Before Wes Craven SCREAMed: Popcorn (1991)

Kevin Williamson’s Wikipedia¹ entry states Scream 1996 was inspired by the Gainesville Ripper². Thrill Fiction asserts that Williamson stole the concept and format of Scream from Popcorn 1991.

A curriculum vitae can be a fascinating testament. In 1972 Leslie Nielson was a respected dramatic actor starring in the ensemble blockbuster The Poseidon Adventure; in 1980 he starred in the ensemble blockbuster Airplane! William Peter Blatty co-wrote A Shot in the Dark 1964 – the sequel to The Pink Panther 1963; he would later write The Exorcist 1973 screenplay based on his 1971 novel. Mark Herrier starred in Porky’s 1982; he directed Popcorn 1991.

There is consensus that the 80s horror boom began with Friday 13^th 1980 and ended with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare 1991. It ended with Popcorn. Where Freddy’s Dead is merely a bad film to end a tired franchise Popcorn is an indictment of the entire genre. It is an exclamation point.

The 80s horror gold rush disintegrated into prospectors selling sand instead of gold. Popcorn accuses both the filmmakers who exploit and an audience that demands more gore. Its satire is attached to a plot: Maggie is being stalked in her dreams. She’s part of a film school crew that stage a horror movie festival. The killer stalks her in the movies.

The plundering of Popcorn by Kevin Williamson has been detailed in the Scream and Scream 2 1997 critiques. There is more:

One of the trademarks of Scream is the telephone call. It is the catalyst that sets up its most famous set-piece – the Drew Barrymore sequence – and is used throughout the franchise. The nuisance phone call precipitates the plot of Popcorn. It doesn’t feature as heavily as it does in Scream but it is significant.

Of more significance is the voice on the phone. Ghostface has an electronically altered voice. In Scream 3 2000 he used electronics to mimic other character’s voices. The Popcorn bad guy uses these ploys – but he did it first. Furthermore he mimics other voices to a greater dramatic effect.

In the Scream films it is emphasized any one of the cast could be the killer – even the high school principal. In Popcorn as the cast dwindles by death in disguise the hidden identity of the killer engenders more importance.

The pilfering is not exclusive to concept, theme and plot. Not many films start without a credit roll. Scream opens with a curtain raiser and then a single title card: the name of the movie. So does Popcorn.

darling of the 80s: Jill Schoelen

Popcorn is not a great movie – it’s a very good one. It has its faults. Like a lot of horror films the story is ludicrous although this is camouflaged by excellent plotting. There is a montage in act 1 – a jaded device used in a slothful manner. It’s the equivalent of a bridge in a computer generated pop song.

The heroes in Popcorn are a film school crew. There is familiarity but no camaraderie. Young people get on with each other. They form a bond quicker than adults yet this is not depicted within this cast. It is depicted in films such as The Breakfast Club 1985, Stand By Me 1986 and Scream.

Popcorn is well acted but the plot takes precedence over its cast and theme. That is until the third act when the bad guy reveals himself and struts down the aisle towards metafilm climax. At this point plot and theme coalesce into art. Some films have their moments. Aliens 1986 had Ripley confronting the queen. Popcorn has the final act of Possession.

Kevin Williamson plundered Popcorn but never reached the high point of art. Perhaps that wasn’t his intention. He did reach the high point of entertainment. He recognised that Popcorn’s selling point was its satire, pop culture references and genre deconstruction. Where Popcorn kept its theme in the background Williamson pushed them to the fore of Scream.

He also applied more comedy. Popcorn is intermittently funny – there is a running joke of Mark getting clobbered – but Scream is constantly funny to the point of horror-comedy. Production company Dimension Films applied more money. Their $15million³ ($21m today) budget is evident onscreen.

The horror genre has a history of using no name actors and young folk; it has a low budget default. Dimension subverted tradition when it hired the biggest director in horror and a bona fide star in Drew Barrymore. They gathered the best ensemble of unknowns in a horror film: Skeet Ulrich, Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy and Matthew Lillard. Furthermore they peppered the cast with recognisable faces: Courtney Cox and Henry Winkler. Dimension was not going to let Scream go the way of Popcorn.

Despite Jill Schoelen as final girl Popcorn failed at the box office^{4 5}. The marketing didn’t help. Even by 1991 standards⁶ the trailer⁷ was awful.

Scream is the most successful slasher ever made⁸. To date the bodies involved – Williamson, Wes Craven and Dimension Films – have not publicly acknowledged their inspiration.  

Scream is not a great movie but it is a great remake of Popcorn. 

Read more Thrill Fiction: Re/Made: The Last Houseon the Left

1 Kevin Williamson

2 The Gainesville Ripper TruTV

3 Scream The Numbers

4 Popcorn IMDb

5 Box Office Mojo

6 The Silence of the Lambs trailer

7 Popcorn trailer

8 Scream Box Office Mojo

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Scream 3

The trilogy is as old as the ancient Greeks. In their time the convention consisted of three tragedies performed in succession followed by a satyr (tragicomedy)¹. The (modified) form has since been adopted in novels (The Lord of the Rings pub.1954-55), poems (The Spanish Trilogy pub. 1913²) and film.

Film is the bastard cousin of the arts of storytelling because it alone is created primarily as a source of commerce. The art in film is despite the motion picture industry not because of it. As such sequels quickly appeared in the history of the movies: the first feature length film is the Australian The Story of the Kelly Gang 1906³; the first feature length sequel is the American The Fall of a Nation 1916⁴. 

Hollywood produced repetitive sequels which formed incidental series such as the Tarzan, Dracula and the Wolfman films. It wasn’t until Star Wars (parts 4-6) that the industry packaged the trilogy as a brand.

In the 90s Hollywood discovered the vociferous appetite of the home video sell-thru market. To wit consumers are prepared to buy bad films as long as they are packaged with good ones eg The Godfather trilogy. Thus the trilogy is good for business.

However Hollywood is not in the business of producing trilogies. Hollywood produces sequels that lead to series. If two of these sequels are made the series is marketed as a trilogy. Yet such is the avarice of the industry that this does not stop more sequels being produced in the same series (Alien 1979 – Alien: Resurrection 1997).

Red White and Blue

A true example of a trilogy is Three Colours directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. To watch these films is to witness the art of cinema in the knowledge that they cannot be mass marketed to an English language audience. Another example is the Dead trilogy. Each film is connected by theme and separated by time with ill attempt to accommodate the market.

Therefore the ‘trilogy’ is a marketing ploy of an industry with a scorched earth policy. That is to beat a horse to death and then flog it. The horse in this analogy is the narrative. Indiana Jones will do in the next film what he did in the last one.

There was a respectful lapse between Scream 2 1997 and Scream 3 2000. There was enough time to make a sequel. Kevin Williamson was otherwise engaged on a TV project so writing duties fell to Ehren Kruger. 

It all fell apart from there.

Prior to Scream 3 Kruger had proved himself penning Arlington Road 1999 – a credible psychological drama. After Scream 3 he proved himself again by writing The Skeleton Key 2005 – a quiet and effective horror yarn. What these two films have in common is intent and purpose. Their respective stories are linear and focussed.

The Scream films have no plot to boast about. They are constructs to deconstruct. Hence they are a series of vignettes dotted together by thin story. It is within these parameters that Kruger fails. With no plot to speak of the urgency must be in the characters, dialogue and individual scenes. Kruger fails on all three fronts.

If Scream 2 had the new character of Joel the cameraman – played by Duane Martin – then Scream 3 has Jennifer Jolie played by Parker Posey (she used to be a somebody⁵). Jennifer plays the role of Gail Weathers in Stab 3. Scream 3 is a film within a film – a metafilm. It’s not confusing. It’s irritating – much like Posey’s character.

The Scream 3 cast

Kruger’s observations about trilogies are neither insightful nor revealing. They are invented for the purposes of this film. The concept of metafilm is not developed or explored. It is solely used as a sight gag. The audience is invited to laugh at unknown actors dressed up as the original cast – and no more.

Krueger is a proven better writer than Williamson but he’s no good at irreverence. The dialogue is scattershot and hysteria. The attempts at commenting on the industry via the Lance Henriksen character lead to nowhere. None of the kills are memorable.

Four weeks into filming Back to the Future 1986 director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steven Spielberg fired lead actor Eric Stoltz and replaced him with Michael J Fox⁶. Wes Craven should not have shot the Kruger script.

The wrestler Matt Morgan turned up at Ohio Valley Wrestling. Kenny Bolin, one of the executives, was surprised to see him. Morgan was supposed to be at WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).

“What are you doing here?” Bolin said.

“The writers didn’t have anything for me,” Morgan replied.

“So they fired you?” Bolin said. “Fire the fucking writers.”

Kenny Bolin of Bolin Services

Scream is a one film trilogy because the concept is a one trick pony. With the release of Scream 4 2011 at least they can drop ‘trilogy’ and start calling it a series franchise.

Scream 4 opens 15^th April. Advance word from the critics is in the middle^{7 8}.

Read more Thrill Fiction: Before Wes Craven Screamed

1 The Oresteia of Aeschylus public domain at InternetArchive

2 The Spanish Trilogy The Washington Post

3 first feature film Associated Content

4 The Story of Hollywood

5 Parker Posey Wikipedia

6 Back to the Future Wikipedia

7 Scream 4 Rotten Tomatoes

8 Metacritc

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Scream 2

The first feature length sequel was a flop. The Fall of a Nation 1916 followed the notoriously racist The Birth of a Nation 1915. The studio involved (with the former) went bust five years later having made the one film¹. The first American horror sequel is Bride of Frankenstein 1935. It was a commercial success. Blogger Ricky Sprague says it’s better than the original. He’s not the only one².

Business is synonym for profit and sequels are good business. In horror’s golden 30s two of Universal’s monsters – Frankenstein and Dracula – headlined five movies. In the renaissance 80s Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers headlined 17. In this 21^st century boom there have been 7 Saw movies.

Sequels are not good for creativity.

These films suck

There are sequels on a creative par with their originals (The Godfather Part 2 1974, Aliens 1986, Terminator 2 1991) but the exception is not the rule. Likewise while there are examples that outperform their predecessors³ the projected gross of a sequel is 75% of the original. Its simple arithmetic: Scream 1996 amassed a worldwide box office of $173million⁴ ($243m adjusted for inflation). The business demanded a sequel.

The Star Wars trilogies are a perfect example of sequels. There’s a three year interval between each film and there’s a reason for this: screenwriting guru Syd Fields⁵ suggests a spec script be written over a 12-18 month period. The average Hollywood movie has a 13 week shoot⁶. Post production including editing can take up to a year for soft deadlines. Thus from first draft to final cut the incubation of a motion picture is about 2½ -3 years. A shorter length is to the detriment of the film. The audience pays for it.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge 1985 hit theatres 357 days after the original. Despite its betrayal of the mythology created by Wes Craven in his 1984 landmark I have sympathy for both writer and director for attempting to further the story in a new direction. However the mistakes and missteps are glaring. I believe given time to develop the script they would have made a great movie. Nevertheless it is hated by the Elm Street fan base.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 box office receipts equated to 113%⁷ (adjusted for inflation) to that of the original.

Scream 2 1997 was released 357 days after Scream.

The Drew Barrymore curtain raiser is the most famous sequence in Scream (and subsequently the franchise). In their attempt to duplicate it Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven were establishing a tradition – much like the James Bond openings and to a lesser extent the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

The Barrymore sequence is a carbon copy of the opening scenes of When a Stranger Calls 1979. In Scream 2 the Stab curtain raiser is lifted from the dénouement of Popcorn 1991. In 1996 the Scream audience – myself included – weren’t aware of When a Stranger Calls but neither were the critics⁸.  In 1997 the Scream 2 audience weren’t – and still aren’t – aware of Popcorn. A pilfered opening can be defended as an in-joke. It can’t be defended twice.

The opening does not work. Where Scream had Drew Barrymore Scream 2 had Jada Pinkett. She is not a star now and she wasn’t a star then. Like Kate Capshaw she is best known as a wife. Her acting was stiff and she had zero chemistry with her co-star. Omar Epps is a proven talent but neither he nor Wes Craven could coax an appropriate performance from Jada. Pinkett is a worthy actress⁹ but in this role she was miscast. Vulnerable is not her forte.

Black Power

Jada was not the only cast member rendered awkward. Neve Campbell was only 24 when Scream 2 was made yet she looked older than her similarly aged co-stars. Perhaps it was that ill judged hair-do. College freshmen don’t go for the politician’s wife look. As for Jerry O’Connell he beggars belief as Sidney’s boyfriend. The Topgun 1986 ‘parody’ could only be written by a gay man or a Hindi. It’s still cringe inducing 14 years after.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is horror royalty and a Final Girl¹⁰ but her casting looks like star padding. The Drew Barrymore scenes signalled anyone could die in Scream. Sarah Michelle’s extended cameo is Barrymore redux. This was the signal the franchise had run out of invention. Gellar and Jada should have switched roles.

The cumulative effect is a cast that do not display the chemistry and familiarity that the originals did. It’s only when the Scream survivors interact that the film comes alive. When Jamie Kennedy’s character dies the emotional investment dies with him.

money in the blood bank: Scream 2 queens (l-r) Heather Graham, Neve Campbell, Jada Pinkett, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Tori Spelling

The plot for Scream 2 is ghostface stalks Sidney Prescott and will kill everyone including her friends who get in the way of his slashing her. It’s the same plot as the original. The difference is in Scream the convoluted execution is forgiven due to the wit of the script. It’s a movie where the horror/action set pieces are a vehicle to connect the dramatic scenes of genre deconstruction amidst comedy. No one cares who the killer is.

Scream 2 makes a brave attempt under constrained circumstances. The film class scene is amongst the best written in the franchise. The Laurie Metcalf character is a good addition. The subplot of fame seeking is astute if underdeveloped. Therein lies the problem; not enough time to develop the script; not enough time in casting; not enough time for a sequel.

Scream 2 grossed a North American $101million¹¹ ($138m adjusted); 96% of the originals domestic tally.

Sequels are not good for creativity but the business demanded another one.

Read more Thrill Fiction: Scream 3

1 The Fall of a Nation Wikipedia

2 Bride of Frankenstein Rotten Tomatoes

3 Sequels outperform originals Wikipedia

4 Scream box office The Numbers

5 Syd Field

6 13 week shoot EHow

7 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Box Office Mojo

8 Scream 2 Metacritic

9 Jada Pinkett-Smith Wikipedia

10 Final Girl

11 Scream 2 Box OfficeMojo

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Still SCREAMing: The Ultimate Scary Movie Retrospective

In the wake of the A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 reboot two fans released the epic Never Sleep Again 2010. It is the zenith of horror documentaries. 

The Scream franchise has its own fans.

Writer director Ryan Turek and producer Anthony Masi have assembled all the relevant players in their documentary Still Screaming: The Ultimate Scary Movie Retrospective 2011. The proof is in the trailer.

FEARnet is giving fans the chance to attend the premiere on Thursday April 14^th. Shame they’re not sending out plane tickets. For those of us who don’t live in Los Angeles Ryan will be posting a week long series of behind the scenes blogs at Shock Til You Drop.

There are fans and there are filmmakers.

Thrill Fiction would like to thank FEARnet for use of its exclusive content. I would also like to congratulate Ryan and Anthony for making this happen.

Scream 4 is released April 15^th in the US and UK.

Read more Thrill Fiction: Wes Craven’s Scream

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Scream 4 (new trailer)

The new Scre4m trailer.

It’s the same as the others but different.

It’s the best one yet. 

Scream 4 is released 15^th April in the US and UK

Read more Thrill Fiction: Husk

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