u/GirlsInWhiteTrainers

I've been a Scream fan since the 90s (and a fan of the slasher genre in general) and after seeing hundreds of the dang things, the thing that really determines a slasher film's quality and makes it memorable to me is the chases and how interesting/violent the kills are. Looking around on this subreddit I mostly see discussion of dialogue, characters and plot twists, with people's least favourite films being the ones with gaps in logic, twists that fall flat, or continuity errors.

Obviously these elements are more important to the Scream franchise than other slasher franchises, where the characters and plot are often barebones and just an excuse for the killer to do their thing, and my favourite Scream films are the ones that have both a great story and really good chases, fights and kills.

But my discussion point is: how important are chases and kills to you in a Scream film, vs. the plot and dialogue? I saw a lot of people really disliked 6 and 7 for plot reasons, and I can see why, but I thought the chases and kills were great and that made them both solid entries for me.

I found a copy of the Hackers novelisation on eBay recently. It's 99% the same as the movie script with a few minor changes (mostly small differences in dialogue, and it ends with The Plague escaping to Japan and plotting revenge).

Here are some fun excerpts I made note of while reading it:

>Data streamed across mirrored shades.
The sunglasses on the teenager were round and black, John Lennon numbers. Worn to prevent "raster burn" from cathode rays burning into the eyeballs after hours staring at a screen, they reflected the phosphor dot symbols that streamed across the screen of Dade Murphy's monitor.
Come to me, baby, thought Dade, totally focused, totally coherent in his intentions. Give it up!
Dade Murphy was eighteen years old now.
Dade Murphy was hacking.
He'd been hacking for hours straight, and the radiation of his machine felt like the rays of a kind sun upon a lowly prisoner who'd been kept in a dungeon for years.
Hunkered down hacking: Dade Murphy.
Pro-phracking-metheus unbound!
Dade was one with his system now, surfing the codes, riding the numbers, whacking through the lines, his brain a laser beam plugged into eternity.
Here's "Zero Cool", frigid cipher turned cipher frigid again, his fingers tapping at the keyboard like a pianist on a caffeine jag or a rock and roll star ripping through a high-speed guitar riff. Click, clack, click, clack, click.
Hair cut short and fashion-defiant, dropping down in razored bangs over high forehead. The pirate-geek turned pirate-dashing. Outlaw of this frontier far away. Ride 'em cowboy...

...

>Even in a more residential area like the West Side, a dweller of Manhattan is aware almost immediately in the morning that he's living in a city. Not merely a place of stone and metal, jammed with lots of people, mind you. No, a multilayered zigzag of bumping trucks and lurching taxis and cars, contorted canyons echoing with honking horns. A complex jigsaw of jerry-rigged circuitry photo-censor to eyeball with mankind.
Dade Murphy could sense this as he woke up. Maybe it was the electricity in the city air, the sense that here he was in a city careening toward the twenty-first century on titanium Rollerblades with Walkmans jammed into ears and office workers slaving before computer screens and information, information, information ratcheting through optic fibers with white electron excitement, and that if he, Dade Murphy, did not plug his brain into a Thinkman soon, he was going to get left behind in a stale puff of fossil fuel.

...

>Hacking was a state of mind. He hacked in math class with those exquisite formulas his teacher gave him. He hacked when he got on the phone and spoke to people. He hacked when he dealt with his teachers, his fellow students. Hacking was a state of mind—and Dade Murphy had been in an incredible mental gym all his teen years. He'd read every single book there was about hacking, he knew all the updates, the incredible advances in personal computing. Information was out there. What, were they going to place a chastity cage over his frightening mind, lest it do society the horrible damage of questing after truth and knowledge?
Right.
Uh-huh. Unlikely.

...

>A voice interrupted his code-filled reverie.
"You have your transfer forms?"
Algorithms changed to heartbeat rhythms.
Rapid heartbeat rhythms.
There was this... this... female hovering over him.
Girl? Yes, she was young. But "girl" wasn't the word that popped to mind. Besides, any word that had popped into Dade Murphy's mind would have been immediately drowned and dissolved in an acid bath of male secretions and bioelectric activity.
Short brunette hair, eyes like green heaven, a perfect sarcastically bent mouth, a long sleek throat.
A slender body bathed in hip-fashion attitude, and draped in a funky leather Suzuki motorcycle jacket.
She was, in short, a slumming goddess.
Geez. Absolutely nothing in Alt.binary.sex on the Internet had ever prepared him for this.

...

>Joey Hardcastle grinned.
He had a nice machine. His father had bought it for him last year. Birthday present. A Pentaflex 486/50MHz with three hundred and twenty meg hard drive, 16-bit ROM, quadra-speed CD-ROM—and all the peripheral trimmings.
Now, the purring machine whispered to him and the hard drive cranked and clunked efficiently as it displayed the visual dances on its progression through Windows toward his communications programs.
He ran his fingers lovingly over the monitor. Touched the edge of his keyboard with the feeling only a computer hacker can know for formed plastic.
"Oh, Lucy, my Lucy," he said. "Baby, baby, baby, you and me, we're gonna show those guys."
Yeah. He took a sip of his cola, shivered with the stacked caffeine inside his soul. Those guys thought he was a munchkin. An urchin. A wanna-be, a bitty-box. They thought he was in larval stage. But he was doing things, learning things so quick... He was sure he was in full hacker's mode now, and this little cyberspace escapade would surely, surely show them.

...

>In the heart of Ellingson Worldwide Headquarters, past security doors and thick glass windows and locks and monitoring cameras, a man played with a GameBoy. Totally immersed, he was playing a scaled-down version of Mortal Kombat. The man's name was Hal. Around him were slung the sleek appointments of a Gibson Supercomputer and its attendant array of stations, monitors, and tastefully colored cables. Everything had a pleasing sheen, a tasteful smell of streamlining. Maybe a trace of coffee and tuna sandwich, a whiff of illegal tobacco to humanify things, but that was all.
As Hal gleefully hammered at his GameBoy, one of the monitors well to his right was showing an attempt at access.
At the password line, the letters G, then O, then D appeared.

...

>As the Garbage file routed toward the microfloppy in the A: drive in Joey Hardcastle's computer, Eugene "The Plague" Belford routed down the halls of Ellingson atop a sleek, expensive skateboard, startling a janitor and a security guard along the way. At the Computer Center doorway, he popped the skateboard up, clasped it firmly in hand, and pushed his way in, strutting like a cocky gunman entering a saloon.
"Never fear. I is here."

...

>Phreak was already at the notebook computer. It sat neatly at the desk, already hooked up to all the peripherals. Phreak turned it on, hit a command, and examined the interior specs. "Check it out, guys. This is insanely great. It's got a 28.8-kilobaud modem."
"Display?" Dade asked.
"Active matrix, a million psychadelic colors. Man, she's sweet."
"I want it," said Nikon.
"I want it to have my children," said Phreak.
They admired the sharp graphics and colors of the new Windows display. "Bet it looks crispy in the dark," said Cereal.
"Hit the light, then!" said Phreak.
The top light went out and the guys hovered over the computer, silently oohing and aahing at the varied shades and hues glowing from this miracle of technology.

...

>"It's got a wicked refresh rate," Dade commented.
"P6 chip. Triple the speed of a Pentium."
"It's not just the chip." He pounded out a command, got a display, tapped some info. "It's got a PCI bus." He smiled. "But then, of course, you knew that already, didn't you."
"Indeed," Kate said, arching an eyebrow. "RISC architecture is gonna change everything."
"Risk is good," said Dade.
Their eyes met, held. There was sweet electricity in the gaze. Frizzle and hum.

...

>"Yeah, cyberspace," Dade said now to all of them. "It's like astral projection. Sit in your room and go to Japan. It's where our money is, where our phone conversations take place, our messages are stored, our identities are. No fuzzy edges, no emotional spill, just pure logic. It's a world that hasn't been screwed up yet. And I want to plant my flag in it. I just can't stop."

...

>Dade pulled on the Pirate Eye the Razor/Blade boys had given him. He jacked it in. Yeah, he could perceive the screen much better with this thing. Dade Murphy, as he attached his computer into the public phone system and booted up the whirrings of his laptop computer, fancied he was some character in William Gibson's Neuromancer, diving into a wondrously luminous schematic of New York City, cruising through the canyons, flying through the circuitry. He could almost feel his jacked-in brain nodes reaching for that supercomputer in the Ellingson, getting ready to dive into it, headfirst!

...

>In Venice, California, in the rosy glow of dawn, a couple of surfer bodybuilders were on the boardwalk with laptops at a pay phone, crying "Rock and roll" as they logged onto the Ellingson computer.
In Hamburg, Germany, where it was late afternoon, a trio of punk rockers were sprawled on a bed, a computer in front of their pimply faces. "Wannsinnig, man!" cried one.
In Madrid, Spain, in an office at siesta time, a couple of tapa-tossing, black-clad Spaniards had just crammed their way in. "Ahora, mano!" cried one.
Across the world, hundreds of men and women of all nationalities cyberelbowed their way into the entirety of the Ellingson computer system. Their one commonality: they were of the new world communications order, with the common languages of C++ and Fortran and a dozen others. They were hackers.
The results of their expert anarchy were immediate.

...

>A crowd had gathered to watch the sight of kids being hauled away. In that crowd was Cereal Killer, munching a granola bar, looking totally bemused by the whole business. If he could get the message to Cereal, Dade thought...
He started struggling melodramatically, then yelled at the crowd at the top of his lungs. "They're trashing our civil rights!" he cried. "They're trashing the flow of data! They're trashing, uh... trashing... trash..."
A car door opened and Dade was stuffed into the back of the cruiser. He managed one more cry before they closed the door on him. "Hack the planet!" he cried. "Hack the planet!"

...

>They embraced, they kissed, and they rolled off the raft into the water. Dade barely noticed. It was the best kiss he'd ever had, or ever even dreamed of. It was better... better...
Even better than hacking.