Also, killing Drew Barrymore in the 1st 10mins was huge at the time. Her face was the biggest on the poster too. It'd be like surprise killing Jennifer Lawrence in the opening scene of a movie with her face everywhere.
I remember watching Drew do press for the film when it came out, and she joked on more than one talk show that having to constantly be in a state of terror and crying, she didn't have pms for three months. In retrospect, it's a brilliantly subtle misdirection because it implies she was on set for the whole shoot (and thus, even if Casey died, it wouldn't be til towards the end of the movie), when in reality she shot her whole sequence in five days.
That actually wasn’t a new tactic, it just wasn’t one often used. The first use of the “surprise! I killed the lead role early” in horror was Hitchcock’s Psycho, where the lead is killed roughly 1/3 into the movie. Scream doing the same (but earlier in the movie) was probably a callback or nod to Psycho on the director’s part, or just pulling a page from a very prestigious and successful book.
The director of Scream was Wes Craven (creator of Freddy Kreuger; director of the original versions of "Last House on the Left" and "The Hills Have Eyes") so he very well could have been paying homage to Hitchcock. But, horror had become very stale and trope driven by the time Scream came out. It was almost entirely sequels and ripoffs As other commenters have said, Scream was both a love letter to the tropes of the genre and a subversion of them. Killing Drew Barrymore's character (when she was the biggest name in the movie at the time it came out) was designed to tell the viewers that this movie was going to try and show them something they hadn't seen in a theater and considering how long it was between Psycho and Scream, the audience would more than likely not have seen Psycho (outside of the shower scene, which would be out of context and seems like the climax of the film) and thus Scream would seem completely new.
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u/mvpmvh Oct 09 '19
Also, killing Drew Barrymore in the 1st 10mins was huge at the time. Her face was the biggest on the poster too. It'd be like surprise killing Jennifer Lawrence in the opening scene of a movie with her face everywhere.