The late ’80s and ’90s saw the major slasher franchises very much on their way out. For Friday the 13th, its eighth installment, Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan, was the lowest grossing in the franchise up to that point. Then, even after a four-year break and with a change in direction, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday proved that people were indeed tired of the Voorhees saga for the time being. As for Halloween, the fifth installment attracted little interest in 1989 and then, six years later, it was the same deal with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
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But Scream came in and proved there still was a market for slasher films. It just had to be a deeper, fresher, smarter slasher. And for this film, the audience turned out in droves until now, nearly 30 years later, Ghostface is held in just as high a regard as Jason, Michael, and Freddy.
Why Is the Original Scream Such an Influential Masterpiece?
The first Scream is still the best Scream, though Scream 2 does a marvelous job of capturing its late ’90s hipness. But believe it or not it was pretty far from a sure thing leading up to release. There was a tense battle to get the movie out there with an R rating and, given how it debuted just five days before Christmas, there were understandable concerns that it wouldn’t thrive with audiences who were looking for festivity, not brutality.
Oddly enough, there were critics in ’96 who thought the film went too strong in the direction of humor and not strong enough in the direction of building suspense. It’s baffling they came to that conclusion because the film is thoroughly a happy medium between those two things. Let’s face it, even if the movie didn’t have an ounce of suspense after the opening with Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker, it would still have more suspense than most horror movies.
Of course, in the end, the movie spoke for itself and became a massive hit thanks to glowing word of mouth. While not nearly as much as they are today, horror movies were frontloaded in the ’90s. It’s just the nature of the genre. With Scream, however, it saw a 42.8% increase from first weekend to second and a further 10.4% increase from second to third. Even its fourth and fifth weekends did better than its first. So, did people go out to see it that pre-Christmas frame? Yes, but not nearly as many went out to see it after the holiday.
And clearly the release strategy pleased Dimension Films, because one year later they debuted Scream 2 in December. About two weeks before Christmas, but December, nonetheless. And, while it had five times the opening weekend of the first film (expected, since the first film put the IP on the map, thus upping the anticipation for round two), this also meant it experienced drops afterwards. Even still, it ended up with just about as much as the first film, so there were two checks in the success column.
It’s easy to see why the first film led not only to a major franchise, but any number of horror films that attempted to replicate its tone, as well. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, An American Werewolf in Paris, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Urban Legend, Phantoms, Disturbing Behavior, Bride of Chucky, Idle Hands, Final Destination, Ginger Snaps, Dracula 2000, Valentine, all of these movies had trailers, posters, or overall tones in the movies themselves that were reminiscent of Craven’s classic. In other words, if it weren’t for Scream and its success, there’s a good chance most if not all of those movies wouldn’t exist.
And, of course, meta horror hasn’t gone anywhere, it persists to this day…and not just via the upcoming Scream 7. But no movie has ever done it as well as Scream. Even more than Haddonfield in Halloween, more than Camp Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, Scream makes its Woodsboro feel like a real place populated by real people, and we’re devastated when we have to see some of them die.
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Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
