Director: Wes Craven
Cast: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Skeet Ulrich
Have I Seen it Before: I mean, I was alive and in my adolescence for at least part of the 90s, so I don’t really see how I would get to this point without having seen it, but I digress.
Did I Like It: It’s hard to look at the film twenty-five years since without dwelling at least for a moment on just how much this film has wrought, and it for which it will receive no opportunity to do so. It injected new life into the horror genre, but that renaissance (including this film’s sequels) wore its welcome all too quickly. Thirteen Ghosts (2001), anyone? Dare I say, Halloween H20 (1998), a film that doubled back on the references in this film. Scientists hoped such a paradox/ouroboros would cause the rift this film created to collapse in on itself and set the timeline right.
What? Oh, also it provided the perfect model for the Harvey Weinstein money maker and allowed that guy to continue on unscrutinized for two decades. So, maybe this wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to the movies.
But I’ll be damned if much of the movie still works after all of this time, despite what I can’t help think is an overwhelming amount of tinkering on the part of the Weinsteins. The vagaries of 90s movies couldn’t snuff out Craven’s capabilities entirely. The references are one thing, and their appeal becomes thinner and thinner with each passing year, but it’s the final act of the film that I think keeps people coming back to the film after all this time. The tension, the shifting realization as to who the murder actually is, and that tape delay on the footage makes this the kind of film Hitchcock might have made during the era. The last reel of this film works so well, I very nearly forget that there is no way Halloween (1978) was playing the entire time during these killings without interruption until Matthew Lillard bites it.
Nearly.