By JASON COMERFORD

The opening sequence of Wes Craven’s Scream was the game-changer that singlehandedly breathed life back into a stale genre. Ironic, self-aware characters weren’t new in horror cinema (films including Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and Craven’s own New Nightmare were two of the more recent visitors to that well), but Kevin Williamson’s shrewdly observed script was the first to make the characters’ knowledge of genre tropes an ongoing dramatic element. Williamson’s expertly constructed opening sequence, combined with Craven’s sleek, confident direction and Drew Barrymore’s perfectly pitched performance, raised the stakes by establishing that the old “rules” no longer applied – and, by gutting a major movie star in its opening moments, showed it meant business.

Scream changed the fortunes of practically everyone concerned – especially those of composer Marco Beltrami. Beltrami, a Brown University grad who studied at Yale and USC (at the latter, one of his teachers was a hack nobody named Jerry Goldsmith), scored the opening sequence as a demo for Craven in two days, using studio space borrowed from a friend. One test screening later, Beltrami was onboard, turning the modest $30,000 music budget into a full-throated score for a mid-sized orchestra, with synths and other electronic elements added for flavoring.*

Beltrami’s ten-minute opening cue, titled “The Cue From Hell” on Varese Sarabande’s comprehensive Deluxe Edition of the score, opens with uneasy textures from piano and strings before launching into a howling assault, as Barrymore is menaced by an unseen phone caller intent on a deadly game of slasher movie trivia. Menacing elements drawn from a wide array of contemporary classical music are employed, from aleatoric writing for strings and brass to hollow percussive strikes and a mournful, moaning electronic tone, as Barrymore meets her grim fate – and a new franchise is born. Beltrami’s startling score established a new standard for horror film music (practically every horror score for the next decade sounded just like it), and it was the opening movement of the ongoing career of one of cinema’s most unique and creative musical voices.

* Source: Liner notes for Scream: The Deluxe Edition, written by Jim Lochner.