So it’s slowly approaching that time of year. The awful horrible time full of fear and decadence; Christmas. But before that, we have to get Halloween out the way. Continuing our tradition that started two years ago with A Nightmare On Elm Street, then repeated last year with Child’s Play, I’ll be watching a horror movie series every day until Halloween and live-blogging my thoughts, some nonsensical, some serious, but mostly kinda weird. I struggled with what to pick at first, I was going to do Saw but then realised since there’s a new one out at the cinema now the blogs will immediately become outdated unless I live blog at the cinema, like an asshole. So, which HALLOWEEN film will I be blogging about in the lead up to HALLOWEEN? Yes, that’s right, Scream! Yup, we’re craving Craven. I kind of dig this film, was originally going to be called Scary Movie, hence the phrase “Scary movie” being used a lot.

Budget: $14million

Box Office: $173million.

• A guy phones someone and is annoyed she wants to not talk to a stranger, he ends up brutally killing her, somewhere on the internet there are people defending him and blaming feminism.
• “Halloween, you know the one where the guy wears a white mask and stalks babysitters?” Spoilers!
• What would have happened if she never answered the phone? That’s why I think I’d survive in this universe, I let unknown numbers go to voicemail or just reject them. “Hi, is this Lee? Yeah, I planned to torment you over the phone and then kill you brutally, let me know when you get this. It’s Pete, my address is….”
• Drew Barrymore runs around locking all the doors. Which means they were all unlocked, she deserves what happens.
• “I’m going to phone the police” “they’d never get there in time”, so she just doesn’t try. Lazy! Although they actually forgot to unplug the phone for this scene, so she actually did phone the police and cry down the line to them.
• “I want to see what your insides look like”, there are magazines for that kind of thing, and videos online.
• “his name wouldn’t be Steve would it? “how do you know his name”, he’s a white American football player at high school, odds are he was going to be called either Steve or Chad, so he had a 50% chance of being right.
• “I want to play a game”, and thus Ghostface invents Saw about 10 years before Saw was ever Saw.
• “Mrs Vorhees was the killer in the first one, Jason didn’t appear until the sequel” And I don’t think he got his mask until the third one, it’s weird how long that series took to set up its iconography, people love Jason and the mask, yet the best-regarded film in the series is the one which has none of those things.
• “There are two doors to this house”, really? She locked like 5 of them earlier.
• She stops running when she sees a car in the distance, as opposed to running towards it, all so the killer can jump her.
• The scene where she is first stabbed was going to be cut by MPAA for being too graphic, it was allowed to stay because the director told them that was the only cut they had of that. They lied.
• Drew Barrymore sees her parents yet is too feeble to properly scream for them so they walk straight past her. That’s one hell of a good scene.
• Her mum seems traumatised by the possibility of something happening to her daughter, I want a horror movie to focus more on that. How does a community react to a large group of teenagers die? Do they get resentful to the ones left behind? Do they even stay there or do they all move?
• She got hung from tree really quickly. Killers may be sociopaths, but they’re efficient.
• If this film was made today, this is where the opening credits would be, as it is the opening credits are at the opening for some reason.
• “kids are doing drugs here, and some are involved in the occult”, I thought that was supposed to be good for you? Aid digestion etc.
• Oh wait, that’s Yakult. Never mind.
• There’s a lot of people wearing really ugly jumpers in this film. Is that what the kids are wearing these days? Ugly sweaters? If that’s the case then hey, I’m fashionable.
• Why exactly are they interviewing everybody at the school? Just because they went to school doesn’t mean everyone at school is a suspect, by that logic you might as well ask everybody on the street, or if they worked everybody there. It’s just because the other main characters are at school, isn’t it?
• “officers are baffled by the lack of clues”, really? Did they not think to check phone records?
• Students sit around making jokes about the murdered students, I like to think I wouldn’t be that awful, then I remembered who I am.
• “the question isn’t Who Am I, it’s Where Am I?”, no, that’s a completely different question.
• “I’m at your front porch” so she walks towards the porch and opens the door just to prove he’s lying, as opposed to, you know, just calling him a prick and hanging up the phone.
• Sidney tries to prove she can’t be seen by picking her nose, ewwwww.
• Ghostface tries to kill her but gets defeated and is unable to. Let’s talk about this for a moment, it turns out the killers are going to cover up their murders by saying Sidney’s dad was driven insane and killed Sidney and himself to cover it up. Then why did they kill everybody else? Surely Sidney’s dad would have had an alibi for the first murder?
• Killer left costume behind, the police don’t use this to check anything like hair etc to try and establish identity. Although the police can’t anyway because they handle it without gloves because they’re idiots.
• The character of Dewey was originally supposed to be the classic good looking and athletic cop. Once they cast David Arquette they rewrote him as more of a bumbling idiot, that’s gotta be disheartening for him to hear. It’s like how Jack Davenport was told he was too good looking to play the lead in Hitchhikers Guide, I wonder how Martin Freeman felt about that.
• “looks like you fingered the wrong guy, again” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve also done that.
• It’s at least four.
• “don’t worry, it’s school you’ll be safe here”. He has no idea school is like does he?
• “what was it like to almost be killed?” Considering that interviewer is Linda Blair from The Exorcist, you think she’d know.
• “Cotton’s in jail, they’re going to gas him”, ah, the old “dutch oven” method of execution.
• Newsreader has an “OMG this person on death row might be innocent, I could save him” epiphany. Surely she already thought that considering she wrote a book saying he was innocent and shouldn’t be on death row?
• “understand what? That I have a girlfriend who would rather think I’m a psychopathic killer than touch me?” Most people I’ve dated have been the same, although to be fair, I am a psychopathic killer, but they didn’t know that.
• “I was attacked and nearly filleted last night”, but you don’t have a penis.
• oh, filleted, not fellated, my bad. Easy mistake.
• Fun fact, the cloak the killer wears was going to be white but was changed because it looked too much like KKK robes. I suppose even killers don’t want to be associated with those racist dickbags.
• Fuck nazi’s. I can’t believe we’re at a point in history where that’s a somewhat controversial opinion yet it seems like it is. People got annoyed at the new Wolfenstein game because you could kill nazi’s in it as if that wasn’t the entire point of the games to begin with.
• On that note, students get caught running through the halls whilst dressed a serial killer that’s on the lose, they object to being in trouble saying it was just a joke. At the time this made them seem like heartless assholes, now they just seem like ordinary twitter people, albeit ones who Donald Trump and Daily Heil will insult for being SJW’s.
• Sidney walks into a toilet stall then 5 seconds later a conversation continues that was obviously happening before she was there, that delay is weird.
• “homicide is a much healthier, therapeutic expression”, that’s what I’ve been telling people.
• Why was the killer in the toilets? What was his plan? How did he know she’d need toilets, more specifically, those toilets? How did he even know it was her?
• “you can literally feel the fear on this campus”, that would only be LITERALLY true if you were walking around wading through people’s fear-piss.
• “now that her boyfriend tried to mutilate her, think she’ll go out with me?”. Oh he’s one of “those” guys isn’t he?
• “It’s the Millenium, motives are incidental”, no it’s not, it’s 1996. I don’t say that 2017 is the same as the year in three years time, that’s why I have no idea what’s going to happen in three years time, I don’t have 2020 vision.
• Nick Cave Red Right Hand. Nothing interesting to say here, just really love this song.
• “If they make a movie about you who’d play you?” Is that a normal question to ask someone during a killing spree?
• Joseph Whipp as the sheriff there, he obviously did such a great job as a police officer on Elm Street he got promoted.
• Ben Affleck and Jason Lee were both considered for this film, all that’s needed is Jason Mewes and it would be a Kevin Smith movie.
• Jamie Lee Curtis described as “The Scream Queen” there. About 20 years before she’d play a lead character in Scream Queens (which you should all watch, by the way, is superb)
• “is that you Randy?” She then proceeds to have a slightly flirtatious dialogue with who she thinks is Randy after he’s been creepy. This is the second time in the film that’s happened, weird thing for him to be known for.
• Shouldn’t the garage door have a safety feature to stop shit like this happening? Side note, how did nobody find her body throughout the rest of the party if that’s the only place there was beer? Was everybody tee-total for the rest of the night? Or did they see her body and think “oh, classic forgettable blonde character, she does this every time she gets drunk”. All jokes aside….then I’d have nothing to say, this death is fucking stupid.
• Randy watches Sidney and Billy go up to a bedroom then says “I’m going to go check on him” like that’s not a creepy thing to do.
• “this isn’t a movie”, wooo, if an actual screenwriter can use that line, then it’s perfectly okay that I did.
• “why can’t I live in a Meg Ryan movie, or a really good porno” If I did this last year I’d have said it’s terrible that those two thoughts follow each other, since then I’ve had someone say “we’re releasing doves to commemorate my fiance’s death, me and you should have sex in those bushes”, so instead I’m going to hate the fact that this film reminded me of that. Also, don’t a lot of people still die in Meg Ryan movies? Just of slow depressing diseases? How is that better?
• “I want to see Jamie Lee’s breasts, when do we get to see them?”, so this is what people did before the internet.
• Watching Halloween and someone criticises it by saying “The blood is all wrong”, in a scene which contains no blood.
• “what do I have to do to prove to you I’m not a killer?” Is that a normal question to ask in a relationship?
• “oh my god”, a simple “look out” or “killer behind you” would have been more useful. But no, stay quiet whilst a knife-wielding maniac approaches your boyfriend from behind (not like that)
• We later find out this death was faked and that’s fake blood on Billy’s chest. One question; how? Like how did they get him covered in fake blood that quickly? It wasn’t a blood pack taped to his shirt/skin as he’d just had sex so Sidney would have noticed (trust me, girls notice if you have fake blood duct-taped to your chest, and it really kills the mood during sexytimes, almost as much as referring to it as sexytimes)
• Those bedroom doors lock from the outside, is that normal? Or is that something which hostage-takers have to pay extra for?
• “watch out Jamie, behind you,” says Jamie Kennedy as the killer is behind him. Lol.
• Kenny the cameraman checks outside when he suspects the killers aren’t in the house. Kenny is an idiot.
• Oh my god, they killed Kenny! You bastard.
• Sidney gets attacked whilst sitting in the front seat of a police car, don’t they normally have mesh wire up to stop this exact thing from happening?
• Stu and Randy both claim each other are the killer and Sidney shuts the door on both of them. That’s kind of dickish, as she basically condemned the other one to death.
• Hang on, wait a minute, didn’t Sidney already see film footage of the killer standing behind Randy earlier? So she should know he’s not a killer.
• What a surprise, the two creepy characters turn out to be the killers. Actually, that is quite a good twist, as one of them was so obviously evil that it seemed like misdirection, and the idea of having two killers was revolutionary at the time. Although how did Stu get in if the doors were locked?
• Killers decide to monologue instead of killing the main character. Have they never seen a Bond movie?
• Killers discuss a motive, saying Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates never had motives and we knew nothing about their past, ironically both have had prequels made about them, which renders that scene redundant.
• They plan to frame Sidney’s dad and make it look like he killed everyone then shot himself, won’t the police be able to tell he didn’t shoot himself by the angle of the shot, fingerprints, and the fact his hands and legs are duct-taped together? And where did they pull him from? Has he been tied together in a cupboard all night? Whilst there was a party going on? So where he was somewhere no drunken teenagers would go during a house party to fuck, does such a room exist?
• Billy and Stu stab themselves to make themselves look more like victims. 1) Actually a terrific scene, full of tension and drama. 2) Why didn’t they wait until everyone was dead before doing that?
• Wild Gail Weathers appears, does nobody lock a door in this damn house? Do you want burglars? Because that’s how you get burglars.
• Wild Gail Weathers used gun. But it’s not very effective.
• Billy throws the phone and hits Stu in the head causing the response “you hit me with the phone you dick!”. Both of which were improvised, well one was, the “hitting another person with a phone” bit was just a fuck up.
• Why did Sidney put on the Ghostface costume? A sense of drama? Odd fact, Skeet Ulrich had heart surgery when he was younger, so he now has metal wiring there which causes INTENSE pain when it’s touched. Another odd fact; when his character was stabbed with an umbrella the actor who did it couldn’t see properly, so hit him in the worst place possible, as such that scream you hear from him is genuine.
• It’s now morning, and the ambulance is finally taking the stabbed people away. What took them so long? “there was a massive killing spree at a house last night, and we’ve got the guys who have been terrorising this town all week, should we go?” “I don’t know, I literally just sat down, I’ll just make a cup of tea, watch my shows, then we can go”
• “like the plot of some scary movie. it all began with a scream”, hey that’s the title(s) of the movie!

So that’s that done. Pretty good film but not a good series starter, mainly because it doesn’t really set up the sequels that much so it seems like it was written as a standalone. On the plus side this means it doesn’t do any obvious sequel hooks which are annoying as fuck. It’s weird how much this changed horror movies. It was supposed to be the film that killed slashers as it made them look too silly, it just made them evolve, this was followed by lots of poor imitators and horror stayed self-aware and teenage until torture porn and found footage became popular. It’s odd as both of those seem to have died a few years ago with the decline in popularity of the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises, yet they haven’t really been replaced yet by anything. There’s been a lot of attempts to kick-start a horror trend but none have really stuck, personally I think over the next few years horror is going to get a lot more political and heavy-handed in delivering messages. I don’t really care, as long as they make good films.