y the opposite of a fantastical, "nightmarish realm." However, such a conclusion would be premature and incorrect. Just as Rony and Telotte might claim, it is precisely the transformation of everyday objects, spaces, and phenomena into mechanisms of fear and horror that makes the film terrifying. In Scream, simple, even mundane things from our world, like the Jiffy Pop, telephone, and movies, suddenly become threatening and nightmarish. Thus, one might say that the monster of the film is the hybrid created when what was previously banal and innocuous suddenly poses a threat and elicits fear.
             Within the very first seconds of the film, Craven introduces this idea of the everyday assuming nightmarish qualities through the quick juxtaposition of certain off-screen sounds and on-screen images. As the movie opens, the very first thing we hear is the sound of a phone ringing in the off-screen space, as the title "Scream" appears. Written in white against a black background, the letters turn suddenly to a suggestive, bloody red, as we hear a single scream and the sound, presumably, of a grating knife. Then, the entire frame becomes red, and the film cuts to a close-up of the phone, now ringing for a second time. Before we ever see a human, we see a television in the background, whose blue screen indicates that the set is ready for a video-screening, and we are now, abruptly, thrown into the narrative and the diegesis of the film. In this almost insignificant amount of time--merely the second or two between juxtaposition of the telephone's rings--Craven succeeds in introducing several essential elements of the film: clearly, as the ringing telephone, the scream of a woman, and the exaggerated sound of the knife are the very first things we experience, these will be crucial to the following scene, and to the film as a whole. On one hand, these auditory and visual experiences simply cue the audience to the fact that they are watching a "...