Scream

Year of Release:  1996
Director:  Wes Craven
Screenplay:  Kevin Williamson
Starring:  Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy
Running Time:  111 minutes
Genre:  Horror, thriller, comedy

In the small American town of Woodsboro, teenager Casey Becker (Barrymore) is tormented by taunting phone calls from a mysterious masked killer, who brutally murders her when she fails his twisted movie trivia game.  As Woodsboro becomes a media circus, it becomes apparent that the killer is particularly focussing on Sidney Prescott (Campbell), whose mother was killed almost exactly a year before.

Some films seem to perfectly capture a particular time period, and Scream, to me, is one of the definitive films of the late 1990s.  The look, style and music really capture that period.  Horror was pretty much in the doldrums at the time, and slasher films in particular were as dead as if the genre had gone out at night to investigate a strange noise, until Scream brought it back.  The film's great idea is that, unlike most of the slashers that had gone before, the characters here are aware of slasher films, and are fully aware of the conventions of the genre.  Audiences sometimes watch horror films and scream in laughter at the stupidity of the characters, this film second guesses that audience by having the characters on screen do it for them (literally in one scene where a character is watching Halloween (1978) oblivious to the killer looming up behind him, and equally unaware that he is being recorded and watched in a TV news van, where the people watching are shouting the same things that he is saying to Jamie Lee Curtis).  The characters are frequently discussing horror films and enumerate in detail the rules of a slasher film.  However Scream is not just a spoof of horror, it works as a slasher film in it's own right, screenwriter Kevin Williamson  obviously loves and knows horror, and director Wes Craven was one of the great horror directors, cutting his teeth on the controversial The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) before unleashing Freddy Krueger onto the world in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).  In fact Craven had explored similar post-modern territory before with Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), which I still think is the best of the Elm Street series.
The film's most recognisable star, Drew Barrymore, is killed within the first quarter of an hour, in a scene that quickly became iconic.  Star Neve Campbell was known for the TV show Party of Five (1994-2000) and Courteney Cox, who starred as tabloid TV news journalist Gale Weathers, made her name in the hugely popular Friends (1994-2004).  The characters are well-drawn and, crucially, Williamson and Craven seem to genuinely like them, so it is affecting when they are in danger, they are not just there to be sliced 'n' diced.  The fact that the film is not just a gory slasher, but it has humour, teen drama and mystery, meant that it's appeal moved beyond the horror fans.
To date, the film has spawned three sequels, and a TV series.    

Courntey Cox, Jamie Kennedy and Neve Campbell in Scream

Cat's Eye

Year of Release: 1985
Director:  Lewis Teague
Screenplay:  Stephen King, based on the short stories "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" by Stephen King
Starring:  Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays, Candy Clark 
Running Time:  94 minutes
Genre:  Horror, anthology

Personally I am a huge fan of anthology films.  It's a fun idea having a selection of short stories instead of one long narrative, almost like a cinematic buffet.  However, like a buffet, the results can be wildly uneven, although if one segment is bad then you don't have to wait too long for something else to appear. 

Cat's Eye has the unique, as far as I know, framing device of following the adventures of a plucky cat who is haunted by visions of a girl (Barrymore) begging for help. On his way, however he is captured by an organisation that will go extreme lengths to stop an annoying yuppie (Woods) from smoking, and by an Atlantic City mobster (McMillan) who forces his wife's lover (Hays) to accept a deadly wager: to walk all the way around the narrow ledge outside the mobster's penthouse apartment at the top of a skyscraper.  Eventually the cat makes it to the girl and finds himself forced into nightly combat to defend the girl form a tiny monster living in her wall.

This is a fun, lighthearted movie.  The first two segments are based on short stories published in King's Night Shift collection (which also supplied the source material for such deathless cinema classics as Children of the Corn (1984), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Graveyard Shift (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Mangler (1995)), the third segment was written specifically for the film.  "Quitters, Inc." is kind of like a weird dark comedy, which has some fun bits, such as a weird nightmare sequence set to the Police song "Every Breath You Take", and James Woods is pretty good as the jittery would-be ex-smoker.  "The Ledge" is a pretty fun, short thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The third story is the only one that features any supernatural elements, and is probably the most typically Stephen King.  The monster effects are good, and Drew Barrymore is very good as the little girl.

Cat's Eye is kind of underrated, I think because it doesn't really feature much of the horror that Stephen King is best known for, but there is something here for pretty much anyone.  It's suspenseful, creepy at times and at times very funny.

Drew Barrymore and friend in Cat's Eye