One fateful sleepover in the summer of 1998, my friend Erich opened his father’s VHS cabinet and invited the group of us to peer inside and make a selection. It was late by then, his parents long asleep, and the five of us were wired: fuelled by a six-pack of Jolt, countless bags of chips and the sort of adolescent adrenaline that accompanies a dark summer night.
When my counterparts discovered a brand new, unopened VHS copy of Scream (1996), the decision was made almost unanimously. It became apparent rather quickly, however, that my sole disinterest in the movie was falling on deaf ears. No matter what I said, no matter how many times I suggested Major League 2 (1994), it seemed that nothing could stop the terrible tear of the plastic and the peeling sound of the tape that held the black shiny cassette inside of its cardboard sleeve.
Before I knew it, my worst fears were realized. Scream was on the television. I, a boy utterly petrified by the mere idea of a horror film, was about to watch my first slasher.
It would be many years before I fully appreciated Scream for what it was and what it accomplished (imagine watching the film with absolutely no context or understanding of its references or general message), but there was one thing I was certain of walking away from it that night:
It was fun.
The group of us talked about the movie for over an hour after it ended, pouring over every detail and discussing who we had thought the killer was. We talked about the scariest sequences, the funniest moments and, of course, the most innovative kills. I had never thought about horror movies in that context before, had never considered the fact that the genre could offer catharsis as well as discomfort – or, rather, that the two ideas might be intrinsically entwined.
The genre malleability on display was nothing short of breathtaking. How was it that a movie could jump from the disturbing terror of Casey Becker’s demise, to the melodramatic high school romance of Billy and Sid to the hilarious comedic ramblings of Stu Macher, practically switching gears from scene to scene?
Still, the veins of the narrative pumped blood-red horror and it was those sequences that stayed with me. Every death plays like a short film, tinkering with tension and pacing in a way that’s both innovative, intriguing and disturbing. Years later, when I thought back upon my journey to becoming a horror fan, it was the raw, pageantry and spectacular filmmaking on display that made me realize just how influential Scream had been.
Tatum’s death, occurring toward the end of the film, represents this perfectly. A simple, quiet scene, infused with humor, character and horror that rises as quickly as light might reflect off of the tip of a knife. Kevin Williamson’s words combined with Wes Craven’s effortless, pointed direction work fluidly together to create something straight forward and somehow layered in a manner that allows the audience to go on a journey parallel to the young teenager onscreen.
Scream runs the genre gamut, appealing to everyone from the seasoned horror veteran to the most doe-eyed terror novice, and this particular sequence stands as a grand illustration as to why that is.
THE SCENE
Tatum enters the garage. She fumbles with the light switch, inadvertently opening the garage door before closing it again and flipping on the light. She finds the refrigerator and retrieves as many bottles as she can carry. She returns to the door to find it locked and opens the garage to exit. As she approaches, the garage door begins to close again. She turns and sees Ghostface standing in the doorway. Tatum assumes its a joke and attempts to reenter the house. She struggles with Ghostface and she drops the bottles as he slices her arm with a butcher’s knife. She screams and runs away, fighting him off. Tatum spots a small pet door against the large garage door and attempts to squeeze through. Ghostface activates the garage door which rises with Tatum still stuck inside. Tatum screams and attempts to escape. Upon striking the rafters, Tatum’s head is crushed.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The script and scene begin in much the same way as Tatum opens the door into the dark garage and peers inside. She seems innocent and unassuming in that moment. The camera holds on her, calling attention to her physical beauty (in reference to the sort of establishing shot one might see in any run-of-the-mill 1980s slasher flick).
She finds a button and hits it. BRRRRMMM! The electric garage door starts to rise. Wrong switch.
The action description is matter-of-fact and straight forward, mirroring Tatum’s own stream of consciousness. Wes Craven takes this simple action as an opportunity to provide a view of the entire garage, showcasing the opening and closing garage door with small pet door attached. He even makes a point to show the shaking metal frame as the thing slowly rises and descends. The shot concludes with a pan back to Tatum, still at the entryway as she moves toward the refrigerator.
The angle cuts to inside of the refrigerator as Tatum bends in to collect bottles. Then the camera cuts to the door, still open to the house. Slowly, the door begins to close. Next the viewer sees a POV camera shot, closing in on Tatum, still bent over in the fridge.
The collection of shots are perfect representations to the average build up to the murder of a beautiful teenage girl often found in the genre. Provocative and foreboding, the sequence of events plays out to create an expectation which, once built, can be subverted.
CRASH-BOOM!
In bold, capitol letters, the script infuses a jump-scare to alert Tatum to the danger of her scenario. The scare is so purposeful and rooted in the average slasher that the script and film have her see a cat escape through a large pet door that’s built into the garage door.” Preying on expectations while simultaneously solidifying the scene’s most important plot device is yet another example of incredible visual storytelling.
The screenplay continues: She smiles at her jumpiness.
The script ensures a moment of clarity for the character. By this point in the film, the viewer has been endeared to Tatum. Most slasher films place their stock solely in the worth of the victim’s physical appearance. Scream ensures that Tatum has a relatable personality and a sense of logical reaction to her situation to create a connection which expands upon that physicality.
Once she discovers that the kitchen door is locked, the lights shut off. The script doesn’t mention this, but the moment allows for another cut to the empty, dark garage and, upon returning to Tatum, a canted angle view of her slightly fearful gaze. The filmmaking begins to evolve with her situation, bringing with it a more complex photographic sensibility. Her fear, her actions, her entire world is becoming heightened.
The script plays out as written here: Tatum again raising the garage door and moving to exit when Suddenly, CRR-BRRM! The garage door RESETS, reversing direction, moving down, closing.”
Simple and direct, the screenplay provides explicitness in the face of mystery, causing more confusion to arise on Tatum’s face. The screenplay doesn’t immediately direct her reaction:
Tatum spins around to see..
A GHOST MASKED FIGURE
The mysteriousness of that title, bold and separated from its place in the sentence, elicits a creeping sense of dread, much like one imagines the words THE SHAPE did in the script for Halloween (1978). The screenplay continues: Tatum at once GASPS, taken back, but then relaxes.” Instead, the film has her gaze upon the costumed stranger with annoyance and confusion- a more in-line reaction given the strength of the character and genre tropes the scene employs.
Tatum inquires if its Randy in a short back and forth that appears onscreen as it does on the page. The primary difference is the comfortability with which Tatum address the Figure and the added effect of Wes Craven’s visual choices. The script calls for Tatum to take a step towards the FIGURE. In the film, she moves naturally over to him, flamboyantly mocking his attempt to scare her.
As she approaches, the camera moves in tighter to each character. Each spoken line is captured at a gradually more and more extreme canted angle and each shot of the killer is done in the same way- his responses relegated to silent nods or shakes of the head. Tatum’s questions of you wanna play the psycho killer? and Can I be the helpless victim? 
also serve to solidify the nature of the sequence and call attention to the self-awareness the average teenager has gained. Even in the mid-nineties, Wes Craven knew that as cinema and media developed, the world adapted to more and more of an audience based mentality. Where that mindset is most frightening and, perhaps, dangerous, is through the eyes of the young and inexperienced.
The situation escalates quickly: Tatum takes a step to move around the FIGURE, but he steps too, blocking her. In the script, there is a longer struggle here with additional dialogue. Instead, the film cuts it down to a brief skirmish culminating with the emergence of a knife, just after the bottles she had come to retrieve in the first place crash against the cement floor.
She looks down, glimpsing a long sharp blade as it darts forward, cutting into her forearm…
Tatum pulls back, horrified, as the moment turns deadly serious.
The film captures this sentiment perfectly. The transition from fun, campy horror scene to real-world life and death scenario is a tricky one to execute, especially when employing as many well-trod tropes as Scream does. The Figure shows Tatum the knife. Allows her to really absorb the reality of the situation. When he cuts her, he does so carefully and calmly. It was not an insane attempt to jab at her or gut her, rather a purposeful act to instigate fear and truth in his victim.
She staggers backwards, holding her bloody arm, backing into the refrigerator, SCREAMING.
The film provides her with the standard flash of realization and what might be the death knell for that character were this a typical affair. After a beat or two, Tatum refuses to accept her demise and fights back, utilizing the tools of her surroundings as weaponry. Craven is careful to fully utilize the objects and the surroundings the viewer has seen over the preceding few minutes in this final struggle, inviting the viewer to dissect Tatum’s survival as a puzzle to be solved with only the pieces of that space.
Instinctively, she rips the top freezer door open, BASHING the FIGURE in the face, sending him backwards, reeling.
Employing the refrigerator as a blunt force object reminds the viewer that Tatum is clever and capable, that a true killer does not succeed or carry out their terrible machinations simply because they have a disposable victim. The film elaborates on this idea further than the screenplay when Tatum reaches for the discarded bottles on the ground and begins to chuck them at the Figure. She hits him directly in several sensitive areas in what is a surprisingly comical and cathartic bit, despite the escalating terror. He rushes her, but she ducks, flinging him over her back. Again, unscripted, but key to challenging the expectations of both Tatum and the Figure.
Emasculating the killer and emerging on top, even if only for a second or two, provides a bit of hope for Tatum’s ability to endure. Then both her logic and the screenplay take her to the only logical exit; an escape option that has been staring the viewer in the face since the very first establishing shot of the garage.
She goes for the pet door, dropping to the floor, diving for it…she wedges her upper body through, her head, shoulders, torso”
The script spends the following four paragraphs describing an altercation between the Figure and Tatum as she attempts to pull herself through the pet door. Tatum’s referred to as A true fighter as she kicks at the Figure grabbing hold of her feet. Alternatively, Craven opts to streamline this string of events, having just accomplished the same idea with Tatum’s previous interaction with the Figure. This moment is about ingenuity and the cost of taking risks in the face of evil. The film picks back up at the end of the omitted conflict when Tatum pushes herself partially through the door:
She takes the moment to pull herself through further…but she stops…stuck.
The screenplay allows for a moment of confusion and eerie quiet, even addressing the reader: Where did he go? An agonizing silence. While in keeping with the genre tropes, the momentum of the scene is such that Craven opts to keep the unhinged direction of both the choices of the victim and the Figure barreling toward their inescapable
conclusion.
CRR-BRRRM! The garage door is activated. It begins to rise upward, taking Tatum with it. She SCREAMS MADLY.
Again the viewer sees the garage door rise, as it has multiple times already. The camera shows the shaking metal frame once more. There’s an inevitability to the actions onscreen that comes from the careful way the sequence was constructed and the incredible attention to detail.
In the end, the screenplay reads: She looks above to see where the door rolls back into garage rafters just as her neck hits the first beam, SNAPPING instantly.
The film deviates slightly, as instead of a snapped neck, the viewer watches (albeit briefly) as her head is crushed. An electrical aftershock then courses through the mechanism, blowing out the lightbulb attached to the automatic garage door. All the while the Figure watches from the entrance to the house, silently and unassumingly, as though unsurprised that that the girl’s death was carried out in such an elaborate fashion.
While the script has already moved on, the film wanted to pause on its overarching thesis. The movie is a slasher film and as such comes with a contract. The choices made, good or bad, will certainly influence the outcome of events, but the narrative requires death.
Fate, it would seem, cannot be opted out of.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“In some ways I’m working off of the clichés used in this kind of scene,” Wes Craven said in his blu-ray commentary for Scream (Available for purchase here) “and then sort of twisting it so it doesn’t go the way you’d think.”
I may not have realized it in that summer of ’98, but Wes Craven was an integral part of what made horror so appealing to me all of those years later. Horror is about rituals. About facing those dark things that we know are out there, or perhaps within, that we turn away from but cannot stop returning to. As the genre explores those ideas, the films and filmmakers operating within it evolve. They adapt their stories to the audiences they’re telling them to and the times they’re telling them in.
“It’s a wonderful sort of layer cake of realities and various versions of the truth…” Wes Craven continued thoughtfully on the aforementioned commentary track, “a new way of constructing a film where you acknowledge all of the different media that’s involved in our lives right now.” In 1996, Wes Craven was already developing a film that could speak very clearly to the disconnectedness of the reality of a teenager in 2018. He was dissecting a genre that many had believed dead and gone. The characters were both archetypal and yet evolved, aware of the contract they were bound to by being inside of a horror movie, but defiant of their fates all the same.
In his commentary, Wes Craven describes the build up of Tatum’s death to be comprised of “standard, cliché” shots. Still, it’s the utilization of the genre’s methodology that results in an atypical take on a classic set up. Tatum’s end is brought to life with expert blocking, dialogue and camera work, however upon reflection, her smashed head creates a gory recollection for the average viewer. As quick as that shot is, the MPAA famously forced Wes Craven to cut it from its original state. Still, that image of Tatum’s bulging eyes and her limp body hanging from the pet door haunts minds far more powerfully than any explicit, bloody take ever could.
When I think back to my fourteen year old self and my unreasonable fear of the horror genre, I realize that I had my true concerns somewhat backwards. While I believed I was terrified to see the explicit, what I was far more afraid of was the insinuations of the imagination. Wes Craven understood that to tell a story and create fear, one must occupy the viewer’s mind and ignite it. Whether that be by way of a whodunnit mystery, a puzzle-like filmmaking style or simply a captivating, relatable character arc- an interested imagination could accomplish far more than the screen was capable of.
And yet… I had fun that night. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t decimated. I was excited.
Running through our alternate takes of who the killers might’ve been, discussing who should or shouldn’t have died was all part of the experience of watching the movie. It took me several more years to understand and apply that learning to the remainder of the genre, but Scream, and Tatum’s death in particular, stands as the perfect representation of what makes the genre so special and so appealing.
In the famous, oft-quoted words of Wes Craven: “Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”
After all, what is a scream, if not a release.
Scream (1996): Written by Kevin Williamson. Directed by Wes Craven
