(Wes Craven, 1996, USA, 111 minutes)

Screening from LaserDisc!

Since we’re dusting off the laserdisc player for July 17’s screening of Zelly & Me, while we’re at it we’re also going to return to one of the best-selling, most-coveted, and beloved releases of the laserdisc era, the 1997 disc of Wes Craven’s franchise-launching Scream. (Besides, with The Mystery of Chess Boxing playing at the Film Series just before it, why not go for a ghostface killer twofer?) Come return to Woodsboro with us to those more innocent days when Ghostface had a single-digit body count and students at the local high school are mostly amused by him and learn to navigate the killings from what they’ve learned from horror movies. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson set off a much-imitated mode of genre filmmaking with this horror-comedy before writing lesser fare, such as the original 1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer. With Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, and, of course, Drew Barrymore.