Franchise Friday: The SCREAM series

Let's take a slash course in Wes Craven's beloved saga.

Jan 14, 2022

My original plan for January’s Franchise Friday was to tackle the Scream quadrilogy in separate installments, building up to this weekend’s release of Scream (or Scream 5 as it would probably make more sense to call it). But the film’s mid-January release meant I’d either have to start it right around the end of the year, when I was pretty much running on fumes, or double-up entries for the first two weeks, which didn’t seem feasible, either.

So, this week, we’re going to do a Franchise Friday crash (slash?) course, going briefly through all four films in the Scream franchise, with a full, spoiler-filled review of the new movie coming next week. I hope you enjoy!

This entry contains spoilers for the first four Scream movies; it does not have any spoilers for the fifth.

Scream (1996)

Scream was released when I was a senior in high school, and it was the first R-rated horror movie I saw in theaters. For a teen taking his first steps into film love, it was revelatory. Far from just another scary movie, it was a commentary on horror cinema that also scared the hell out of me. When I worked at a local theater shortly after its release, I regularly snuck into showings during my breaks.

Scream is, of course, famous for its opening sequence, a brutal and clever bit of suspense. At the time, it was infamous for killing off Drew Barrymore’s character in the opening scene; the marketing materials positioned Barrymore as one of the film’s stars, and her death was shocking to the unprepared. But beyond that, it’s maybe the most effective sequence Wes Craven ever directed, constantly ratcheting up the tension until it explodes in a fever of violence and desperation. It caused a visceral reaction; my heart was jackhammering, my breathing quickly paced and I still remember wondering if I should cover my eyes, watch the scene or just get the heck out of the theater. It felt dangerous for someone who hadn’t seen a scary movie in the theater before.

That opening is so effective that, over time, I began to just dismiss Scream as a movie coasting off its masterful prologue. Watching it again recently, I was reminded how wrong I was. Kevin Williamson’s script is a masterful bit of construction; knowledge of horror movies and their clichés fuels the laughs but also keeps the audience on its toes, as it’s constantly subverting expectations. Sidney (Neve Campbell) complains about horror heroines “running up the stairs when they should be going out the back door” minutes before she does the same thing, and the film’s “rules” create tension about who will live, who will die and who’s behind it all.

Craven was no stranger to meta horror; he’d recently helmed New Nightmare, a Freddy Kreuger movie that also had a real-life twist. But in Scream, he balances the commentary, the humor and the horror deftly, allowing the film to poke fun at scary movies and then turn right around and make what is possibly the ultimate slasher movie, building on everything it learned from Halloween and its ilk.

Craven isn’t afraid to be mean (Ghostface’s taunting calls are sometimes the scariest things in the movie) and knows the power of a talented cast. Campbell might be the Final Girl, but she’s no naïf; she’s innocent, but smart, capable and self-aware, the emotional anchor of the entire saga. Jamie Kennedy brings just enough charisma to be comic relief while also inviting suspicion as Randy, the know-it-all film geek. Courtney Cox coats her Friends persona in a sheen of ice to bring Gale Weathers to life, and I’ve always appreciated David Arquette’s bumbling sincerity. Add to that a menacing performance by Skeet Ulrich and bonkers, he-understood-the-assignment work from Matthew Lillard, and this was the first time a slasher movie had an ensemble worth taking seriously.

And the final reveals are just as terrifying as the opening sequence, with Billy and Stu’s blood bath mixing over-the-top violence and humor into something deranged and feverish, even more so in an age of school shootings and random violence. There’s the hint of an emotional motive, but in the end what really drives them is the desire to imitate what they see in the movie (“movies don’t create psychos; movie’s make psychos more creative,” Billy says in one of the film’s most iconic lines). It’s disturbing and all-too real, a fittingly horrific conclusion to one true scary movie, and no slasher has topped it since.

Scream 2 (1997)

Scream 2 should be an utter failure. Released just one year after the first film, there’s no way the script should be this tight, the direction this on point and the final product this much fun.

Just a week before the world would enter Titanic obsession, the release on everyone’s mind was Craven’s horror sequel (indeed, both James Cameron’s epic and the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies moved their release dates to avoid going head-to-head with Scream 2). My buddy and I saw this opening night at the biggest multiplex in town , and the lines were out the door. That party atmosphere in the opening scene was no joke; someone even walked into our viewing dressed as Ghostface, which leant that opener a surreal twist.

Scream 2 isn’t quite as effective as the first. Some of the sequel talk feels a bit more awkward and less organic than in the first movie, and slasher movies generally tend to lack intensity when they move out of high school into the college and adult years. But the mystery might be even smarter this time; I hadn’t seen the film in ages, but I remembered who the killers were, and Williamson’s script shrewdly tosses out suggestions and red herrings but never cheats when it comes to the reveal.

Craven, who always desired to move out of horror, seems rejuvenated by the success of the first film, and while the sequel lacks its predecessor’s visceral brutality and violence, it makes up for it with some cleverly crafted suspense pieces. The opening scene, taking place at the premiere of the movie within a movie Stab, cleverly pokes fun at horror tropes before delivering a tragic one-two punch (Omar Epps’ death is a routine slasher death, but Jada Pinkett Smith’s murder in the middle of the theater is still a shockingly brazen bit of horror, and her anguished scream still gives chills). There’s a fun house chase with a young Sarah Michelle Gellar, and a scene where Sidney and her friend must escape a car with the killer is a great hold-your-breath suspense piece.

I think Gale, not Monica, might be Courtney Cox’s best role; I love the way the series constantly finds a way to make her both sympathetic and narcissistic. And her love story with Dewey is the franchise’s silly-sweet center. Craven doesn’t play too safe with this one; Randy’s death is still a shocking and brutal moment, and there’s something sinister in the way Craven follows up Gale and Dewey’s aborted hookup by having Dewey stabbed in front of her just moments later (the finale reveals he’s okay).

Williamson cleverly plays off the events of the first film to keep Sidney unsure of who she can trust, leading to the film’s meanest moment, when Jerry O’ Connell’s character is shot and killed after Sidney can’t decide whether to take him down and save him. The final twist trades in the brutality and horror of the first film’s ending in favor of cleverness, but Laurie Metcalf is fantastic when she gets to go all wide-eyed maniac. And while Timothy Olyphant’s character’s motivations are a bit far-fetched (which Metcalf’s character ultimately points out), the film’s done such a good job portraying him as a sweet, concerned friend that it definitely feels surprising when he makes his heel turn.

Scream 2 almost feels ready to implode from the meta-ness — in addition to horror references, there are sly jabs at Cox’s Friends fame, sequels in general and callbacks to jokes from the first movie — and yet it holds together pretty nicely. In some cases, a rushed sequel means disaster, but the closeness that Williamson, Craven and the cast have to this story and these characters — as well as the general acknowledgement that slasher sequels are ripe for roasting — leads to a surprisingly cohesive and enjoyable second entry.

Scream 3 (2000)

This is when it all implodes.

On paper, Scream 3 seems to take a route that’s both inevitable and inspired. The meta nature of the franchise and its awareness of movie tropes means it eventually has to go to Hollywood, and the idea of killings happening on the set of a Stab sequel probably always felt like the right way to end this trilogy (as it was intended).

But from its opening sequence — a surprisingly lackluster scene in which Liev Schriber’s Cotton Weary is murdered — on, it feels rushed, lifeless and toothless, the balance that was navigated between comedy and horror so well in the first films finally being consumed by the former.

There are a number of theories about what could have gone wrong. In the light of school shootings, Dimension apparently asked Craven to tone down the film’s violence, which might be to blame for its lighter tone. And in the age of Ain’t It Cool News, the script kept being changed to prevent spoilers from leaking (a plot point the movie picks up).

But the problems are far from just studio meddling. The biggest problem is that Kevin Williamson was unable to complete the script, and so Ehren Kruger was brought in to finish it. Kruger might know his way around a plot twist (Arlington Road is no masterpiece, but its final moments are a great kick in the gut), but he doesn’t have Williamson’s skill with dialogue or pop culture savvy. The movie references are on the nose and surface-level, and all the non-legacy characters are one-dimensional cartoons that have no personality or stakes (the sole exception is Parker Posey as the actress playing Gale, and she Parker Posey’s it so hard that it becomes the film’s most memorable performance).

Coming to Hollywood might have been the obvious direction for the franchise, but the film has very little to say about movies or trilogies. Patrick Dempsey plays a cop who couldn’t be more of a red herring if he had scarlet fins, and the film only expands on the “rules” of the franchise by saying sinister things like “in the final chapter of a trilogy, all bets are off” or “the hero can die.” But Scream 3 plays it extremely safe; all three legacy killers are alive at the end, and the characters who are dispatched are so unmemorable that I had to go online after to be reminded that they actually died. And Craven, whose drama Music of the Heart debuted to a muted reception just a few months later, seems to be going through the motions. The chase sequences are perfunctory and lack suspense, the back half is a Scooby Doo mystery in a Hollywood mansion, and the humor is obvious and broad. Even Gale and Dewey’s romance feels tacked on and lifeless, and the less said about the Jay and Silent Bob cameo, the better.

There’s one exception. About midway through, Sidney is on the Stab 3 set, which is decorated for a flashback sequence involving her mother’s real-life murder. As Ghostface chases her through the blood-soaked set and doors open to nowhere, Sidney’s past comes back to haunt her and the result is the one suspenseful and truly unsettling moment in the entire film. The film’s mystery connects the murders to Sidney’s family history and the events of the first film, but the movie is too much of a tonal mess for it to properly work. It’s too funny to be haunting, and both the humor and horror feel played out by this point. There’s a reason I saw this on opening weekend and then didn’t think of it again for 20 years.

Scream 4 (2011)

If there was a reason to revisit this franchise, it was to take a second look at Scream 4 and realize just how wrong I got it 11 years ago.

My reaction to Scream 4 after seeing it in theaters was to shrug. It was a slight improvement over Scream 3 to be sure, but I didn’t think it was as smart or well made as the first two films. I felt like the returning characters and the new cast never truly gelled, and it felt like a split film. And I thought Craven didn’t quite nail the tension as well as he did in the first few entries.

Watching it again, I don’t know what I was expecting with this fourth entry, but I somehow did not appreciate it nearly enough at the time. Scream 4 is not just a smart and ferocious addition to the saga; on any given day it might eclipse Scream 2 in my rankings as the best of the franchise’s sequels.

The key is having Kevin Williamson back. Williamson doesn’t just understand these characters, he gets the texture of this world. Kruger’s Scream 3 script seemed to think that being clever just meant tossing in references to movies; Williamson understands that pop culture is how teenagers process the world and find common ground. These aren’t just meta jokes; they live and breathe pop culture, and the references are more subtly woven into the dialogue. In addition to crafting a clever mystery once again, Williamson also has fun with the film’s structure. The opening is a Russian nesting doll of fake outs that then starts commenting on the fake outs. Our familiarity with Scream and its plot informs how this story unfolds, and Williamson has a lot of fun hinting at false endings before delivering not just one, but two.

There’s been criticism about this film’s muddy rules, and how its characters harp on the rules of remakes when Scream 4 is clearly a sequel. I think that’s valid; Williamson can’t quite get a bead on what he’s critiquing here and had he waited just a few years, he’d probably find the thread in discussing “legasequels” instead of remakes. But the killer’s motive — social media fame — has only grown more relevant in the years since the film’s release, and Emma Roberts gives the franchise’s most unhinged performance since Matthew Lillard in the climax.

Whereas Scream 3’s new recruits were shallow cannon fodder, I like the characters here. Hayden Panettiere is a lot of fun as the best friend who’s just as movie savvy as the rest of them. I like Rory Culkin’s film dork quite a bit, as well as Marley Shelton’s deputy, who has eyes on Dewey. Williamson creates believable, fleshed-out characters who also each have their own motives and suspicions. Where Scream 2 and Scream 3 had its killers’ motives come seemingly out of nowhere, a revisit to Scream 4 shows the killers hiding in plain sight. I even like how Roger L. Jackson’s Ghostface voice seems to embody the sound of a teenager trying just a bit too hard. It’s a really clever mystery.

This is where I have to issue a mea culpa about my demands for the sequels to dispatch Sidney, Gale or Dewey. What makes Scream different from other slashers is that it’s not just a kill fest; it’s about survival. And this trio is the beating heart of the franchise, as well as its identity. Where too many slasher sequels become obsessed with an elaborate, increasingly supernatural, mythology for their killer, the Scream films are centered around Sidney and our love for the movies. Sidney is the emotional anchor to these films, and I don’t know that they work without her. Gale, meanwhile, is the sinister, comedic edge that allows the meta commentary to seep in and have some teeth (and we can’t have an imposter, as Allison Brie’s character learns). You might be able to lose Dewey, but David Arquette is so much fun. You could possibly lose Gale at a certain point, particularly if you were ending the series. But I think now that Sidney’s survival is essential; for her to be killed off would be a major disservice to her character (I have not seen the new Scream, and I realize I could be setting myself up for massive disappointment).

This was Wes Craven’s final film, and it’s a helluva movie to go out on. This is a more brutal entry than the previous two films. Two moments in particular are shockingly sinister: the gutting of a next-door neighbor and the way the camera lingers on Anthony Anderson’s character after he’s been stabbed in the forehead. The characters constantly talk about how familiar they are with horror tropes, particularly of jump scares and killer reveals. And Craven plays with that, often having Ghostface appear a beat earlier or later than we expect, throwing us off the expected rhythm. He seems re-energized and eager to scare, and while I still think the first Scream is the only legitimately scary movie in the franchise, this one comes close in places.

I don’t think the final scenes in the hospital quite work; it’s obvious that the ending was tacked on when the studio disliked Craven and Williamson’s original finale (which left Sidney’s fate unclear and saw the world thinking Roberts’ character was a hero). It feels rushed and obligatory. Scream is a movie about survival, not death; to end it without us knowing Sidney is okay would undercut the hard work the franchise had done before.

The final verdict

I realize the slasher genre is not particularly respected, and so these words might not hold much weight. But I think Craven’s original Scream may be the best slasher movie ever made, and it’s also an effective bit of film criticism. It builds on what Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th had done before, but then weaponizes our knowledge of those films to keep us on our toes. It’s scary, funny and smart, and the only thing that keeps it from being recognized as a masterpiece is that it’s part of a genre that doesn’t get a ton of critical love.

And I think there’s no question that the Scream franchise is the most consistent and well-executed slasher franchise. Aside from the dip of Scream 3, the film’s are smart and suspenseful, and anchored by characters the cast and its creators love and respect. There’s a reason this franchise is still beloved and highly anticipated after 25 years. I’m more eager than I thought I’d be to return to Woodsboro this weekend.

Rankings: Scream > Scream 4 > Scream 2 > Scream 3