Scream 3

Year 2000 Traits:

• Exclusively alt-metal soundtrack (including Godsmack, Incubus, System of a Down and Stained), produced by Creed
• Jay and Silent Bob cameo
• Patrick Warburton referred to in review as a “rising action star”
• Absence of original franchise writer to develop ABC’s Wonderland
• Liev Schreiber

When the first Scream was released in 1996, it was called it an ironic nod to the slasher film (the New York Times even defined it as “a parody”). But at the time mainstream horror was nearly extinct, relegated to direct-to-video sequels and TNT’s “Monstervision” for almost a decade. Scream itself would go on to single-handedly revive the genre, but most of the teenagers who flocked to see the film (myself included) were too young to have experienced the slasher genre it was poking fun at. We were watching it for genuine thrills, only marginally aware of its tongue-in-cheek references. Scream was taken so seriously, in fact, it was able to support a parody of its own, Scary Movie.

Scream 3, on the other hand, is undeniably a comedy-horror, with the “comedy” first in the hyphenate. Set in Hollywood during the production of “Stab 3,” a sequel-within-a-sequel about the “Woodsboro Murders” of the first Scream, the movie reunites Sydney (Neve Campbell), reporter Gail Weathers (Courteney Cox) and retired lawman Dewey (David Arquette) as they alternately pursue and evade the knife-wielding Ghostface, who’s been hunting the cast and crew of Stab 3, including a hilarious Parker Posey (the master of self-absorbed airheads) and Patrick Warburton, two comic actors who help make Scream 3 essentially a better parody of Scream 1 than Scary Movie was.

Scream 3 received mixed reviews, but re-watching it I’m convinced it’s the best installment of the series – largely due to the laughs. It hits the “sweet spot” of horror and comedy, only occasionally going to goofy with the laughs (as when Jay and Silent Bob make an awkward cameo), or too heavy-handed with the drama. This sweet spot is typically reached somewhere in the middle of horror series’ run (where, with the announcement of a fourth installment, Scream 3 will soon rest), between originals that take themselves too seriously and later chapters that don’t take themselves seriously enough. This is perhaps best represented by the Evil Dead Trilogy, part 2 of which strikes a nice balance between the genuine horror of the first and the Three Stooges-like antics of the third:

The six original Nightmare on Elm Street films illustrate this as well. The first was terrifying, but devoid of any sense of humor. Conversely, by the sixth film (Freddy’s Dead) the series had devolved into pure slapstick in which the  murders were more about putting Kreuger in a new costume (low point: The Bastard Son of 1,000 Maniacs wearing blue tights and shouting, “It’s Superfreddy!”). It was the mid-point of the franchise, Dream Warriors, that struck a nice balance between actual terror and self-knowing silliness. It has the series’ most famous Freddy pre-kill one-liners, and the attacks themselves are equal parts disturbing and hysterical, as when a topless nurse (in the greatest abstinence metaphor of the ’80s) uses her demonic tongue to restrain a victim to a bed that opens up into a portal to Hell.

What stands out 10 years later?

IT’S ABOUT THE DANGERS OF FILE-SHARING

Today, the online file-sharing controversy has settled into the digital equivalent of the Cold War, but 10 years ago it felt white-hot, with Nelly on one side of the Iron Curtain and his adolescent fans, armed with dial-up modems, on the other. Everyone in my upstate-New York High School, it seemed in 2000, knew a kid who knew a kid who had received a threatening letter from A&M Records.

Scream 3, released amidst the breakout of this war (a mere two months before Metallica filed its infamous lawsuit against Napster in April of 2000), not only references the Internet-versus-entertainment-industry debate, it makes the issue a key plot point in the film (perhaps the first and only film to do so). As the movie’s body count piles up, the stars of Stab 3 discover they’re being disposed in the order in which they die in the film-within-a-film’s script. The problem is, the Stab producers wrote three different endings to their sequel. “Something ‘bout keeping the ending off the Internet,” explains a steely Det. Kincaid (a pre-Grey’s Anatomy Patrick Dempsey) in that turn-of-the-century, These darn computers! tone. Without a clear ending, more pretty young stars die, and we the Internet, claims Scream 3, are to blame.

IT FEATURES THE ROLE OF DAVID ARQUETTE’S CAREER (SO FAR)

All the self-aware jokes about horror film cliches are what made the Scream franchise famous, but the movies’ most reliable comic presence is Dwight “Dewey” Riley, the bumbling former Woodsboro sheriff played by David Arquette. It’s been a decade since Arquette has played Dewey (he’s set to reprise the role in Scream 4) and he had a lengthy resume before he was cast in the first Scream, yet Dewey stands arguably as the actor’s best role to date. Granted, the mere fact that the character survived the first film is a kind of genre joke: What if one of those dimwitted anonymous cops you see in thrillers lived, and what if we got to know him? But by Scream 3 Dewey has outgrown his status as a parody of movie cops and become the most enjoyable part of the franchise next to Ghostface himself (or herself). Scream 3’s funniest exchange occurs when Dewey is confronted by Dempsy’s Det. Kincaid:

DEWEY: Is that a threat, detective?
KINCAID: When it’s a threat, you’ll know it.
DEWEY: (confused, then) Was that a threat?

Another Dewey joke, not quite as funny but still perfectly played by Arquette, inadvertently highlights the very specific technological era in which Scream 3 was made (perhaps even better than its Internet piracy theme). As Gail Weathers, in a tense scene, tries to figure out how the killer has discovered Sydney’s whereabouts, she turns to Dewey:

GAIL: Do you have her number in your memory?
Dewey scrunches his forehead, thinking.
GAIL: Phone memory.
DEWEY: Oh.

What dates this joke so specifically is that it both relied on the audience’s familiarity with the concept of a specific technology, as well as their acceptance that some people might not know what that technology was. If the joke had been made five years earlier, audiences themselves would not have assumed Weathers meant phone memory. If it had been made five years later, on the other hand, they would have scoffed at the idea that anyone, even a detective as absent-minded as Dewey and even as a joke, would legitimately not get her meaning. Only in 2000 (shortly after our own national embarrassment over defunct Y2K paranoia) could  America simultaneously laugh at and understand technological ignorance.