Scream:  more than just a murder, baby

The horror movie genre that was known and loved is dead and all the heroes have gone: Jason's ninth trip took him to hell, the fourth time Leatherface was seen he was in drag and the sixth Halloween plot involves men in black. Even the devil we knew and loved is no longer. Instead of the bass-voiced big red symbol of evil in Legend,  we get men in Armani suits who look like Pat Riley.

Wes Craven's latest offering, Scream,  tries to bring back a time long gone, when small sleepy towns were the norm. A small piece of Americana, a place where all the cops eat donuts, the boys look like Johnny Depp, the girls wear clothes tighter than their skin, everyone's  parents are "out of town for a couple of days," the journalists all want to know how it feels "to be almost brutally butchered" and  The Fonz is your principal.

And it keeps getting better. Craven first takes 25 minutes to remind everyone of two things: despite Vampire In Brooklyn, he can still make a horror movie that will scare the pants off of you in multitudes of ways, second, Drew Barrymore really can act, even better then her performance in E.T.

He doesn't settle for simply stopping there, afterwards he proceeds to show that he can also, in a nearly collegiate fashion, spend the next hour and a half deconstructing the horror genre and then piece it all back together like some bodysuit from Silence of the Lambs. 

The tributes to other films and his own previous work are numerous, from Barrymore's character telling the killer that the first Nightmare on Elm Street  was good but the rest sucked, to the name "Keri" being carved into a bathroom stall, to a teen obsessed with Ricki Lake wearing a yellow and blue version of the cheerleader outfit from Heathers. 

But the stand-out part of the movie is the constant blurring of the lines between what is reality and what is created. Any time real life pokes its ugly little head into one of the characters lives they immediately compare it to some aspect of film. So the kids get to approach their reality through the shield of movies, and the more the movies are used to placate reality the more their reality becomes those movies. This mixes the ideas of the characters' real world and their "movie freaked" mindsets, and leads to the psycho-behind-the-mask being all the more realistic, spouting such lines as, "Movies don't create psychopaths, movies make psychopaths more creative!" and, after being called "crazy" by our heroine, rebuts "actually, we prefer the term psychotic."

The characters go from being simply templates of dippy high-schoolers to being symbols of a group of people, living in a time which has gone so completely nutsoid that the only way to function and survive is absorb the insanity and work from within it. The authority figures, as always, will eventually bite it in the world where teens reign supreme. So when Principal Himbry (Winkler) goes off on two boys, and their entire "Havoc inducing, thieving, whoring generation," you've got a pretty good idea of how long he is going to keep breathing.

This basic idea which makes the film so special is that it tries to show that being insane is good. Fighting fire with fire is the only way out and if you can't put on the mask and be the hunter instead of the hunted then you run the risk of hanging from a tree with your insides laying on the ground in a steaming pile. While this may or may not be good rules for life, they definately provide a new lens to look at horror films in.

The biggest question is will a film which prides itself on satiring and poking holes in its own genre be able to hold its dignity and also still cash in on itself while going for the ever-dangerous sequel? "Cause these days, baby, you gotta have a sequel!!"

Also, don't worry if you missed the scant week long showing. Seeing as how this is Oberlin, anything showing at the Apollo will be in the video stores in a scant couple of weeks. Scream  may not scare you to the point where you don't go to bed, but you may be a bit more wary with wrong phone numbers or movie buffs from now on.

Nachie Castro is Managing Editor and doesn't need a motive 'cause it's the millennium.