Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene: Scream (Intro)

Welcome to a new project here at Stale Popcorn where I, your faithful - and dedicated - blogger, navigates and dissects Wes Craven's Scream trilogy. All three movies in an epic scene by scene, minutia by minutia, pop culture reference by pop culture reference analysis of these historically important, personally significant and technically fascinating movies. I aim to look at every single scene within the Scream franchise in chronological order, starting with Drew Barrymore's opening in the original Scream and concluding with the door closing on the franchise in Scream 3. I do not anticipate this will go quickly. Instead, I am giving myself a deadline of 15 April 2011, the (at this stage) release date for Wes Craven's Scream 4. That's ten months. I think I can manage that!

The amount of times that I have discussed my history with the Scream franchise is many. Whether it is paying tribute to Portia Di Rossi's eyebrows in Scream 2, taking the Black & White Friday treatment to the original, laughing at the possibilities for Scream 4 or imagining it in a post-Juno world, I love to talk about these movies. LOVE IT! As I recently sat down to watch them, yet again, I had this sudden urge to do this project and so I promptly collected my thoughts I decided to do it. I meant to start it last week, but got derailed by illness. Alas, here we are!

I've seen the first two films in the series at least 100 times each, probably reaching the 150 mark for the first. I watched it every.single.day. during school holidays in 1997 when my brother purchased the VHS of it. I wasn't able to see it at the cinema, but boy did I wear that video cassette out! Friends would come over and I'd force them to watch it multiple times. Then we'd move on to Scream 2 and I'd obsess all over again.

The Scream franchise literally changed my life. I have met some dear friends because of it, friends that I still have today (which is itself a long story that I won't go into). It helped create my obsession with cinema and my beliefs about it. I see this feature as being the be all and end all of my devotion to the series, some of my favourite movies ever made. I'm not sure how I will write this series to be perfectly honest with you. I expect it will change from entry to entry depending on what and how much I have to say. I'm taking it as if comes.

In the end, however, it is my hope that by the time 2011 rolls around that I will be well on my way to finishing and that Wes Craven will see how much these movies mean to me and will invite me to the Scream 4 premiere and... well, okay, that's never gonna happen, is it? I hope you enjoy, the first part will be up very soon!