Miller and I went wandering into Walmart yesterday for storage solutions, and naturally we had to stop by the bargain Blu-ray bins. We each walked out with four movies (with digital copies included!) and paid about $30 each. Total. $30 for four movies! These days we’re lucky if we can find one movie we want on Blu-ray and digital for $30. So when some of our favorites were going for five or eight bucks a pop, we went a little crazy.

Among our spoils, we picked up – and watched – Scream. I recently got caught up on MTV’s Scream series, so it was really interesting to go back to the source. Ironically, I actually prefer the show to the film, but the film obviously has a lot going for it. After all, it has become one of the classic horror movies despite being comparatively young.

Possibly my favorite aspect of the film and the show alike, and what I want to focus on today, is the meta level of the dialogue. The character that works in the video store spends a decent portion of the movie narrating the classic horror tropes. “If this were a horror movie, so-and-so would already be dead.” “Don’t say you’ll be right back, that’s the kiss of death.” Observations like this not only call attention to the genre contract of horror in general, but they also free the filmmaker to both play into the tropes and completely ignore them as appropriate. It becomes a catch-22 not unlike in The Princess Bride. You cannot choose the cup in front of me or the one in front of you; you cannot trust the filmmaker to follow the tropes, but neither can you trust him not to follow them.

I can’t say how often this technique had been used previously, but one need only look at The Cabin in the Woods or any of the Scary Movie franchise to know that it has definitely been used since. In fact, come to think of it, it’s a technique witnessed more commonly in baroque or satirical films than sincere genre films. Scream somehow manages to blend the two in a way that feels completely genuine. After all, how many times have I been hanging out in haunted houses with friends, or home alone but for each other after watching a ghost movie, and we’ve heard a weird noise and insisted upon not splitting up and definitely not going to investigate, “because that’s how you die in horror movies?” Too many to count.

Whether or not Scream was the first to utilize this type of meta narration, it certainly made it more mainstream. My own personal ambivalence about the film aside, I have to thank it for that.