Further Reading
Finlan, Alastair.The Gulf War 1991.New York: Rout-
ledge, 2003. Well-written account of the war
showing how the various technologies were
used.
Harland, David M.Jupiter Odyssey: The Stor y of NASA’s
Galileo Mission.New York: Springer, 2000. Pro-
fusely illustrated, detailed account of the travels
and discoveries of the Galileo spacecraft.
Rezende, Lisa.Chronology of Science. New York: Facts
On File, 2006. Nice compilation of advances from
the Stone Age to the present. Includes time lines
and some longer entries. Everything considered,
a good source for quick facts or to start a deeper
study.
Rosner, Lisa, ed.Chronology of Science: From Stonehenge
to the Human Genome Project. Santa Barbara, Calif.:
ABC-Clio, 2002. Fascinating collection of brief
entries and some longer ones. Easily used since it
is arranged by decade, then by field: astronomy,
biology, chemistry, earth science, ecology, mathe-
matics, and physics.
Charles W. Rogers
See also Apple Computer; Archaeology; Astron-
omy; Biosphere 2; Blogs; Bondar, Roberta; Cell
phones; CGI; Cloning; Computers; Digital audio;
Digital cameras; DVDs; E-mail; Fermat’s last theo-
rem solution; Glenn, John; Gulf War; Hackers; Hale-
Bopp comet; Hubble Space Telescope; Instant mes-
saging; Internet; Inventions; Kyoto Protocol; Lucid,
Shannon; Mars exploration; Michelangelo computer
virus; Microsoft; MP3 format; Nanotechnology; No-
bel Prizes; Patriot missile; PDAs; Plasma screens;
Search engines; Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet; Silicon
Valley; Space exploration; Space shuttle program;
Spam; String theory; Telecommunications Act of
1996; World Wide Web; Y2K problem.
Scream
Identification Groundbreaking postmodern
horror film
Director Wes Craven (1939- )
Date Released on December 20, 1996
This film revitalized the horror genre while introducing a
self-reflexive viewpoint and proving that horror and humor
could effectively mix.
By the mid-1990’s, the phenomenal popularity that
horror films had enjoyed in the 1980’s had waned so
much that some critics were declaring the genre
dead, much like Westerns and musicals. Director
Wes Craven—a longtime genre veteran with such
films asLast House on the Left(1972),The Hills Have
Eyes(1977), andA Nightmare on Elm Street(1984)—
brought an experienced hand and a fresh eye to
screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s postmodern take
on slasher films. The plot is fairly standard: A serial
killer is gutting, ripping, and crushing his way
through a group of high school students, with hero-
ine Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) particularly in
peril. The twist is that these characters are media-
savvy, experienced scary-movie fans, and they act the
part. One of Sidney’s friends, Randy (Jamie Ken-
nedy), recites the “rules” for surviving in a horror
movie, which characters disregard at their peril, un-
aware that they are indeed in a horror movie. At one
point, the famous theme music from Halloween
(1978), playing on a television, momentarily be-
comes the theme music ofScream, further blurring
the boundaries of reality, film reality, and film-aware
reality.
Unlike its predecessors,Screamhas much overt,
character-driven humor, which occasionally verges
on slapstick. That this comic element does not de-
tract from the terror is due in part to Craven’s pre-
cise balancing of laughs and scares, and an unusu-
ally talented cast including Courteney Cox (of the
then-popular television seriesFriends), David Ar-
quette, Rose McGowan, and most famously Drew
Barrymore, who is terrorized and slaughtered in an
opening sequence that has the shock value of the in-
famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’sPsycho
(1960).
As with most of his films, Craven encountered dif-
ficulties with the Motion Picture Association of
America Code and Rating Administration, which
termedScream’s original version a perfect example
of an NC-17 movie. Cuts required for an R rating
amounted to approximately twenty seconds of vio-
lence and gore. Even the sound track had to be
toned down for being too intense.
Screamwas a tremendous box-office hit, with gross
profits of over $100 million, making it one of the
most commercially successful horror films ever. Two
sequels followed:Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 3
(2000). Scream’s success brought the supposedly
“dead” horror genre back to robust life, particularly758 Scream The Nineties in America