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• Scream (1996) — "The Opening Scene"

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The opening scene of Wes Craven’s brilliant 1996 film Scream is one of the primary reasons why horror films made a strong comeback in the late 1990s. Writer Kevin Williamson knew that Scream’s audience had become tired with typical horror conventions, and aimed to send expectations flying out the window with his hip, inventive, audience-loving script. Ads for Scream placed a heavy emphasis on the presence of Drew Barrymore, and audiences went into the picture expecting to see the blonde actress for more than ten minutes. Well, as is now common film knowledge, Barrymore’s Casey Becker bites the dust within the first scene of Scream, in a particularly grisly manner: she is viciously toyed with, stabbed, gutted, and hung from a tree, only to be discovered all-the-more-tragically by her parents.

The scene starts off innocently enough, with Casey staying in to watch a scary movie. Suddenly, the phone rings. An ominous voice starts quizzing Barrymore’s increasingly nervous character, asking numerous horror trivia questions (some of which include winks at director Wes Craven’s career). When the voice on the phone starts to get more and more threatening, the questions switch from friendly conversation to life-and-death scenarios. The rest is motion picture history.

Not since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho had the expectations of a horror audience been so explosively shattered, and Scream knew this upon its release in 1996. Wes Craven’s horror comedy is a movie that loves its audience, and in a genre that relies on clichés, Scream dared to do something different by breaking the mold of typical slasher films at the most crucial of times. By truly shocking audiences, Scream became a sleeper hit in December of 1996, grossing over $100 million in the United States alone. A year later, Scream 2 opened, and proved to be even more clever and scary than the original. The same cannot be said for Scream 3, which relied heavily on conventions that the first two films so brilliantly made fun of. Scream 4 is currently shooting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a release date of April 2011 already set. Kevin Williamson is writing yet again, with Wes Craven directing and stars Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox Arquette all coming back. Here’s hoping that the old crew can surprise and reward horror lovers once again.