The honest trailer for Wes Craven's classic meta slasher Scream jokes about spoiler culture by having a spoiler warning even though it's from 1996. Starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, and Rose McGowan, Scream was a rare self-referencing horror film that succeeded both as a parody of the genre and as a genuinely terrifying slasher movie. Craven's brilliant take-down of the type of movie he made famous included a teaser poster featuring Drew Barrymore, even though her character gets killed off in the opening scene.
From there on out, Craven's smart horror attempted to subvert audience expectations at every turn. From including a horror movie-obsessed character who works at a video store and lists the rules of horror movies while they're playing out on screen, to the climactic reveal that the two killers were inspired to do so by other horror movies, it upended the horror genre. Unfortunately, a stream of sequels has steadily eroded its reputation, though the original is still rightly considered an innovative classic of the genre. Hopefully, the upcoming Scream 5 will restore the Scream franchise to its former glory, with new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett having proven in 2019's Ready or Not that they can deftly balance humor with genuine scares.
Now, Craven's horror great gets the Honest Trailer treatment from YouTube channel Screen Junkies. Starting the video off with its best joke, featuring a fake rating that warns the video contains spoilers for the 24-year-old movie, the trailer then goes on to pay tribute to Craven's bold re-imagining of the slasher movie. However, there's also space for criticism, with the video pointing out the lack of plan behind the killers, and the fact that despite starting as a criticism of horror movies with endless sequels, the Scream franchise has become the very thing it parodied. You can watch the video below:
The video's assessment of the original is spot-on. While the movie itself is a classic, it arguably killed off the slasher genre while reinventing it. The death of the 80s slasher movie lead to a host of sub-par Scream copycat franchises, like the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise, that took everything smart about Scream and threw it out in favor of cliches. Scream's success also led to the increasingly poor taste Scary Movie franchise, which stole Scream's original title but none of its intelligence or smart humor.
Regardless, there's no doubting the quality of the first Scream, which managed to build its characters well, had an intriguing central premise, and took that premise to an interesting and logical, if unexpected at the time, conclusion. And the movie treated its stars well, given that the central trio is still willing to appear in the franchise 24 years later. Hopefully, their return after almost a decade since Scream 4 is more successful than the last three movies have been.
Source: Screen Junkies