"However, once the film starts rolling around our final girl Sidney Prescott (an incredibly ballsy and unfazed Campbell), Craven tweaks the dread spread with something of a tonal shift. With Sidney and her friend Tatum (a feisty McGowan) in a resilient fighting mode, the "ghostface" killer loses the menacing omnipresence so intrinsically linked to the masked Michael Myers in John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN (1978), sometimes, he even seems ridiculously clodhopping in action. A subplot about a meet-cute between career-driven journalist Gale Weathers (Cox, who is relentlessly assertive and knows how to take a shiner) and goofy deputy sheriff Dewey Riley (Arquette, what a babe!) is another efficacious comic relief. Ergo, by diffusing these terror-inducing elements and the graphic goriness, SCREAM cleverly resuscitates a second wind to the stock genre, a teen horror can be both funny and scary, and it hits the jackpot!"
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