Dec 15: Isabelle Robinson, Three Scenes from an Essay about Scream

Three Scenes from an Essay about Scream 

Isabelle Robinson

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The opening scene of Wes Craven’s Scream—among the most famous in the history of cinema—is less than thirteen minutes long. I’ve watched this scene far too many times for its length, recently brought to my attention, to surprise me, but it did: I could have sworn it was longer. In less than thirteen minutes, an entirely new type of slasher was invented; a franchise was born; and I am moved to tears, without fail, every time.
     This last clause is new. I never used to cry at movies—much less horror movies—but now I do, and I keep forgetting this about myself. It still feels unlike me, even though it isn’t. Not long ago, I watched Steel Magnolias and cried so hard my eyes began to swell. I come undone, like clockwork, at the end of My Neighbor Totoro. I’ve been crying at the movies for years now.
     But somehow, I didn’t anticipate tears this past Halloween. I should have known better—my pre-movie prologue, delivered to a handful of friends, took a turn for the mortifyingly earnest. I needed them to understand that this movie was special, that it had something important to say about violence and grief, but the words clumped like sand in my mouth. “I know it’s just a movie,” I said, sheepishly, knowing that it wasn’t.
     The first scene starts in a familiar place. A pretty girl is home alone at night, in a beautiful house with big windows. The camera follows her as she goes about her evening, unaware that she’s being watched through the glass. But very quickly, that familiarity starts to fade, because this killer—like the director—has devised his own formula: a meta murderer, who knows all the tropes of horror to avoid and embrace. He lures you in with a phone call and a question: “What’s your favorite scary movie?”
     The girl is named Casey Becker, although we don’t know that yet. She’s nameless for most of her first and only scene. This is another one of Craven’s tricks: the pretty girl, and seeming protagonist—played by Drew Barrymore en route to her prime—doesn’t make it to the thirteenth minute.
     We learn Casey’s name from her boyfriend, Steve, who screams it under the duct tape covering his mouth. The killer has captured and bound him to a chair on the patio: a bargaining chip in the game in which Casey is ensnared. “It’s an easy category,” the deep voice on the phone purrs, “movie trivia.” If she answers correctly, Steve lives; if she doesn’t, he dies. It’s a false pretense, of course—Steve isn’t going to make it, no matter how well Casey plays—but she’s fooled by a trick question, anyway, and Steve is no more.
     Casey is still clutching the phone when the killer reveals himself, a tall figure in a ghostly mask and black cloak. Its eyes are downturned and sad, with a long mouth and chin; it resembles the famous painting by Edvard Munch. In the chaos that comes next, Casey seems to forget that she has a phone, or she doesn’t think to use it. But she never lets go, holding it close, like a frightened child might cling to a favorite blanket.
     She holds on all throughout the chase, and even as she’s stabbed and thrown to the ground. Sobbing, she scrambles to her feet, runs to her parents at the door—they just got home—but they don’t hear her. The knife punctured her lung, and she can only croak. I feel my arms start to tingle, the hairs standing up.
     Mr. and Mrs. Becker return to a house in disarray—shattered glass, and a tin of popcorn in flames on the stove—and their only daughter, their baby, nowhere to be found. Her mother screams her name, picks up the landline to call 911, but she hesitates to dial. She can hear Casey gasping on the other end.
     Mrs. Becker cradles the receiver gently, as if holding a newborn. “Casey, baby?”
     Casey can hear her, too. As she’s dragged across the front lawn, barely conscious, she begs for her mother, and I fall apart.  

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The first time I rewatched Scream after the shooting, a few years had passed. I was in college by then, and I had acclimated fairly well, just like Sidney Prescott—the series’s true protagonist—in the sequel. She gets a few good months at college before the killings start again, like a bad dream you can’t shake. But in the original, she’s seventeen, a senior in high school. Her bedroom is full of stuffed animals and floral decor. She looks young, so much younger than she seemed when I watched the movie as a child. I had never been older than her before.

     These days, I try not to think of my life in terms of fiction, but this is an impossible task. If I really wanted to gnaw my leg out of that trap, I’d have to stop writing essays, and then what I would do? It sounds ironic—essays are not fiction, ostensibly—but in this regard, they might as well be. They’re a place to discover parallels, to package up pain until it’s coherent. And the parallels between my life and Sidney’s were a little surreal.

     A year before the events of the first film begin, Sidney’s mother was raped and murdered. (Fortunately, this is not an experience that we share, but it is essential context.) The commonalities start with the media, who swarm Woodsboro High after Casey and Steve’s murders, hunting down their peers for a quote. This I remembered well, although it didn’t bother me at the time. I was Sidney’s age, seventeen, but I wasn’t as shrewd as her. I thought talking to journalists might make a difference. I thought I was too smart to be taken advantage of: a child, convinced that she was an adult.
     The visual and sonic similarities stunned me during that first rewatch, and still do. The burble and screech of walkie-talkies makes my body tense; I cringe at the lawn dotted with cops and camera crews. I find myself getting angry, truly angry, on behalf of these characters who are not real: why can’t everyone just leave them alone? Sidney looks dazed; she flinches at the arrival of her best friend, Tatum, who approaches from behind and fills her in.
     Later, in a quieter moment, Tatum will ask her if she’s doing okay. Sidney replies, with practiced lightness, that it’s fine. “It’s just…you know, the police and reporters and everything, it’s like déjà vu all over again.” A rush of memory, felt bodily, in the static between calls. 

     The reporters in Parkland and Woodsboro wanted to know if we knew the victims, if we were scared, if we were damaged, if we saw it coming. Unlike Sidney, I was all too happy to appease them in the name of sensible gun reform—and, of course, my own vanity at being asked. Unquestioning, I delivered answers; I told myself that I could take it. I was a pretty tough cookie back then. 

 

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Carmen sat two desks behind me in English class. She was smart but quiet—not shy, exactly, but never one to say much in group discussions. I didn’t know her very well; I could count the number of conversations we’d had on one hand. Still, this was a new kind of silence. 

     I wanted to have known her better than I did, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t trust my motives. Did I really want to know Carmen, or did I just want guilt to remove its vise grip on my lungs? I had found her intimidating and decided that she was stuck-up, which suddenly seemed unfair. Now I stared at her empty chair, feeling shitty, but not enough to wish that she were staring at mine. This made me feel shittier. 

     These are the politics of teen murder, which so rarely make the director’s cut: the complex relationships, conflicting emotions, and sick inside jokes. Scream captures these nuances so well that it’s almost uncanny, “like déjà vu all over again.” When Sidney tells Tatum that Casey sat next to her in English, Tatum replies, with remarkable flippancy: “Not anymore.” This seems cruel until I remember the overnight trip to the state capitol, when another high school hosted ours for dinner. One of the students told us their school was haunted, and my friend Jose said, “Ours is too.” It took me by surprise, and, shamelessly, I laughed. 

     In the aftermath of Casey’s death, there is one scene that strikes me like a bell, reverberating from the inside out. Or, rather, it’s just a moment—if you blink, you might miss it. Sidney stares at the empty desk where Casey once sat, looking so much like I must have: a girl torn asunder, lost in her own head. 

 

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Isabelle Robinson eagerly awaits the release of Scream 7, coming to a theater near you. Her work has been published in other places, including Swamp Ape Review and The New York Times. Originally from Parkland, Florida, she is working on a collection of essays about her haunted hometown from the safe distance of the Willamette Valley. Follow her on Instagram (@isabellerobz) because she keeps forgetting to make a website.

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The author (L) circa 2011.