Drew Barrymore on why she wanted her character to be killed off in ‘Scream’: “I went bananas!”
In the 1990s, the horror genre was beginning to slump. The ’70s and ’80s marked its golden era, introducing us to some of the most iconic movie villains of all time, including Halloween’s Michael Myers and Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees. By the early ’90s, horror faced a decline in popularity and originality, relying on predictable remakes and sequels.
However, classic horror legend Wes Craven, known for helming early exploitation flicks such as The Last House on the Left and the widely popular ’80s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, decided to change things. By using his skills as an established filmmaker, Craven created Scream, a satirical slasher which actively poked fun at the cliches of the horror genre. He subverted and revelled in the conventions of the genre, using comedy to create the ultimate meta-horror film.
Scream follows Sidney Prescott, an intelligent high-school student reeling from the murder of her mother. However, she is soon the target of a ruthlessly relentless masked killer known as Ghostface, who will do whatever it takes to put Sidney and her friends in danger. Craven references other horror films within the script, making it clear that Scream is a scary movie about other scary movies.
In fact, the characters’ fates often rely on their horror cinema knowledge. During one scene, horror aficionado Randy explains the rules for surviving a horror movie while watching Halloween at a party, many of which accurately play out. At one point, Randy exclaims, “The police are always off track with this shit! If they’d watch Prom Night, they’d save time! There’s a formula to it. A very simple formula! Everybody’s a suspect!”
This is established in the very first sequence when Ghostface brutally kills high-schooler Casey Becker after she fails to answer horror trivia questions correctly. The character was played by Drew Barrymore, one of the film’s most established actors. Thus, this death scene surprised many audiences, signalling that no character was safe in Scream, even the main characters, as evidenced by the death of Randy in Scream 2.
Barrymore explained on Hot Ones that she requested to play Casey because she thought it would throw audiences off to see her murdered within the first 12 minutes of the film. “In the horror film genre, my biggest pet peeve was that I always knew the main character was going to be slugging through at the end but was going to creak by and make it. What I wanted to do is to take that comfort zone away. So I asked if I could be Casey Becker so we would establish this rule does not apply in this film.”
Moreover, the actor told EW about taking on the role in 2011. “I just read the script one night at my house, and I just said, ‘Oh my God, there hasn’t been anything like this for so long.’ I loved that it actually got tongue-in-cheeky, but it was still scary, and it was this great game that sort of described genres and revived them at the same time and redefined them all in one script. I went bananas.”
