The Scream Trilogy (1996–2000) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 41

The slasher was supposed to be dead by 1996. The sequels had gotten silly, the masks had gotten tired, and the whole genre felt like it was running on fumes. Then a screenwriter named Kevin Williamson sat down, reportedly wrote a script called Scary Movie in about three days, and turned out to have written the one idea the genre hadn't tried: a killer and a cast of victims who had all seen the same movies you had.

That's the engine of the Scream trilogy, and it's why I wanted all three films in this countdown instead of just one. Each film takes a different swing at the same question, what happens when the audience knows the rules, and the answers get more interesting as the series goes on.

The first film, directed by Wes Craven, is the one everybody remembers for the phone call. Drew Barrymore, who was originally attached to play the lead and asked to switch to the smaller role of Casey Becker, anchors an opening scene that works as a promise to the audience: nobody is safe, not even the biggest name on the poster. The rest of the film is a whodunit dressed in slasher clothing, with Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott, Courteney Cox's tabloid-hungry Gale Weathers, David Arquette's goofy-hearted Dewey, and Jamie Kennedy's Randy, the video store clerk who recites the "rules" at a house party like a gospel nobody can follow. That mask, by the way, wasn't designed for the film. It was an existing novelty-company mask that a crew member reportedly spotted while location scouting, and Craven fought to keep the original instead of a legally altered copy. It was made on roughly $15 million, survived a rough ride with the MPAA, which reportedly demanded cuts to get an R, and earned about $173 million worldwide.

Scream 2 arrived about a year later, in December 1997, and it's a fascinating sequel because it's about sequels. The opening at a Stab premiere, a movie-within-the-movie based on the first film's murders, is a smart, queasy joke about audiences turning real tragedy into entertainment. Sidney is in college now, trying to build a life, which gives the film real emotional weight alongside the body count. The production was a scramble. The full script reportedly leaked online during development, and Williamson rewrote much of the ending while shooting continued, with the final pages handed to the actors only at the last minute. You can feel that adrenaline in the pacing. It cost about $24 million and earned about $172 million.

Scream 3, released in February 2000, is the odd one, and I think it's the most misunderstood. It moves the story to Hollywood, where the Stab sequel is shooting on a studio lot, and Craven turns the whole thing into a ghost story about fame and a movie industry that chews up the people who feed it. Williamson had only enough time to write an outline, so Ehren Kruger wrote the script from his notes. It was shot in the shadow of the Columbine tragedy, and the studio reportedly grew nervous about on-screen violence, which helps explain its lighter, stranger tone. Campbell was only available for about 20 days of filming, so the film leans heavily on Cox and Arquette, while Parker Posey and a Carrie Fisher cameo add some welcome mischief. Critics were split on it, and Rotten Tomatoes sits at 45 percent, but the film has been reevaluated in recent years for how pointedly it looks at power and abuse in the movie business.

What holds the three together is Sidney. By the end of the first film she's a survivor, and by the third she's someone who has decided how she wants to live with what happened to her, rather than letting a masked stranger decide for her. Neve Campbell has talked about that arc, from a "tormented, traumatized, insecure young woman" to someone who feels "overwhelmingly empowered and strong." That's a better story than any of the kills. It's why people keep coming back to the franchise, and why the sequels that followed keep orbiting her.

Craven is all over this countdown, if you've been following along. He's the same filmmaker who gave us the raw, uncomfortable edge of The Last House on the Left and the dream logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream feels like the work of someone who finally got to look back at his own genre and laugh, with a knife in his hand.

If that wink-and-a-scream attitude is your kind of horror, the Nightmare Logic line is built from similar stuff: monochrome, high-contrast, distorted typography with a grin that's a little too wide. It's for people who know the rules and enjoy watching them break.

So here's my question for you. Randy's rules say the survivors are the ones who understand the game, but Sidney lasts because she changes how she plays it. Which do you think the trilogy is really about, knowing the rules or deciding when to break them?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.