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How do you blame a filmmaker for making films the majority want to see ?
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It's called "selling out"; those who want unpretentious, affecting horror are in the minority - and we appreciate the guys who can give us this. We don't like it when they sell out.
Scream "clever"?
How? For telling the audience how to celebrate horror films, by way of attempting to deconstruct scary movies and cheapen their effect with knowingness and parody?
Straight horror spoofs such as
Saturday the 14th and
Scary Movie are fine - they set out to poke fun at what we usually find tense and horrifying and do not pretend to be anything else;
Scream on the other hand is asking us to admire its hipness and understanding of the horror movie... and as if this is not grating enough, discovering the director is Wes Craven (yes
that Wes Craven of
Last House, Nightmare, The Hills Have Eyes...) we then need to admire how good ole Wes has obviously become so experienced in and jaded of the genre he is qualified enough to pastiche it and show us what he "knows" we like. Wink wink. Throw in a few well crafted sequences, and the film is a roaring success with kids flocking to see and "get" it.
You could call
Memento,
Irreversible and
Pulp Fiction clever for their unusual construction - but
Scream?
Only
smug - and responsible for the taming and safety of American horror which has increased since its ghastly release.