I don’t remember how many horror movies I’d seen when Scream first came out in theaters, but I’d probably watched at least Kubrick’s The Shining and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula – the first two horror movies I recall seeing – in the tiny t.v. room of my family’s old house on East Gore Road before settling down in the theater to see Wes Craven’s post-modern masterpiece. The original Scream came out in 1996, when I was twelve years old. I don’t remember the “build-up” to the film the way I remember the anticipation preceding, say, the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project (and my concomitant let-down when I was less than scared by the film), but I definitely remember the general reaction to the shockingly grotesque introduction that the film provides.
One of my favorite quotes from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (which is one of my all-time favorite books) goes like this: “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.” Coelho’s words are often wise – this quote is just one example – but they’re probably meant, in this case, to encapsulate human relationships. No matter: they can easily be applied to art, cinema, music, etc. One can offer much in-depth critical analysis of a piece of art, but in the end we “only have to let that soft animal of [our] body love what it loves” as Mary Oliver says in her poem, “Wild Geese.” Criticism, commentary, and speculation are all ancillary relatives of that fundamentally satisfying, sometimes calm and refreshing, sometimes frenzied and excited feeling that wells up inside a person when she finds what she loves – in literature or the fine arts, cinema or music, or, to be genre specific….in horror.
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