Wes Craven directs this film that made a big splash at the time, a slasher satire that revitalized the horror genre back then.
Neve Campbell stars in Scream, a film that in its day was groundbreaking for its satire on horror films and their rigid rules made by a guy who knew a lot about this: Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street).
Plot
A girl receives a mysterious call from a guy she doesn’t know, and they start talking about horror movies. She doesn’t pay much attention to him, but in anticipation we discover that the guy is serious and has… a long knife. The girl and her boyfriend end up brutally murdered.
The Movie
It was very well received in its time, mostly because of the irony of a guy who hit the jackpot with slasher movies and now exposes his ground rules by laughing a little at them. Wes Craven, if anyone ignores it, is the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, laughs at himself and the whole genre in a film that gave rise to another saga, that of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which also mocks the genre, although much less.
Several familiar faces appear in the film, such as Drew Barrymore, who surprised us at a time when we had already almost forgotten her, a little absorbed in her personal dalliances. Neve Campbell seemed to have a promising career in television, but it finally came to nothing and, of course, we have Courtney Cox, from Friends, who no longer plays a teenager.
It’s teen cinema laughing at itself. We won’t say it’s clever, but it’s ironic and satirical and it has its own appeal and, for once -and may this data remain in the history of cinema- the critics didn’t trash the film.