You know that standard Halloween costume that approximately 84.7 percent of American male adolescents have adopted at some point – the one with the long black robe and the hooded ghost mask? Well, bet you didn’t know that that iconic get-up originated in the 90s teen slasher masterpiece Scream. (OK, maybe you did). That Party City staple is but one indication of the widespread influence this movie has had on pop culture.
Starring “90s teen mainstay Neve Campbell as innocent protagonist Sidney Prescott, Scream subverted decades’ worth of teen horror clich?s while reveling in them at the same time. The film is set in the fictional Woodsboro, Calif., and revolves around a series of murders committed by a man outfitted with the aforementioned “ghostface’ mask and a twisted love of horror movie trivia.
I’ve seen Scream countless times on various television sets, but as I was all of four years old when it was released in 1996, I never saw it in theaters. Seeing it on a grand theater screen, let alone in the gorgeous Coolidge Corner Theater, therefore, was a whole different experience. The creative folk at the theater also made the show more interactive for the audience, as we were pelted by free candy thrown by Sir Ghostface himself, as well as treated to individual scares by the masked villain.
The revered Coolidge Corner Theater, located on Harvard Street in Brookline, began the month of October screening the Wes Craven-directed blockbuster and continues this weekend with his cult classic The People Under the Stairs (1991), on Friday and Saturday at midnight.
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