10 Years of Bitter Posts - Why SCREAM is one of the best films ever made

One of my all-time favorite movies is SCREAM and so it's little shock that over the years I've found opportunities to blog about it. It's one of the best horror films ever made and I honestly think probably ranks among the best spec scripts ever written. I feel like there's a lot to be learned from it, and these posts cover quite a bit of ground:

Lessons from Wes Craven & Kevin Williamson's SCREAM

Why I like Wes Craven's characters and what I fear from SCREAM 4

This is where so many horror specs I read fail. I see a lot of scripts that are clearly trying to be franchises, to the point where all they've done is work out the gimmick that will drive the series. So much time is invested in giving the killer a cool look, or a gruesome gimmick to his kills. Where they fail is in coming up with a strong dramatic arc to sustain the story. Too often the cast of characters is treated as little more than a future body count: a dead asshole jock here, a slutty girl with nice breasts there. 

And sure, there are plenty of bad B-movies made every year. There's a long list of produced slashers that never dug deep. 

But the horror thrillers that endure? The ones that future filmmakers grow up wanting to emulate? Psycho, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream - they all have an important element in common: strong character arcs for their protagonists. Your hero isn't the guy wielding the blade and drawing blood. Never forget that.

Scream's Sidney Prescott: Horror's Greatest Heroine:

Without hesitation I picked Sidney Prescott, who was not only horror's greatest heroine, but possibly one of the strongest modern teen females ever created. She's perhaps the best-realized version of the girl-next-door turned heroine. When she takes on the killer, she doesn't have the advantage of super powers, cool weapons or military training (ala Buffy, Ripley, or Sydney Bristow.) She's also got her shit together a lot better than some of the WB female leads of the day, who tended towards mopeyness, martyrdom, and wallowing in their own baggage.

Yes, like most heroines, she's got some issues from a dead parent, but unlike say Lana Lang or Joey Potter, those issues don't DEFINE her. The wound is there, but it's not stopping her from interacting normally with her friends and it doesn't feel like she uses every conversation as an excuse to pick at that scab. She has friends, she's well-adjusted and she's generally likable. You get the sense you could carry on a conversation with young Sidney, and not once get the urge to smack her, or feel like she's making it all about herself.

I'm aware she's a descendant of Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy and Halloween's Laurie, but I feel she is a successor that improves on the original. They're both icons in their own right, but Sidney is a better-realized character in my opinion.

The opening of SCREAM 4 - expectations and misdirection:

The opening scene initially left me disappointed, until I got what the creators were going for. We open with two teens - played by Pretty Little Liars' Lucy Hale and 90210's Shenae Grimes - who pretty much embody everything the original Scream characters weren't. One is dumb enough to keep talking to a Facebook stalker, and another one when faced with a threatening phone call from the killer, first hangs up, and then later passes the phone to her friend. (Grimes by the way, makes ZERO effort to distinguish this character from her 90210 role, right down to the same acting ticks.) Moments later, these girls are dumb enough to actually open the front door when it might as well be flashing "KILLER ON THE OTHER SIDE."

So it's no shock when these two are swiftly dispatched, and just as I'm thinking "Wow, that was oddly tensionless for a Scream opening," the title card for Stab 5 comes up and I realize the joke is on me. It puts a clever spin on what we just saw. After all, in a world where Stab 5 is supposed to be of questionable quality, Shenae Grimes WOULD be its Drew Barrymore. Consider that a point for the casting people. (This is probably the best place to note that Scream 4 continues the series tradition of strong casting, not just for the genre, but for a feature in general.)

I have too much affection for most of the SCREAM characters to want to see them actually killed off, but after the latest film, my relief at their survival made me realize that sometimes what I wanted doesn't always lead to the best story. And so I wrote this: Scream 4 - when a core character needs to die:

Sometimes in order to make these stakes real, you've got to sacrifice a beloved character. The thinking is that if the audience sees you gun down an audience favorite, you've proven that affection for the characters alone won't save them and everyone is fair game. Supposedly, when Return of the Jedi was being developed, screenwriter Lawrence Kasden was a major proponent for killing off one of the core characters at some point in the story. He felt it would have been more powerful for the Rebel victory to come at some cost, and he was a major advocate for killing a character early in Act Three, so that the audience would worry that they were just the first of several.

And finally, check out my three-part interview with SCREAM 4 co-producer Carly Feingold, starting here.

In the wake of DON'T BREATHE's success, what can we learn about writing horror films?

Horror is a genre that, as a whole, doesn't get a lot of respect. That seems a little unfair when you consider that the misses in that genre probably aren't significantly greater than the misses in any genre. Maybe the disdain has to do with the fact that slasher films have frequently been less highbrow and less polished efforts, while the respectable successes always get gerrymandered into more highbrow categories. Thus, we get the notion that PSYCHO isn't a horror film, it's a "Hitchcockian thriller." SILENCE OF THE LAMBS isn't a horror film, it's a "psychological thriller."

The success of DON'T BREATHE this past weekend should be a reminder of all the virtues of this much maligned genre. Here, in the waning dog days of summer, a new film opened up with $26.1 million. According to Box Office Mojo, that's up 43.5% from the same weekend last year. That fact alone would probably be reason to celebrate, but it gets even better. It was made for less than $10 million, which means it has a FAR shorter road to travel before its in the black and starts making money. And guess what? All of this was achieved with any big name stars.

That's the thing about horror - it's perhaps the one genre left where it's understood the concept is king. The box office proves that audiences don't need that extra nudge to go see something that looks interesting to them. I've always felt that same philosophy was transferable to other genres, but there remains this conviction that a project needs "marketable" names to earn a green light. (And if any of you have ever dealt with foreign financing, you understand how insane it can often be to try to put together a cast that the money men deem worth their investment.)

When I was still working as a reader, horror was probably one of the more frequent genres I read. Sadly, it was probably also the genre where I detected the most laziness on the part of the writers. Too many were seemingly satisfied with being generic. Perhaps it's that old snobbery at work again, it's "just" horror, so why work to make it good, right? Since DON'T BREATHE is likely to provoke another wave of horror writers, I want to pontificate about what I think makes a great horror film.

I took a look at many of the horror releases of the past several years and when you see the profit margin on the low-budget entries, it might inspire you to see how strong your affinity is for that genre. Blumhouse's success with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY has been talked to death at this point. Of the six films in the series, five of them were made for less than $5 million, and until the penultimate release, THE MARKED ONES, worldwide gross was always well over $100 million. Then again, the final film cost $10 million to make and it only made $18 domestically. ($59 million was taken in overseas.)

When you look at the PA numbers, you can see the first dip happened with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4, which is probably not coincidentally the first film in the series where the story really seemed to be treading water. The lack of payoff likely discouraged attendance at the next entry, and by the time the final film rolled around most viewers who had cared were long gone.

Blumhouse's other franchise THE PURGE seems to be holding strong. The first film grossed $64.5 million domestically and each sequel's domestic take has risen. The films keep getting gradually more expensive, but both sequels have taken in over $100 million worldwide. I didn't like the original film at all, but something about this hook really seems to appeal to people.


The INSIDIOUS films are also a huge success with regard to the budget to box office ratio. The first one cost $1.5 million and earned $97 million, and it's the lowest grossing of the three.

Lesson: in a franchise, keep finding new angles within the framework of the concept. Making a horror film cheap isn't enough; having an inventive story and scares matters.

So what kind of horror story do you want to tell? My own interests lean more towards the Hitchcockian end of the spectrum. I like character-driven horror stories. For me, it's always more unsettling when the evil is relatable to something in the real world. This is part of the reason that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was so effective - getting lost in the woods felt like something any of us could have done and the lack of any on-screen visual effects meant that viewers weren't immediately triggered to feel, "Okay, that's clearly fake so I'm now very aware I'm watching a construct.

Great horror stories start with primal emotions and fears. LIGHTS OUT had a supernatural killer, but the film cleverly reveals that her power is that she is strong in darkness and is invisible in the light. She might not be able to hurt you in the light, but you can't stay out of the dark forever. And when that moment comes, she's ready to kill you. It's a smart primal fear to build off of because studies show that fear of darkness is an evolutionary trait, not a learned one. On a visceral, gut level, the average person is likely incapable of NOT being triggered by this film.

A NIGHTMARE OF ELM STREET uses a variation of this, giving the killer power in his victim's nightmares. Everyone has nightmares and surely there are few people who haven't woken from a terrifying dream at some point. Those emotions are what makes Freddy Krueger such an effective bad guy. It also makes for a strong thematic through-line to hang a feature on. This will have to be a story about the heroine confronting her worst fears and surviving.

You can't neglect theme in horror films. Like the primal fears, these will be the elements that resonate with your audience on more than just a superficial way. LIGHTS OUT plays as an allegory for depression, and perhaps specifically trying to deal with a loved one who suffers from it. Any idiot can write a monster leaping out of the darkness and get a momentary scare from the audience. The REAL scare you want is the kind that lingers for days, that becomes a dull buzz in the viewers head even long after the end credits have rolled. You'll find these factors present in both supernatural and non-supernatural films, so no matter the horror subgenre you're working in, you want to be thinking about these questions.

Lesson: Theme matters, so have one. (And it should probably be in your mind as you're breaking the story, not tacked on after everything else is figured out.)

Let's take a look at some recent horror films that were either standalones, or the first in their series:

Supernatural horror
Insidious - $97M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
Sinister - $77M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
Lights Out - $126M worldwide on a $4.9 million budget.
Ouija - $103.5M worldwide on a $5 million budget.
Unfriended - $64M worldwide on a $1 million budget.

For me, Unfriended is the one of the bunch I wish I wrote because it had the most inventive high concept premise (the entire film is told via laptop screen, through Skype calls and chatrooms.) It's a much smaller story than the others, but it understands how to use its limitations to reveal things about the characters. That said, Sinister's pitch-dark ending is the rare horror finale that really, deeply chilled me. It absolutely earns that visceral punch from everything building up to it.

Non-Supernatural Horror
The Purge - $89M worldwide on a $3 million budget.
The Gift - $58.9M worldwide on a $5 million budget.
The Visit - $98.5M worldwide on a $5 million budget.

THE PURGE goes for a less repeatable concept and casts itself in the near future, where the laws have established The Purge, a yearly free-for-all where all laws are suspended and anything goes, including murder. I didn't particularly like this film, nor did I find the premise credible at all. However, that same hook is what drew people into the theaters, wondering, "How will they pull this off?"

Lesson: Sometimes audiences will go for something wildly original even if it's implausible.

THE VISIT, however, is far better at drawing on real-world fears. There are themes of aging and dementia, even invoking our pity for the elder folks and seemingly kindly grandparents, who seem to be succumbing to senility. Seeing that visited upon adults can be very hard on children, though by this point, it's likely a part of most childhoods. There's a twist near the end that's inventive, but might be too clever for its own good. It's something of a knife to the gut, but it's also the point where the film trades any poignant identification for visceral thrills. To be honest, sometimes that can work. It's like when Spielberg was told that blowing up the shark in JAWS was a ludicrous twist. His reply was some version of: "If I've got them in my hand for two hours, they'll believe anything I show them in the last five minutes."

Lesson: Take an experience that one might find unsettling or uncomfortable and amp it up to its possible worst case scenario. The old folks' deterioration lingers far more than the twist the film pulls in its third act.

It's THE GIFT that casts its spell by being grounded from minute one. Simon and his wife Robyn meet Gorod, an old classmate of Simon's who is instantly a little TOO friendly. Simon remembers him as "Gordo the Weirdo," an awkward kid in high school. It's archetypical enough that every viewer will either identify with Gordo, or think of their own "weirdo" they knew in high school. Simon doesn't like Gordo's efforts at becoming a friend, but Simon's wife is more receptive. It's a neat writing trick that makes Robyn empathetic, gets the audience feeling a little bad for Gordo, and makes us wonder if Simon's just being protective, a jerk, or if he's right to be wary of Gordo.

Every twist in this movie comes from pure character, even as it escalates into a stalker thriller. Having written a stalker thriller, I learned that a key rule is to keep the stalker relate-able. In the case of my script, several people said they found themselves on the stalker's side and were hoping he could just explain himself in the end and make everything okay. I like a movie where it's possible to empathize with the bad guy because it usually means the writer has done a good job of making that person a fleshed-out character.

Lesson: Character is king. A good tip is to plot only the character stuff first on its own and see if it holds together without the scares goosing the excitement every 15 minutes.

With supernatural films, when you're using paranormal creatures to personify abstract ideas or fears, you can sometimes get away with a lighter touch on the character work. If your story takes place in the real world, everything MUST have depth to it. That's what makes Hannibal Lector so scary and fascinating at the same time. It's what draws us into Clarice Starling's crusade to capture Buffalo Bill and be taken seriously as a woman in a man's world. Those are Academy Award-winning roles because so much effort was made to make them more than just "the cop" and "the psychopath." If you're writing a movie like this, your standards must be higher

One of my favorite horror films of all time, SCREAM, would not work if there wasn't recognizable human emotion driving the killers' plan. You can argue that their motivations are taken to a severe extreme - people have killed for revenge and notoriety before, but few have probably gone after as many bystanders just to serve the narrative they plan on selling to the cops. Also, the film plays fair with all of its cheats. Every misdirection is clearly motivated and directed so that it makes sense in hindsight.

SCREAM's other strength is that its heroine is at least as interesting as her adversary. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET got this right in the first installment, then forgot it for several subsequent entries. Write the kind of role that could stay interesting across several films. The horror films that get a bad rap tend to have weak, barely developed characters.

Lesson: from a character standpoint, there's really no great distinction between writing a horror film and writing any other genre. Characters shouldn't be two-dimension just because they're eventually canon fodder for the slasher or supernatural threat.

This year has seen a lot of strong horror and thrillers, some low-budget, some not. 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, THE SHALLOWS, and THE INVITATION are three that spring to mind with one thing in common - they're all limited locations. Two of them are confined not just in setting, but in time span too. 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is the exception, spreading its story out over several months, but that also uses the claustrophobia well, like a pressure cooker for inter-character tension. The situations are more extreme, but the intensity can work as a trigger for the viewers own emotions.

Also, I'm a sucker for these sorts of locked-room or limited location thrillers. If you can come up with an original hook to confine a story to a few sets, you might find yourself with some buzz around your story.

Lesson: containing your locations doesn't just have to be a limitation of budget, but can be an asset in forcing tension to a heightened and extreme level. This can be useful with a more heightened premise that doesn't immediately conform to some of the relatability issues I discussed above.

This obviously isn't everything you need to know about writing horror, but give it some thought when working on your next horror script. Do it right and you'll have created the sort of film that critics will keep finding reasons to label as "elevated genre" or "thriller" or whatever "respectable" term they're using for horror that week.

My review of YOU'RE NEXT

This past weekend, I had a reaction to a film that was so counter to the pre-hype that I'm still struggling to understand how I saw the same movie as those who were singing its praises.  For about two years now, You're Next has been hailed as the next big thing in horror.  Critics have been mentioning it in the same breath as Scream, which still stands for me as one of the most ingenious horror-thriller screenplays of all time.

If you've followed my blog for a long time, you know I'm a fan of horror films, or at least good horror.  I also have read a lot of horror scripts over the years, many of them NOT so good.  (That's just the nature of the job. Most of what I've read en total is not very good.)  If you were to audit my Netflix history, you're likely to find an overrepresentation of horror-thrillers there, including a lot of movies that probably were panned upon initial release.  For some reason, I can enjoy doing an autopsy on a bad horror or thriller movie in a way I can't from a drama.

Most internet critics are huge horror guys and I guarantee they've had to sit through a far greater number of bad horror films than I have.  If anything, they should be more disgruntled than I am with all of the cliched elements that crop up all too frequently.  So when the flock says, "This is an amazing horror film," I feel safe trusting that as an informed opinion.

So that's why I don't get how people who've sat through the same bag of tricks time and again can come out of this movie not weary of many reused tropes.  My take on the film is this: It's a midnight movie.  It's not a game changer.  It's got a few inventive kills and the lead heroine is pretty badass.  I'll give the film credit for that - when Sharni Vinson's character really starts cutting loose and taking names about half-way through the film, it's pretty cool to see.

But for me, that's not enough to overcome some of the faults here. You're Next is just loaded with elements that kept ejecting me from the film.  The first act was slow, but when Vinson's character sprung to life, my faith in the film was renewed.  The last act or so really burned a lot of goodwill and over the last two days I've found the more I revisit it, the less impressed I am by it.  I don't even think it's a case of the film being built up so much that nothing could match the expectation.  For me, it's that it includes some elements that really don't work.

What might those be? I'm glad you asked.

Unrelated Kill to Kick off the Film - This one really irks me when I see it in screenplays.  It might be the biggest "bad script cliche" in the horror genre.  Typically, the writer presents a brutal scene with a minor character - in most cases, rarely mentioned again - being offed in gruesome fashion.  Bonus points if bare breasts can be involved somehow.  It's a scene that's often there solely to announce "Hey! This is a Horror film!"

I can almost understand the motivation for including this at the script level.  It's important to grab an exec's attention early, so you might as well include a scene that defines the genre of the film.  What I don't understand is that by the time the movie has been shot and marketed, the audience knows the kind of film they've bought a ticket for.  They're not ignorant of the fact it's a horror film, so why does that have to be spelled out in painstaking detail for them within the first three minutes?

However, a good writer should be able to find a way to find a way to make that scene serve a larger purpose.  In Scream, the opening kill is not only the inciting incident, but it goes a long way to defining the killer and his M.O.  Scream is a completely different movie without that opening.  Most (bad) horror scripts I read treat the inagural dismemberment as completely extraneous.

You're Next falls victim to this.  I can't figure out what larger purpose the opening kills serve.  You could say, "Well, the neighbors had to be killed so that anyone who escapes the house has nowhere to run."  While that's technically true, the creators made a choice to have those neighbors exist in the first place.  It would have been just as easy to set our lead character's home out in the middle of nowhere.  Another issue is that those dead bodies never become relevant.  There isn't a scene where the lead characters explore the first victims' house and get the sense something is up.  We - the audience - know that a killer's out there, but our characters remain blithely unaware of this fact until the first of their number meets the business end of an arrow.

(This also exposes the "You're Next" blood-written warning as a completely extraneous element.  Why do the killers even bother with that at all, let alone for two people who they're offing just as in inconvenience?)

I've heard the vague justification that other neighbors had to be killed in order to give credence to the killers' cover story that this was just a random spree killing.  That's really flimsy and it suggests an insanely high degree of sociopathy on the part of the killers.  Which brings me to...

The killers' motivations and the explanation of them - I've already dumped some spoilers, but an extra warning here - I'm going to be discussing everything about the ending.  Last chance to turn back.

For more than half the film, we know very little about the killers and why they are engaging in this home invasion and murder.  They're personality-less beings behind Halloween masks.  In real life, random, senseless spree killings happen, but in movies we almost always know some aspect of what provokes these killers.  Even if the motives border on pure insanity, it's common convention that the film will attempt at some point to answer the question "why?"

Smarter viewers will realize once the siege is underway that every character we've met is either already dead or among the prospective victims.  Once we're halfway through the film and have not found out anything about the killers, it's a good bet that the killers are going to be revealed as having some connection with at least one seemingly innocent victim.  Someone in that house is going to be revealed as a collaborator, if not a mastermind - and there's little shock when that happens.

Nine times out of ten that collaborator will turn out to be the person who seemingly dies, but who's death remains unconfirmed on-screen.  There's a point where Crispian, who happens to be the boyfriend of our protagonist Erin, decides to make a run for it despite the risks of being taken out by one of the killers.  After that, nothing is heard from him for a while so the characters assume he's dead.  Strange how we don't see him die, right?  Gee, I wonder who might pop up in the third act.

Scream was brilliant because it anticipated how the audience was going to scrutinize the suspects.  It pointed a giant neon figure at the first suspect, then seemingly exonerated him.  It introduced that element of doubt that kept the audience guessing. ("They wouldn't be that obvious, would they?  But maybe that's what they want us to think. Maybe he's a red herring. I'm not going to fall for that.  Or maybe that's what they want me to think!")  The genius of that kind of writing is that it engages the audience so that when the explanation comes, it's like having the final few pieces of a puzzle snap in place.

In contrast, You're Next mostly holds back those puzzle pieces and then dumps them out at once while assembling them.  Sibling Felix and his girlfriend Zee are revealed to be working with the killers stalking their family.  In the second-worst expositional dialogue I've seen in a while, Felix recaps the plan with one of the killers.  It's a scene that mostly exists just as an infodump for the audience.  The sequence lacks the tension necessary to make that reveal anything more than an explanation.

So Felix has concocted this plan to murder his parents and his siblings so that he can inherit the family fortune.  The family's wealth was established earlier, I'll give the film that much.  What's lacking is any sort of rational motivation for going THAT far to get it.  Why now?  And what sort of a person would be party to a violent slaughter that is intended to murder both parents, two siblings, and at least one of the sibling's significant others'?

Unsurprisingly, Crispian turns up alive and as the mastermind of the plan.  Remember how I said the earlier scene was the second-worst bit of exposition dialogue I've seen in a while?  This scene is the worst.  In defense of the writer, the acting and the staging of the scene do this infodump no favors either.  There's kind of an infodump at the end of Scream too, but the audience has been given just enough information that receiving these finally nuggets prompts an "A-ha! That's how it all fits!"  There's not enough foreshadowing to make You're Next's reveal work in the same way.

Here's what I like about Crispian's plan - the notion that Erin was meant to survive and be an unbiased witness to the carnage.  Her role as the Final Girl is essential to the plan working.  That's actually a pretty sly move, and it's effective how Erin's badassery in the situation throws a wrench into the whole scheme.  As much as I complain that there was a lot here I've seen before, that's one thing I don't really recall having been done.

I still can't buy what would possess two brothers to murder their whole family, even for an inheritance.  The film doesn't really hint at any existing tension among the relatives at all, certainly no more than the average family.  For a spree killing that extreme, that brutal, there HAS to be some personal element to it.  This is amplified when you consider TWO siblings had to collude on this plan.  Maybe I could buy one of them being batshit crazy and sociopathic, but two?

(Also, if Erin was meant to be the unbiased witness, what does that mean for Zee?  Was she supposed to be killed?  Is there any element of the plan that doesn't work if Erin was absent and Zee played the role of the Final Girl?  What is Erin's survival going to accomplish that Zee's wouldn't?  Both of them are dating the key surviving conspirators, so if the police suspect an inside job, wouldn't they assume Erin to be a part of it as well?)

You know what might have worked for me?  If the initial plan seemed to be all four siblings plotting the murder of their parents, only to have the plan involve the siblings turn on each other in succession.  Think of it like a long-form version of the bank robbery in The Dark Knight, where the participants are killed by their collaborators after fulfilling their roles.  (Giving the siblings a more concrete motivation for the slaughter would be a must in this situation.  It can't JUST be about the money.)  I might have also gone for a Ladykillers scenario where the collaborators were perpetually taken out by other means too.

For the life of me, I just can't wrap my brain around the motivation for these two to kill everyone else.  We're just not told enough about those relationships where that is comprehensible to me.

On a more minor note, the second act is marred by the character behaving rather stupidly.  There's a point where someone is left alone and murdered in an upstairs bedroom.  When the survivors find out, that should pretty well indicate that the killer is in the house, right?  You wouldn't know it from their behavior, where not even Erin reacts accordingly to the fear that a killer has gotten in.

Tonally it's all over the place.  There's nothing wrong with mixing humor and horror, but the shifts are done randomly at the whims of the director.  The result is that some scenes come off as camp when playing them straight was likely the intent.  The two elements I spent the most time on were the biggest issues for me, but these minor elements still add up.

Maybe this is just one of those films that really thrives at a midnight festival crowd.  It's not totally without merit, but it's not one I think I'm going to feel compelled to revisit again.

First ten pages - Horror

As I’ve said before, your first ten pages are critical. Agents, managers, readers and producers will often use the first ten pages to gauge how strong you are as a writer. If the first ten pages suck, you probably suck. Ten pages is more than enough space to convey tone, genre, themes and give the characters a good introduction.

I read a lot of bad horror scripts that start off the same – a disposable kill of a barely related supporting character. This makes a little bit of sense. In a horror film, you should establish the threat that’s out there. We need to know there’s a “shark in the water,” as it were.

But there’s more to a good horror opening than just killing a big-breasted babe in her underwear. Bad scripts start off with a throwaway kill, then introduce a new cast of characters and spend the next 25 pages just killing time until the act break. Worse, most of the time, the lead characters are so annoying I start rooting for the killer.

A good horror script doesn’t just kill a character in the first five or ten pages, it teases why this horror/thriller is different from all the others out there. Scream is brilliant because the opening establishes a unique M.O. for the killer – he calls up his victims on the phone and taunts them with movie trivia. Even before the Drew Barrymore character is killed, you know you’re reading something different.

The trick is that since the character introduced in the first scene is also usually dead by the end of that sequence, the audience needs a reason to stick around. That’s why you have to make your antagonist and his methods distinctive. In the case of a sequel, it helps to have a really inventive kill. Scream 2 doesn’t get lazy there either. While an audience watches a “Stab” movie, based on the events of the first Scream, Jada Pinkett Smith is killed in the audience and then bleeds to death standing in front of the screen. That’s a powerful image.

Tone. Genre. Craft. You don’t even need your lead characters to display those three elements. (But it doesn’t hurt.)

So if your story is about Bigfoots killing people out in the woods, make sure your opening is memorable. Don’t just have a generic kill, and don’t think that hyper-violence is the only way to get an audience’s attention. Show me the monster, and then show me why I should care what it does.

Interview with Scream 4 co-producer Carly Feingold - Part III: Making Scream 4

Part I - The path to being Wes Craven's Creative Exec
Part II - What does a Creative Executive do and what do they look for?

Then you went and did Scream 4, which, you mentioned you were a fan of Wes’s from a long time back, how surreal was it to be a part of the new Scream movie?

The first Scream [was released when] I was in high school and under 17. I snuck into the theatre – it was so packed, it was the second weekend – and I sat in the aisle and watched it. I think I went back the next weekend and my parents bought me a ticket. And as soon as it came out on VHS, I bought it and rewatched that movie, like, 100 times, you know, with my friends. Like on Saturday night after we’d come home from going out we’d watch Scream. So I was so thrilled to get a chance to work on the fourth one.

Scream was one of my favorite movies. I know all the lines, I’ve seen it 40, 50 times, I was following Wes on Twitter when he was doing trivia questions for signed posters and every time I was like “Oh, I hope it’s a Scream 1 trivia question because I know that forwards and backwards!” I’ve seen all of them but I know the first one cold.

I told my parents, “See, this will pay off, me watching this so many times!” Then on set, they’d need to know something about the first one and I knew it. And so much of the original crew was part of it, so to hear all of the stories from them first-hand about stuff that happened on the first three was just so exciting.

I’ve heard all of the stories about how you auditioned actors for this one with scenes from the first one. I imagine this script was top secret, like the interns were not allowed to read it.

No, I don’t even think some of the actors we cast got a full script. We’d only give them their pages. That was all they’d see. At the beginning as the Co-Producer, I was kind of the script master, so I watermarked every single one we sent to anyone. We never sent it to any agencies or managers. We’d only hand-deliver directly to the actors so it wasn’t even emailed to them. For casting, we pulled sides from the first Scream and we also had fake pages – scenes that [screenwriter] Kevin [Williamson] wrote that we’d already taken out of the script that we knew we weren’t going to use. So we’d have the final Billy/Stu kitchen scene [from the first film] for the kids to read and we gave it to each character. Everyone who came in to read, read that scene.

So they all came out of that like, “Oh, I’m TOTALLY the killer!”

We gave it to everyone, all the boys, all the girls.

But there’s a neat kind of head-fake in there, where you’ve got people who are sort of reminiscent of the original, but it’s just enough that I could see people in my audience going “Oh I so know where this is gonna go because this is like in the first one where…” And then they’d go, “Maybe they think I’d think that, so it’s totally not him.” Like with the boyfriend, I could sense them going, “Oh, he’s so the killer. He’s so obvious…. Wait, it’s so obvious he’s not. But that’s how they did it the first time…”

Yeah, exactly! (laughs)

I just thought it was neat the new movie used everyone’s expectations from the first film against it. And it was kinda cool to see the speculation about “If this is a new trilogy, they’re totally gonna kill off the old cast” – which I think was the genius of the new one. I even did an article about how everyone’s expecting Sidney will get killed to pass the torch, and to find out “No, the person we think is going to take over the franchise is actually the killer…”

It was really fun to work on. Even the house we were shooting in for that final sequence, the owners of the house obviously could come around [during shooting.] But occasionally they’d bring people and we’d have to be, “I’m sorry, we can’t let you in your house.”

They’re going to see something you don’t want them to see.

Yeah, it was very top secret. Michigan was wonderful to shoot in, but because film was so new to them, all the neighbors would get so excited and they’d set up lawn chairs and watch until four in the morning – even if we were inside, they’d just sit there and watch because it was so interesting to them.

But at the same time, people would always be taking pictures, so anytime [the actors] had any blood on them we’d throw a poncho over them and get them in the van, in an attempt to not get them photographed.

“They can’t see that you’ve got blood on the carotid!” Was there ever a point where you were like, we should just screw with them and send, like, Neve out there covered in blood?

I think there were times when we let things go so people would think [that certain characters would die.] There was definitely speculation that Gale Weathers was not going to survive, and we didn’t stop that speculation. I can’t remember if we did anything to really tease people one way or the other. Wes would tweet some things like a picture of a bloody couch, or blood on set, and people would be like “Who are they shooting with today? That person must get killed!”

And you were one of the few people who knew, so would you get “Carly, let’s go out for drinks tonight” and have them try to ply you for spoilers?

It’s funny because my fiancée was a fan of the Screams too and he never knew. I never told him. And the script would be at my house but he didn’t read it. My sister-in-law’s also a big fan and she was like, “Just tell me.”

“It’s Dewey. You can tell me.”

It was a fun secret to keep.

Were there alternate endings?

No. That’s it.

Because I know they did that on some of the others. The third one, I think.

The ending’s the ending. There was a “button scene” we shot, maybe it’ll be on the DVD. It’s just like an extra little joke at the end.

Can I ask about the Kevin Williamson/Ehren Kruger thing, how much of Kevin’s draft is in the final film?

Oh, it’s his script. He had to go back to Vampire Diaries at the end of May, which we all knew. So there were things that still needed to be tweaked and he couldn’t do it, but it’s totally his story, his characters, his script.

It feels like his. It feels more like a proper part III than Scream 3 does, actually.

Last question: If you could go back to your first day out here working on Cursed and give yourself advice, what would it be?

The best advice would be to “always anticipate.” Try and guess what whomever you’re working for is gonna need or want and have that already done. That’s probably the best thing any aspiring assistant looking to move up can do… of the assistants and interns I’ve had, the ones that can anticipate are the ones that I then recommend for jobs in the future or try to help find their next job. It definitely makes you stick out a little more.

It’s so important to do that and not just be the intern who shows up with the attitude of “I’m not getting paid so I’m not going to do anything.”

And have passion. Be interested and not be like “Right at six I’m going to leave.” When I was the office PA on Cursed, I would always try to end my day with a delivery to set so I could stay on set and hang out. And I would stay there because that was my opportunity to learn more, and I didn’t have to work or do anything. I could just observe.

Interview with SCREAM 4 co-producer Carly Feingold - Part I: The path to being Wes Craven's Creative Exec

If you've read my earlier interviews, you'll know that I've mostly interviewed writers and a few writer's assistants. This week's interview is a first in several ways. Carly Feingold was a co-producer on Scream 4, but she got her start like many in this business did, as a PA. In between, she climbed the ladder as Wes Craven's assistant and eventually became his creative executive. If you're among the readers who send me emails asking "How do I break in?" you might want to pay attention and take notes.

I know you went to The University of Texas at Austin – I stalked you on the Internet – were you studying film there?

Yes, I was a film production major. I finished early because I knew what I wanted to do and wanted to get to L.A. And while I was there I was part of a student film club. We organized this thing called Conference where each year we’d bring in professionals in the industry to speak to students about breaking in to the industry. We held workshops and a panel discussion. The year I was the conference director, I was able to get Wes Craven to be our headliner. We also had Wally Pfister there, Dody Dorn, and some more amazing people.

Wes and I just really hit it off that weekend and I kept in touch with him through email after that. When I moved to LA I called him up and just asked if I could pick his brain about what to do. It just so happened he was starting up on Cursed – for the second time – and he offered me a job as an office P.A. Then during that film, his assistant left and I became his assistant.

Wow. How’d you convince him to come to Austin in the first place? It seems like that was the root of all of this.

I was in college and I definitely didn’t have a subscription to Baseline! So I called a lot of people’s assistants… probably cold-called about 300 people in the industry. I picked my top three people that I wanted to come and sent them gift baskets. Wes was one of them. I was always a huge horror fan, and a fan of his, and just always loved the balance of humor and gore in his movies.

So I started a dialogue with his assistant and at the time, luckily, Wes wasn’t shooting anything. We only paid for speakers airfare, their accommodations and their transportation. They didn’t get paid to be there. We got about 12 speakers to come… so I think the gift basket really did it. For the other people I think it was just my persistence – calling every week until finally they were like “Okay, we’ll just tell this girl ‘yes!’”

It sounds like you did the right thing in making them feel special and important, and appealed to them personally. That’s a lesson right there, I guess. You never know who’s going to say yes when you try.

Exactly. It’s worth trying.

So you were an office P.A. for the whole run of Cursed?

I began on Cursed when it started up for the second time. Cursed was an interesting project. On the weekends I’d do Set PA work on music videos and commercials, just to get more on-set experience. During the very end of Cursed, Red Eye was starting and by then I was Wes’s assistant. We were still doing post on Cursed when we were shooting Red Eye.

Does a complete cut exist of that first version, or is it a case where they stopped so early in the process—

I never even saw the very first version. I think I’ve been told there was 8 minutes of the first version that was shot that ended up in the final movie. They recast parts and rewrote the script entirely. I think the problem was that when they started the first time, the script just wasn’t there yet.

So then Red Eye was the first time you were on the set of a feature?

Yes, as Wes’ assistant I was there every single day.

When you’re assisting a director, what’s the day-to-day job, if you can give us an idea?

I’m trying to remember what I did back then…. There’s a lot of making sure he had coffee… making copies of the shot list, making sure he had storyboards, and then just sitting next to him, really observing and being there if he needed anything.

Red Eye was unique because we had the same background actors for six weeks straight. They formed groups and had different holding rooms to retire to. I thought that was so interesting that I started doing a documentary on the background [actors]. I’d go around filming my own behind-the-scenes thing everyday, which was really fun. Then the editor’s assistant and I cut it and made a documentary on that.

How is that not on the DVD? That would be so cool!

I know, we interviewed Wes for it. We interviewed all these people and we gave it to [the DVD producers] and we don’t know why they didn’t put it on. It’s on YouTube.

Well, I’ll go look for it and maybe put a link in the article. That is really cool.



It was really fun and just gave me something else to do on set, because when you’re there 14 hours a day, you’re not busy every second of the day. I was reading scripts that were coming in for Wes but that wasn’t really my job at the time because I was hired at that point for the film and not for his company. Then after that I became an employee of his company.

Wes is such a great guy. He’s a wonderful person to work for and learn from. He used to be a professor, so I think he instinctually teaches. I’d ask a question when I didn’t understand something and he’d explain it to me without making me feel like an idiot. He is just so warm and generous.

So anyway, after you transitioned to Wes’s company as his assistant, were you reading scripts for him and the usual assistant stuff? Filtering through submissions and all of that?

And fan mail. He gets a lot of fan mail… some from prisons and all kinds of places.

Really?

A lot from Japan and Russia and all these other countries and you’re like “Really? Okay.”

And then how’d you transition up to being Creative Executive?

I think I was probably his assistant for about two and a half years before I became a CE there. At that time, other executives had left and the company had changed a bit. The other executive there – he would focus more on stuff for Wes to produce and I was trying to find stuff more for Wes to direct. Of course those things overlap a lot, but that was how we separated it. Most of the producing projects were the things he owned the rights to—

Like The Last House on the Left.

And The Hills Have Eyes, The Hills Have Eyes 2. Wes also did a great segment for Paris, je t'aime in there. So when we were on a press tour for Red Eye in Europe, we stopped in Paris to do location scouting and then came back a month later to shoot it. That was a great experience. It felt like film camp for professionals. All these [filmmakers] were there and would be like, “Hey do you want to come be in [my segment]” or “come help in mine.” That was one of my most fun film experiences.

Was there a point in there where you were like, “I didn’t even need to go to film school.”

Texas was great, but I probably learned more in one day on a feature set than I ever did in film school. When I was in high school though, I went to a wonderful film camp in Maine called, the International Film & Television Workshop. I went there for a two week camp, and I learned more in those two weeks than I learned in film school.

Were you making movies in film school?

Yes, but mostly I made shorts.

Same here.

I mean, I never made a feature. I started making my own movies when I was five years old – not that I was good at it, but you know, after school all my friends would come over to my house and we’d make a movie. That’s what we did all day. So that was what I always wanted to do and what I was working towards.

Part II - What does a Creative Executive do and what do they look for?
Part III - Making Scream 4

Scream 4 - When a core character needs to die

Note: The second half of this article contains many spoilers about who does and doesn't survive Scream 4, (as well as Serenity.) You have been warned.

When writing a thriller or an action movie, one of the most important things a writer can convey is the sense that the script might have the stones to do the unpredictable and actually knock off a main character or two before the end. I believe this is what Blake Snyder called, "the whiff of death."

One recent film that really conveyed this feeling was Taken. Part of the reason I got drawn into the script is there was just something about the tone that gave me the sense the filmmakers would have the balls to end the film on a dark note. It was the kind of film that could have ended with Liam Neeson failing, and his daughter winding up either dead or sold into sexual slavery. The brilliant thing about that is that once you convince the audience that the unpleasant is possible, the "happy ending" is so much more of a relief and release.

Sometimes in order to make these stakes real, you've got to sacrifice a beloved character. The thinking is that if the audience sees you gun down an audience favorite, you've proven that affection for the characters alone won't save them and everyone is fair game. Supposedly, when Return of the Jedi was being developed, screenwriter Lawrence Kasden was a major proponent for killing off one of the core characters at some point in the story. He felt it would have been more powerful for the Rebel victory to come at some cost, and he was a major advocate for killing a character early in Act Three, so that the audience would worry that they were just the first of several.

In most accounts, Lando is the character considered most expendable, and he would have been killed after detonating the Death Star and failing to escape the blast in time. Harrison Ford was also a major proponent of killing off Han Solo, feeling the character had nowhere to go, so he might as well die and give the whole story some resonance. As you know, all the heroes came out unscathed, and it's possible the film wouldn't have been as big a hit if Han bit the dust. Then again, if that had been part of the plan from the start, perhaps it would have helped set the tone of the film more in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. (Or it would have clashed like hell with the kid-friendly Ewoks, making the film even more uneven as a result.)

Serenity is a good example of this detail being executed properly. The film was spun off from the TV series Firefly and was hoped to be the first of several films with the TV cast. This made it all the more shocking when little more than halfway through the script, the Shepherd Book is killed. Even more traumatic to fans, less than half an hour later, beloved pilot Wash is swiftly killed after getting the ship on the ground mid-battle.

Two much-liked characters dead - and what does the film gain? Tension. Writer/director Joss Whedon used those deaths to set the stage for a climactic final battle where most of the survivors are in the middle of a pitched battle against the ravenous Reavers. Suddenly it doesn't seem unlikely that Whedon might go for an ending that has ALL of the Serenity crew go down in battle, and sure enough, as the fight progresses, there's a moment where it seems everyone's in mortal danger. Even when River ensures everyone else's safety and takes on the horde herself, we're still not sure that her noble sacrifice won't be a permanent one. There's only one thing we're sure of about the ending - anything can happen.

Fans still call for Whedon's head for killing Wash, but what that loss did for the climax is immeasurable. The alternative would have been a case like the original Star Trek, where very week you knew that if someone was going to die, it'd only be the nameless extra who beamed down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Kill a core character, and suddenly everyone feels like fair game.

Which brings me to Scream 4. Last week I said that I hoped that Neve Campbell's Sidney wouldn't be killed off over the course of the film, especially as part of a bid to hand off the franchise to younger characters. Even after seeing the film, I still stand by that thought. Sidney IS the franchise and the neatest trick of this latest sequel is that rather than diminishing that, it's a flat-out confirmation of that fact.

I might as well just say this flat-out - the film completely cleans house on the new teenage cast. None of the fresh-faced CW types make it out of this film alive, nor do any of the other new characters, save for Marley Shelton's Deputy Judy. The returning characters of Sidney, Gale Weathers and Dewey Riley all survive to the final fade-out. After seeing the film, I feel like there should have been one core-cast death ala Wash, as it would have lent more tension to the climax when Sidney seems VERY likely to meet her maker.

There's a scene about halfway through the film where Gale encounters the killer and gets stabbed a few times. Dewey is quickly on the scene too and has a brief tussle with the killer before he (or she) gets away. Despite a very brief attempt to convince us that Gale might die, it's pretty clear by the time we see her at the hospital that if they were going to kill her, they'd have done it already.

One of Scream 2's best decisions was killing off Randy. No one wanted to see Randy die - he was one of the fan favorites from the first film. He was part of the core group who returned from the original so there was the sense that he was a bit more invincible, and he CERTAINLY wasn't supposed to be killed mid-movie. When Randy was killed partway through the film, it lent the sense that an even bigger casualty was possible later.

In my humble opinion, that's what Scream 4 was missing, but I'm not naive enough to think that the option was never discussed. I've worked in development when these sorts of franchise films are being developed and there's always a point where the possibility of killing a core character is considered. Maybe the filmmakers still regretted killing off Randy and got gunshy about offing another "regular." Maybe the actor in question balked at coming back just to die, or maybe the studio worried about what would happen if one of the core three died. We can't know, but I'm sure it was on the table at some point.

The issue is made a little bigger by the fact that neither Gale nor Dewey have an especially integral role to the story, and there's very little they have to accomplish after their brush with Ghostface (save for their role in the climax.) Killing one of them might have energized the character arc of the other, and given that character a stronger emotional arc to play.

My preference probably would have been to use Gale's horrible wound as a red herring and then - while the audience is still reeling at the possibility that she might bleed to death - have the killer finish off Dewey. This helps in several ways. First, Dewey's survived severe stabbings in all of the other films. When he first goes down, the audience might expect another fakeout - giving his death that much more impact. Secondly, as the only "new" character to survive to the end is the Deputy, we've already got someone who can fill Dewey's role in the climax of the film. Finally, it means that Gale gets the story she's been trying to find, but it comes at the cost of her husband.

And of course, this means that when the killer stabs Sidney in the gut and it looks like we're seeing the series heroine bleed to death, the first thing in our minds is, "They killed Dewey, Gale's hanging on by a thread, so they're probably cleaning house and this really is it for Sidney."

(I will admit that I'm so used to trying to out-think the creators that when Sidney was stabbed, I didn't dismiss it as a fake out, for I assumed that NOT killing Gale earlier was to lull us into a false sense of security that our old friends would make it out alive. Basically, I didn't trust them not to reverse the reversal.)

In the end, I don't think this is a huge black mark against the film. In fact, given the way the Cox/Arquette relationship talk dominated some of the press for this film, actually killing off one of those two might have only lead to some uncomfortable speculation about behind-the-scenes tensions.

But I can't help but wonder - if Dewey died, how would that have affected the reaction in the theater when Sidney takes what appears to be a mortal wound? I bet it would have led to even bigger cheers when she tells the killer: "First rule of remakes - Don't fuck with the original."

The opening of Scream 4 - expectations and misdirection

NOTE: Heavy spoilers for the first 15 minutes of Scream 4 follow, plus some vague spoilers for the rest of the film.

Since I've devoted several posts to the Scream franchise in the past, one as recently as last week, I wasn't surprised when I got a few Tweets and emails asking for my take on the latest entry in the series, Scream 4. Not wanting to ruin the surprises of the film, I went mostly radio-silent about it on Twitter, except to say that I enjoyed the film. I didn't think it was the equal of the first one, but let's be honest - topping the first one would have been almost impossible. I was hoping it would be better than Scream 3, and on that order it delivered, coming in more or less even with Scream 2.

I've harped a lot on the importance of a strong opening in a film. The best specs I read usually have an opening sequence that defines the film and its world in an incredibly effective way. The worst tend to just lazily drop us into the world and trot the main characters out one by one. The original Scream had an unforgettable opening that just oozed tension. Once you watched it, the only way you weren't going to stick around for the rest was if you scared easily. In both Scream sequels, the opening kills have often been some of the better executed sequences in the film, so the new movie had it's work cut out for it.

The opening scene initially left me disappointed, until I got what the creators were going for. We open with two teens - played by Pretty Little Liars' Lucy Hale and 90210's Shenae Grimes - who pretty much embody everything the original Scream characters weren't. One is dumb enough to keep talking to a Facebook stalker, and another one when faced with a threatening phone call from the killer, first hangs up, and then later passes the phone to her friend. (Grimes by the way, makes ZERO effort to distinguish this character from her 90210 role, right down to the same acting ticks.) Moments later, these girls are dumb enough to actually open the front door when it might as well be flashing "KILLER ON THE OTHER SIDE."

So it's no shock when these two are swiftly dispatched, and just as I'm thinking "Wow, that was oddly tensionless for a Scream opening," the title card for Stab 5 comes up and I realize the joke is on me. It puts a clever spin on what we just saw. After all, in a world where Stab 5 is supposed to be of questionable quality, Shenae Grimes WOULD be its Drew Barrymore. Consider that a point for the casting people. (This is probably the best place to note that Scream 4 continues the series tradition of strong casting, not just for the genre, but for a feature in general.)

Enter Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell as the viewers of the aforementioned Stab sequel, cue the usual meta speech about how horror films are trapped in their old habits and aren't surprising anymore. (The meta perhaps is carried out a beat longer than necessary, but again, I'm betting that's intentional) Then, surprise the hell out of the audience by having Bell stab Paquin and ask, "Are you surprised?" As I'm thinking, "Are they really tipping their hand on one of the killers this early?"cue the title card for Stab 6.

Inspired. Rather than go for the scares, Williamson and Craven take more of a chance and go for the in-jokes, making it clear that whenever someone criticizes the Stab films, we should read that as "every bad horror film of the last ten years." Just as I'm thinking, "Wait... how can Stab 5 be happening inside Stab 6 and still be a coherent franchise" the film literally verbalizes my thoughts through the character played by Britt Robertson, who's watching Stab 6 with a character played by Aimee Teegarden.

That instilled me with a lot of faith that the film was in the hands of people with a mindset like mine, and who were going to ask the questions that a smart viewer would ask. Scream was the godfather of staying one step ahead of the audience and then using that lead to confuse the hell out of them. After Robertson and Teegarden do some due diligence on exposition, they're dispatched rather quickly. As a scary scene, it's easily the least impressive of the four films, likely because the creators realized that it would be impossible building up any sort of tension immediately after the two false openings. Overall, I think the opening works.

From there we move on to a scene that introduces Sidney's young cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), and her friends Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Olivia (Marielle Jaffe.) Given that Olivia looks a good five years older than the girls and seems to have stepped right out of a modeling catalog, you'd do well to wager that she's going to be the "early kill who ends up in a state of undress." The girls chatter about Jill's creepy ex-boyfriend bothering them all, and any fan of this series knows that means he's being set-up to be either the killer or a red herring that'll be called into service throughout the film. Not bad for a guy who hasn't even showed up yet. Then we go to school and meet even more new teens, in a way that doesn't precisely mirror the original Scream even as it evokes the spirit of those scenes. It doesn't feel like Scream so much as Scream: The Next Generation.

And that is probably the slickest bit of misdirection here. By going straight into the new cast, complete with proto-Sidney in the form of Jill, we're made to subliminally see this film as a passing of the torch. The opening seems to be saying, "Here's the new cast - enjoy the cameos by your old friends, but you'll be seeing a lot of these young faces in the inevitable sequel."

After all, that's how these franchises work. Slasher films are largely a teen-driven affair, and when the actors outgrow their parts, they're replaced by new ingenues. Actually, that's true in other genres. One day you're playing Danny in Grease, the next you're playing the DJ at the dance. Basically, by bringing in so much fresh blood, we seem to be primed for the old-timers to drop one-by-one.

And yet, once again, Williamson and Craven find a way to use our expectations against us. If you saw the film this weekend, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

Scream's Sidney Prescott: Horror's greatest heroine

I'm anticipating this week's release of Scream 4 with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. I've said before that the original Scream is not only my favorite horror movie, it's one of my all-time favorite movies, period. In fact, it's pretty much the movie that made me a horror fan. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and you have to remember that that was a period where a proliferation of inferior sequels really tarnished the genre. The endless Friday the 13ths might have made a decent amount of money, but they and their kind really contributed to the perception that horror films were mindless, bloody and exploitative affairs. There wasn't much respect for that genre in general.

So as I was becoming "movie aware" right in the middle of this trend, Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers held no appeal for me. Slice and dice affairs weren't my kind of movie, and it's not as if the latter chapters in those franchises and their imitators offered much counterarguement to the notion that those films were trash. I remember the hype over Freddy's death, even though I had zero interest in the film, though I do recall being intrigued when I heard the following sequel took place in "the real world" and actually commented on the horror genre. I still wasn't intrigued enough to go see it though.

And then came Scream - which I initially dismissed as more trash. (Yes, even at sixteen I was a movie snob.) I don't think I even saw it until a few months after its release and I was instantly a fan because it was such a smart film. It was a horror movie for people who were smarter than the genre. If you haven't read it yet, check out my post on what you can learn from the original Scream. Scream 2 continued that tradition, and even though I was largely disappointed by Scream 3, it was still better than many of the imitators. So it's a given that I'm going to be there for the opening of Scream 4.

However, my trepidation comes from the concern that this time they might actually kill Sidney (Neve Cambpell.) I've spoken about this fear before, so I don't want to repeat myself too much. Instead, I want to talk about the impact of Sidney Prescott.

Back in college, I ran what was basically a half-hour teen drama that was intended to air on our school's fledgling cable network. (The network itself ended up crashing and burning, but that's beside the point.) I quickly decided that one of my central characters had to be an assertive female character. As I developed the character, like most writers, I found myself using a shorthand to describe her, citing other influences.

Remember, this is 2000, the height of the WB and after many, many assertive, strong, and/or ass-kicking heroines had invaded pop culture. So did I compare my lead to Buffy Summers? Joey Potter? Jen Lindley? Felicity? Angela Chase? Those were the leading teen heroines of that day, but they weren't my point of reference.

No. Without hesitation I picked Sidney Prescott, who was not only horror's greatest heroine, but possibly one of the strongest modern teen females ever created. She's perhaps the best-realized version of the girl-next-door turned heroine. When she takes on the killer, she doesn't have the advantage of super powers, cool weapons or military training (ala Buffy, Ripley, or Sydney Bristow.) She's also got her shit together a lot better than some of the WB female leads of the day, who tended towards mopeyness, martyrdom, and wallowing in their own baggage.

Yes, like most heroines, she's got some issues from a dead parent, but unlike say Lana Lang or Joey Potter, those issues don't DEFINE her. The wound is there, but it's not stopping her from interacting normally with her friends and it doesn't feel like she uses every conversation as an excuse to pick at that scab. She has friends, she's well-adjusted and she's generally likable. You get the sense you could carry on a conversation with young Sidney, and not once get the urge to smack her, or feel like she's making it all about herself.

I'm aware she's a descendant of Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy and Halloween's Laurie, but I feel she is a successor that improves on the original. They're both icons in their own right, but Sidney is a better-realized character in my opinion.

(So yeah, I'll cop to the fact that when I was in high school, I totally would have gone for the Sidney Prescott type. It was my bad luck we really didn't have any in my class. However, I honestly think that every female lead I've written owes a lot to the impression Sidney Prescott made on my teenage brain.)

Better still, when the time comes, she actually uses her head. She's blindsided by the reveal of the killer, but the plot doesn't turn her into an idiot to pull this off. She makes questionable choices, but not stupid ones and it never feels like the script makes her brain-dead for the sake of advancing the plot. She's smart, she's likable, and she's emotionally mature, which is sadly kind of rare in teen characters, male and female.

But the real reason I think Sidney is horror's strongest heroine is who she becomes in the sequel. After all she's been through, she's still strong enough to not let it get her down. Her mother's been murdered, her friends have been killed and she herself narrowly escaped that same fate. That'd be enough trauma to turn anyone into a basket case, but no, she goes off to college, she has a social life, and she's almost jaded about the prank phone calls she gets.

Sidney is no victim. And she's got her shit together. It's part of her past, and ONLY when it's clear that someone is actively stalking her does she really let it get to her and mess with her mind.

This is partially why I'm less of a fan of Scream 3. Not only is Sidney's participation greatly reduced, but the character herself is shown to be living in seclusion, shutting herself off from society and people in general. I get that some of that was done to accommodate the fact that Neve Campbell only could work some 20 days on the film, but it's frustrating to see that in between parts 2 and 3, the killer essentially beat Sidney and drove her into hiding. Even though the "real" Sidney seems to reassert herself by the end of the film, I had a hard time recognizing the Sidney we rediscover early on as the same girl from the first two films.

In Scream 4, I hope to see more of the character who was the emotional core of the first two films. I'm sure the younger characters will dominate in terms of screentime, but even if Sidney's role is as limited as, say, Leonard Nimoy's in J.J. Abram's Star Trek, as long as the character is true to herself, I'll be happy.

And yes, it would be a shame if the film featured Sidney's death, but if the character has to die, I hope it's handled in a way that honors the character, and is a worthy death in some way. Kevin Williamson, Wes Craven and Neve Campbell have created one of the genres best characters, and it would be unfortunate to see that tarnished by an undignified exit. However, I have faith that these players wouldn't have teamed up again after so long if they didn't feel as strongly about honoring the character as I do.

Why I like Wes Craven's characters and what I fear from Scream 4

In my bid to have some holiday-specific content on the blog this week, I started writing a post on what it takes to write a good slasher movie. A few paragraphs in, I was bothered by the feeling that I'd written something like this before. Turns out, I had, in a piece last year called "Lessons from Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's Scream."

I briefly considered pulling out my DVD of Scream 2 and writing a piece on what makes a good horror sequel. And while I do enjoy Scream 2, it's clearly the anomaly when it comes to sequels. In the horror genre, I'd be hard-pressed to think of many good sequels. (Does Aliens count? Maybe Wes Craven's New Nightmare?)

And here's my problem - Horror sequels frequently turn into mindless rehashes of their predecessors because often the only continuing character is the killer - the antagonist. Most of time, there are few survivors in a horror film and when someone does live into the next sequel, they're disposed of rather quickly. After all, there are only so many times that the same girl can get menaced by the same villain before it starts to feel hackneyed.

Scream somehow manages to make this work by keeping the victim of Sydney as the protagonist while constantly shifting the person under the mask of the killer. Sure, the motive every time is the revenge against Sydney (and the ultimate revenge motive in Scream 3 is a little far-fetched and convoluted. I really can't argue with that.), and she's the axis that the film series turns on. (Again, Scream 3 messes with this somewhat by giving Neve Campbell less screen time, but she's still the prime target.)

And in thinking about this, I realize it's something I really like about Wes Craven's work: he really cares about character. From Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street to Rachel McAdams' character in Red Eye, Craven tries to make his protagonists - his victims - truly fleshed-out characters. It's screenwriting 101 - you can't have a compelling story without a strongly-defined lead. Most of the time, I find that Craven takes a more intellectual approach to his characters and story structure. Listening to his director commentaries backs up that impression.

(I confess I've not been able to see My Soul to Take yet, so I'm unable to incorporate Mr. Craven's latest work into my hypothesis. Also, I don't mean to diminish the contributions of the many screenwriters he's worked with, particularly Scream's Kevin Williamson. However, when you notice particular themes in a director's work across several writers, it's hard not to take that element as something the director is committed to.)

This is where so many horror specs I read fail. I see a lot of scripts that are clearly trying to be franchises, to the point where all they've done is work out the gimmick that will drive the series. So much time is invested in giving the killer a cool look, or a gruesome gimmick to his kills. Where they fail is in coming up with a strong dramatic arc to sustain the story. Too often the cast of characters is treated as little more than a future body count: a dead asshole jock here, a slutty girl with nice breasts there.

And sure, there are plenty of bad B-movies made every year. There's a long list of produced slashers that never dug deep.

But the horror thrillers that endure? The ones that future filmmakers grow up wanting to emulate? Psycho, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream - they all have an important element in common: strong character arcs for their protagonists. Your hero isn't the guy wielding the blade and drawing blood. Never forget that.

This is why I'm both anticipating and dreading Scream 4 next year. The nostalgist in me loves the idea of getting "the old gang" back together. The massive cast that seems to include every young actor and actress in Hollywood also should make for fun viewing. I'm guessing this is going to make for a high body count, and with so many stars, the "death order" will be less predictable. (Most of the time, the order of the deaths roughly corresponds to the reverse order of the billing in the credits.)

My big fear is that in order to "pass the torch" to younger generation, Sydney will be killed. That makes a lot of dramatic sense... and yet it doesn't. The series is Sydney's story. If she dies, she loses. Yet, if she lives, how can the story possibly continue? How many times can new madmen come after her? How can a genre driven by the teenage audience be sustained with an "older" protagonist like Neve Campbell, as opposed to the more teen-appropriate Emma Roberts?

(Confession: Emma's a cute girl, no doubt... but Neve was my crush in 1996 and she still gets my vote today.)

The place to kill Sydney might well have been in Scream 3. Coming in Scream 4, it might tarnish the construction of the first trilogy. A new story might have been launched at the expense of the old one.

So perhaps Scream 4 will give us the most unexpected ending of all - where ALL the teen protagonists who seem to be groomed as Campbell's replacements are killed and the next chapter of Sydney's life is launched. Dare I hope that Craven's history of commitment to character suggests this, particularly when those characters are developed under Mr. Williamson's pen?

I'm not saying that a good story can't be told with Sydney's death, but it could be a challenge to pull this off in a satisfying manner. Sydney's death could be an appropriate tragedy, but the challenge beyond that would be convincing the audience that a larger story will still continue beyond Sydney's death.

Is it possible? I don't know, but come this April, I'll be there opening day to find out. (Or more likely, I'll be there at midnight the evening before opening day.)

Lessons from Wes Craven & Kevin Williamson's Scream

When it comes to slasher films, I only have a few favorites. I've seem dozens of them and I don't boycott the genre by any means (I save that venom for torture porn and Saw ripoffs. If you like that shit, don't try to defend it. I don't want to hear it.), but there are many, many more bad slasher films than good ones. Among the best, is 1996's Scream, written by Kevin Williamson, and directed by horror legend Wes Craven - whose A Nightmare on Elm Street is also on my "favorite slasher movies" list.

Scream pretty much single-handedly revived the teen horror genres after years when it was well out of favor. For the first time in a long time, horror was smart, scary and funny again. If it wasn't for that resurgence, you have to wonder what sort of movies the teen stars of the WB and CW would have ended up making during their hiatuses. I've read a lot of bad horror scripts that were trying to be like Scream, but few of them seem to have really deconstructed the film and made note of what really made it work. Here's what Scream really gets right:

A killer opening sequence: Granted, Craven's directing has a lot to do with this, and having a director that skilled isn't something a writer can always count on. Putting that aside, there's a lot here that's on target. A lot of horror scripts start with a three or four page kill scene that doesn't do much beyond setting up a victim and killing them off immediately. It's usually treated as a disposable scene that's just there to grab the audience and then give the writer license to spend the following 25-30 pages slowly killing time until the killer jumps out of the shadows and guts the next lowest billed character (who nine times out of ten will be the female character whom the script introduces at least a full two lines after her breasts.)

Scream's opening is a bit longer than that, and it doesn't just give us a victim and a killer. It has them interact via phone and we see the killer's MO established with clever dialogue. He asks his victims to name their favorite scary movie, setting an important tone for the killer and the movie in general - this is a movie about people who have actually seen scary movies and know all the conventions and cliches. It's a way of announcing to the audience "This isn't a film that's going to just cynically recycle the cliches - it's gonna subvert them!" (Now, whether this sort of meta humor is always a good thing is probably a topic for another column.)

As many, many reviews have been written about Scream's self-aware tone, I won't waste much more time on it. My point is that the opening sequence isn't a throwaway kill. It's crucial to the fabric of the movie beyond being a scene that shows a killer is out there.

Sharp dialogue - Here's where you probably either love Williamson or hate him. I'm firmly in the former category. The characters - especially Jamie Kennedy's Randy - are constantly referencing movies, both in terms of the horror setting and in other scenes. (In one example, a character laments that his relationship with his girlfriend is like a horror movie "edited for television" - all the good parts have come out. Every character has a distinct voice. A Randy line doesn't sound like a Billy line. Nor does a Sydney line sound like a Tatum line. I've suffered through many a horror script where Jack's lines seemed interchangeable with Ryan's, or even Jennifer's. I've also read a lot of scripts that try to imitate the Williamson (or Joss Whedon) penchant for pop culture references and you know what? Every character talks exactly the same. It's not enough to make your characters witty - they need to be distinctively witty.

(Now, sometimes the actors will make this harder for you. I remember loving Scream's dialogue, but feeling that some of Williamson's dialogue in early Dawson's Creek sounded rather clunky. Revisiting Scream post-Dawson's actually left me feeling that there wasn't THAT much difference in the dialogue, stylistically. If you listen to some of the lines in Scream, you can clearly pick up on cadences and rhythms that turn up on the TV series. So why does Dawson's sound more forced? To be blunt, the actors seem a lot less comfortable with it - especially early on. Neve Campbell and company took Williamson's words and were able to deliver them organically. In contrast, James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes appeared to have memorized their dialogue phonetically at times.)

Great use of red herrings - Scream is a solid example of using the audiences expectations against them. From the moment it's clear that this is a whodunit, the audience is naturally going to try to outguess the film. Thus, Williamson is smart enough to not just thrown in red herrings, but use those as red herrings for further red herrings.

For example, boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) is virtually the only suspect the film points a finger at early on. Thus Mr. Smarter-Than-Everyone-Else Moviegoer is going to say, "They want me to think he's the killer, but since it's still the first half-hour of the movie, he's clearly not going to turn out to be the killer. It would be too obvious... unless that's what they want me to think. So, when Billy is arrested and then seemingly cleared, it can't be taken at face value... unless they want us to think that he's still the most likely suspect so that we won't notice it's someone else...."

That was basically my internal monologue during the entire film the first time I saw it, "It's so obvious that it can't be true, unless they're counting on me NOT to suspect the most obvious suspect!"

And don't even get me started on the debate about which glass had the iocane powder....

Anyway, I kept vacillating about the killer's identity - still casting a suspicious eye towards Billy right up until the point he got gutted in the bedroom. At that point, the audience's reaction is probably something along the lines of "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!" as they try to outguess the movie again. Even later, when Billy turned up still alive, I remember not suspecting him. After all, we saw him and the killer at the same time, right? Which leads to...

Using the audience's knowledge of the genre against them - I'm sure there are obscure counterexamples, but I can't recall a slasher film with two killers working together. Williamson knew that the audience would assume that there's only one killer to be unmasked, and because the script doesn't tip it's hand on this until the very end, certain characters seem to be accounted for at the same time the killer is shown. We're used to getting one psycho with one convoluted motivation - so most viewers were likely totally blindsided when the ending hinged on two killers working in concert with each other.

I'm not even sure if this counts as misdirection so much as it is knowing how the audience is going to interpret the unspoken clues. The best mysteries hide their solutions in plain sight. They rely not so much on deception as the audience putting themselves and their logic in a box. In this case, the "box" is "There is only one killer." We were never told this - the movie just gambled we'd assume it. Thus, Craven and Williamson haven't deceived us so much as WE have deceived ourselves. That's a lot more subtle than simply cheating by lying to the audience about what they were shown, and that's the sort of twist that keeps people talking. (See also The Sixth Sense.) A weak mystery plays out exactly how you'd expect, in the precise manner you'd expect.

So if you have never seen Scream, slip it into your movie marathons this weekend. You won't be disappointed. Yeah, I kinda blew the ending for you, but there's more than enough to keep you entertained even with that.

Plus after that, you can watch Scream 2 completely fresh. (Scream 3 isn't as strong a script, in part because Williamson is replaced by Ehren Kruger. I'd love to know what Williamson's original plan for the trilogy closer was.)