The Lesson Scream Taught Me That Changed Everything
The first and most important lesson Scream ever taught me didn’t come from Ghostface, Sidney, Billy, or Randy’s rules.
It didn’t come from a kill, a scare, or a twist ending.
It came from something much simpler, something I didn’t learn until years later, while watching one of those early 2000s bonus documentaries I’ve seen a dozen times but somehow always absorb differently depending on where I’m at in life.
Last night, during one of those rewatches, I heard a detail that stopped me in my tracks:
Wes Craven originally turned down directing Scream because the opening scene was “too violent.”
Let that sink in.
Wes Craven, the man behind Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, thought Scream was too violent and would mess up his charisma.
That tiny fact cracked something open in my brain and sent me spiraling back to my very first time watching the movie… and to the real lesson Scream taught me:
Horror fans judge way too fast.
And I was the worst offender.
I remember when Scream hit video. I was about 11. My mom rented it, which was weird because she almost never rented horror movies. My stepdad did, sure, but she must’ve heard about it from the kids she worked with at the nursing home and hospital. When I came downstairs she was already halfway through it, and she looked at me and said:
“You need to watch this movie. It’s really good.”
So I stood there. And within minutes, I was judging the hell out of it.
Specifically the scene where Billy gets “killed” in front of Sidney. He turns his head and there’s that smear of blood on his shirt… no visible stab wound, no prosthetic, nothing. Eleven year old me scoffed:
“New horror movies suck. That is so fake.”
But I kept watching, and when the Billy twist hit, it absolutely wrecked me in the best possible way. It flipped everything I thought I knew and made me feel like a total idiot in that fun, mind blown horror fan kind of way. Instead of being annoyed, I was pumped. I wanted more. Scream hooked me instantly.
I immediately needed to rewatch it. And I did, again and again, for that entire weekend. I even bugged my mom until she finally caved and just bought me the movie, because she was sick of renting it.
Side note: the only thing I regret about growing up in the VHS era, or being too poor for DVDs until the early 2000s, is all the special features I missed out on. I had no idea how much cool behind the scenes stuff I wasn’t seeing until years later.
That memory is what got me thinking about trailers… because this is exactly how certain horror fans behave whenever a new one drops. Ninety seconds of footage and suddenly the internet acts like it has the entire movie decoded. Every horror fan does this from time to time. Even veterans. And especially me, although I try to be observant of this tendency.
We hold every new movie up against the classics we grew up with and expect lightning to strike twice.
But that sets us up for disappointment before the movie even has a chance.
Then we go online and say things like,
“I can tell by the trailer this is gonna suck.”
No. You can’t. Nobody can.
Trailer editors are professionals, literal experts whose job is to make anything look good.
Judging a movie based on its trailer is like judging a restaurant by sniffing the outside door.
What can a trailer tell us?
Tone.
Style.
Cinematography.
Maybe pacing.
But skipping a movie entirely because “it won’t be as good as the classics”?
That’s how we shoot ourselves in the foot.
It’s the same trap I fell into with Scream as a kid.
We judge too fast.
Assume too much.
And forget what discovery feels like.
And honestly? Sometimes we miss out on something great because of it.