What is it with Wes Craven and teenage girls?

There's a specific moment in the horror film Scream, when you just can't believe that it was written and directed by two middle-aged men and not a teenage girl. Unmasking as a psychopathic killer the nice boy she happily lost her virginity to only three reels earlier, Sidney (Neve Campbell) spits, "F*** you". "No," replies her grinning tormentor, "we already played that. You lost."

Director Wes Craven, a vision of cuddly Dad-ness in his shiny shoes, pin-stripe suit and salt-and-pepper speckled beard, sighs. "A lot of women end up feeling like it has all been a game. There's so much pressure for young girls to give themselves sexually before they really know who the men are."

All the men in Scream are potential psychos, from Sidney's boyfriend, to her own father. And when Principal Himbry (a cameo by Henry Winkler) momentarily touches Sidney's chin as he's talking to her, it sends shivers down your spine. It's a tiny, inappropriate action that makes you wonder straight away whether he's the killer.

Stephen King has said that laughter and screaming are almost the same sound: if you stand in the lobby of a multiplex, you wouldn't be able to work out which cinema is showing the horror film and which is showing the comedy. Scream meshes the two so perfectly that you feel in a constant state of terrified euphoria for the whole film.

"See it in a packed theatre and there's this incredible amount of energy that leaves you kind of giggling," says Craven. "At the same time, you're so scared you can't move. It doesn't make sense rationally, but I don't think art ever does make quite rational sense."

The script, by Kevin Williamson, does what Craven attempted to do with the last in the Nightmare on Elm Street series (Wes Craven's New Nightmare) and subvert the genre. New Nightmare had the actors, studio head and Craven himself being stalked by Freddy Krueger as they worked on a new instalment of the series that had, out of Craven's hands, become a gross marketing parody of a brilliant film.

In Scream, the irony and self-reference is acute. Tatum, the sassy best friend played by Rose McGowan, tuts, "This is like something out of a Wes Carpenter [sic] film." Later, as the hooded killer holds a knife to her throat, she smirks, "Oh no, Mister Scary Ghost Face, don't kill me, I want to be in the sequel."

The pounds 95m US box-office for Scream has ensured that there will be a sequel and that horror is well and truly back on the map.

The Fifties "Ant That Ate Cleveland"-type movies coincided with Cold War fears of annihilation. In the Eighties, Nightmare On Elm Street became a fixture of teen life as Aids came to public attention and damage to the environment became a topic in classrooms. Again, horror movies reflected the fear of the end of the world as we know it. For teenagers it was (and is) incredibly liberating to sit in a darkened movie theatre and scream, processing these fears that no one wants to hear about.

"Horror movies deal with the overriding, barely expressed fears of a culture," says Craven. "Teenagers are very susceptible to it because they're just coming into an awareness of the world at large. Who should you trust, who should you be friends with? They know they're about to become adults and about to have to find a mate and have children and do all those very scary things."

Nowadays, terror on celluloid can only just match what happens in real life. Scream is shocking, but as Craven says, "It's all about breaking windows. Realising that suburban America is not necessarily a safe place to be."

This is a theme David Lynch also deals with, to much mainstream critical kudos, something Wes Craven has barely received. This has to be purely because he works in the horror genre: as director of Scream and who achievement is flawless. The performances, especially from Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, are awesome, and the pacing never falters. And the girls are glamorous: Courteney Cox, the goth as sex symbol. Rose McGowan, the Dalai Bette Davis. Neve Campbell, a steely-jawed teen warrior. And dear, sweet Drew Barrymore, still button-nosed and vulnerable, but fighting back on screen as in life.

This week the Evening Standard printed a letter from a punter who had seen a preview of Scream which expressed outrage at the way Craven's camera seemed to "linger on the faces of dying teenage girls". But if the director does linger on the faces of dying teenage girls, it's because he cares about them. (The boys, geeky and shifty, drop like flies - because they don't count.)

"People ask me why the women in my films always get beat up," says Craven. "It's because they get beat up in real life." And it's only ever the women who have the power and courage to outwit the killer. In Nightmare on Elm Street, after all, the heroine found that the way to destroy Freddy Krueger was by turning her back on him, refusing to acknowledge his existence.

So Wes Craven does have a thing about teenage girls: a very positive faith in their inherent superiorityn

John Lyttle reviews Scream, page 8