward in search of a new adversary. The decade was bookended by the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. AIDS was rampant and gun homicides reached an all-time peak in 1993. Local television news alternated between stories of drug use and violent crime while daytime talk shows offered up a parade of pregnant teens, victim narratives, and fist fights. And throughout the decade a series of lurid tabloid dramas held the nation’s attention, most notably the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the murder trial of O.J. Simpson whose acquittal shook the public’s faith in the justice system.
 
Scream was the sinister offspring of this environment. It funneled the anxieties that were floating in the zeitgeist into a murder mystery that dramatized them as a horror show. Here was a story in which a killer embodied one of the key parental fears of the 1990s—that violent media would turn children into murderous psychopaths. But the killer wasn’t the only predator. As a secondary antagonist, Scream featured an unscrupulous tabloid journalist who exploits the carnage for ratings and book sales. After one female student is murdered and another is attacked, their classmates respond by parading through the high school hallway dressed in the Ghostface costume. When disciplining those students, the principal tells the teenagers that their entire generation is disgusting and threatens to kill them. And when that principal is found dead, the teenagers rush to see the body before the authorities have a chance to remove it. This was a distillation of what was preoccupying the culture at that time and it was presented in a way that was recognizable to the 1990s audience.

That recognition was probably a key reason for Scream’s phenomenal success. It was the right movie at the right time. But equally important was Scream’s vicious sense of humor. The jokes of Scream were funny but they were also cruel. The film mocked the anxieties of the characters and of the culture. But as cynical as Scream could get, it was never so jaded that it lost touch with the horror. The film has a strange push and pull between the bloody violence and the ironic humor.
 
That combination of violence and sardonic wit made Scream a cathartic experience. This is exactly what audiences want from a horror film—to face the fears of the real world from the safety of the theater seat. What separates Scream from so many of its imitators was how well it visualized the anxieties of the time. Scream did this more effectively than perhaps any other title of the 1990s and that makes it one of the defining movies of that decade.

To read more commentary on the twentieth anniversary of Scream click here.