Scream Review

Campbell is Sidney Prescott, a high school student in the all-American small town of Woodsboro. Already haunted by the murder of her mother some years earlier, Sidney gets further spooked when a killer starts brutally picking off her fellow students. Nobody is safe, and everybody is a suspect, down to ambitious news reporter, Cox, and ineffectual young policeman, Arquette.

Director Craven, long immersed in the horror genre, had already begun to toy with the notion of postmodernism in his final addition to the Nightmare On Elm Street series. Writer Williamson, creator of the television teen sensation 'Dawson's Creek', was clearly paying attention, and ran with the idea of the characters within a horror film being fully aware of the conventions and rules of the genre. So as the butchery continues, the kids keep score and comment on how the killer is or isn't adhering to these rules.

Where Wes Craven's New Nightmare was an interesting, noble failure - pretty smart, but crucially not very scary - Scream is not merely clever, making the obligatory narrative nod to Psycho among many other classic stalker-slasher movies; it is, from its breathtaking opening sequence (with Barrymore as the woman in peril) onwards, simply terrifying.