1996 Scream

THE ONE THAT MADE HORROR SELF-AWARE

- Alex Godfrey, Chris Hewitt, James Dyerala, Nick De Semlyen, Ian Nathan, Al Horner, Liz Beardsworth

Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, recalls how seeing Wes Craven’s meta murder-thon for the first time blew his mind.

WHEN WES CRAVEN decided to — spoiler! — murder Drew Barrymore in the opening ten minutes of Scream, it was just the start of a series of smart and very considered wrongfooting that would play on the common traits of the slasher movies of the past 30 years (from Black Christmas, through Halloween and Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street). But ultimately Scream would draw in a much wider audience than the films it had satirized, leading to a mega-meta franchise and changing the landscape of scary movies from that point on.

That point was 1996. I was in my second year of a Theatre Design Degree at Wimbledon School of Art, majoring in Special Effects For The Stage & Screen. Effectively I was training to become a monster maker, prosthetic FX artist, sculptor, and possibly even a horror filmmaker. A little bit like Jamie Kennedy’s character Randy from the film, I was the geeky guy that knew everything about horror movies.

However, I heard about Scream from someone else, a girl on my course who wasn’t a horror fan, and this kind of threw me. I can only liken the feeling to when one of your favorite lesser-known bands scores a hit single; suddenly everybody loves them and you get a little bit sad or maybe even angry because you know that from that day on, the world will be different. Of course, in Scream’s case this was ultimately for the absolute better, but as I walked to the cinema the following night, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to experience.