EEEEEEEEE!!!

In Pasadena, no one can hear you scream. Well, maybe someone can, but it really doesn’t matter because everyone else is screaming, too. The kids up on the screen, the teens in the bouncy seats. They are legion and eerily similar: boys with patchy, soft adolescent stubble in baggy retro wear, girls with blackberry pulp mouths, intentionally exposed midriffs and ill-placed barrettes. Call it splatter chic. Because we are all here watching, often through splayed fingers, the bloody harvest of yet another generation of slasher-film victims, and we are screaming. In all the right places.

I’m an old-timer, of course, along with my brother and our friend, whom I roped into accompanying me to the late show of “Scream” because a friend had described, with a 15-year-old’s exquisite intensity, the joy of the slice-and-dice experience--how the audience gasped and clutched and cowered, how they yelled advice to their doppelgngers on screen. Ah, yes, it brought back a flood of tender memories, of the under-the-cot throat stabbing of “Friday the 13th,” of the bed-turned-Cuisinart in “Nightmare on Elm Street,” of the plucky naif, Jamie Lee. But mostly it evoked the joy of that scary-safe horror-flick buzz and the sweet, roiling rush of the throat-busting, eye-bulging, socially permissible scream. One after the other, until the movie ended and you crept from the theater, brain limp, body spent. You don’t get that kind of release from “The English Patient,” let me tell you.

So off we went to Pasadena, where we dined first on awful pizza, too much Coca-Cola and then settled into our seats accompanied by a big bag of caramel corn. (You can go home again.)

Wes Craven’s no dummy. He knows nowadays he’s dealing with a more sophisticated clientele. The kids in “Scream” not only look like the kids in the audience, they think like them, too. They are slasher savvy; they know the rules: Anyone who has illicit sex is doomed, as are those who drink or do drugs. Those who say, “I’ll be right back” will certainly not be. (Come to think of it, all of these things are also true of “The English Patient.” So how come there wasn’t more screaming?)

Even with Craven’s smirky self-awareness, the twitching brain-stem elements are there: lots of vulnerable, revealing windows, the sudden burst of the ringing telephone, the scary mask in the mirror right behind you, the flashing, relentless blade. Add to that Drew Barrymore’s brief but terrifying appearance in a truly bad wig, and I spent most of the movie grabbing my brother’s arm or peering between my hands. When I wasn’t screaming. The oldest broad in the joint, screaming my head off. And shouting advice to the screen. (Note to Neve Campbell’s agent: After this and “The Craft,” next movie must not include homicidally insane school chum.) When we finally pulled ourselves out onto the street, my throat ached, my head rang and my stomach churned. I felt wonderful.