‘Scream’ is for the fans
The series’ fifth entry is a clever, fun poke at toxic culture.
This entry contains spoilers for Scream, the fifth entry in the slasher franchise.
We probably didn’t need a fifth Scream movie — a silly statement, given we don’t really need any film or sequels — but I’m glad we got one.
That in itself is surprising, given that I rolled my eyes when it was announced that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo known as Radio Silence, were shepherding this new installment. At the time, I was still smarting from Scream 4, which I’d seen opening weekend in 2011 and found decidedly lackluster (in recent weeks, I’ve done a 180 on this). But even having changed my mind on the fourth entry, I didn’t really know what new perspective could be brought to the table. The franchise had already dissected bad sequels, trilogies and remakes. What new ground could be covered? And more than that, was there any sense moving forward without the guiding hand of Wes Craven?
But Scream — reverting to the first film’s title is part of its meta commentary — works surprisingly well, feeling, in its best moments, like the logical continuation of Craven and Kevin Williamson’s work. It’s scary and brutal, but also as clever and funny as the best movies in this franchise. More than that, it finds new things to say about horror cinema and toxic fan culture. It may lack Williamson’s witty dialogue or Craven’s mastery of suspense, but it comes close, and proves there’s still blood pumping in this 25-year-old franchise.
Do you like scary requels?
As with Scream 4, this fifth entry tackles remakes, although it starts off with a more blatant riff. Where the previous film opened with a jokey Russian nesting doll structure, weaving in and out of various Stab sequels before settling into the movie proper, Scream (2022) opens with a reboot of Scream (1996’s) famous opening sequence, finding teenager Tara (Jenna Ortega) alone in her kitchen when a stranger calls to talk about scary movies.
It’s a bold move, given the iconic weight of Craven’s original sequence, widely regarded as not just one of the top slasher scenes of all time but one of the great movie openings. Radio Silence may not match the desperation and terror of the original, but they still deliver a competent and taut sequence, which includes a great moment using phone-activated home locks. And where the original opening featured a horror movie trivia component, screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick do something similar with Stab trivia, using the franchise’s mythology to heighten the suspense. It’s fun, scary and surprisingly brutal, and it’s also the only opening in the franchise where the victim lives, the first of many twists in store.
The attack brings home Tara’s estranged sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and her boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid). Sam has her own dark history with Woodsboro, along with secret links to the original 1996 killings that she fears may have put her sister at risk. They meet Tara’s friends, a group of high schoolers with their own quirks, motives and ties to the original film. Along the way, legacy characters Dewey (David Arquette), Gale (Courtney Cox) and Sidney (Neve Campbell) show up to assist.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Scream is poking fun at the legasequel craze (or, as the characters here call them, “requels”), in which the franchise story is continued via a reboot that also makes sure to honor the original film and its characters. The killings, we’re told, have to tie back to the first film (“not the inferior sequels”), honoring the original characters and satisfying hard core fans of the franchise’s mythology. Along the way, Star Wars, Halloween and other similar requels get nods, while the film uses that material to build its own satisfying requel to the trilogy.
It’s obvious the filmmakers have done their homework and are fans of the previous Scream films; there are constant callbacks to each of the franchise’s movies via plot points, visual cues, character names and off-handed references. At times, entire sequences mimic scenes from the original and the film’s third act is a dizzying and effective twist on the first film’s climax. It’s smart, funny and self-aware. The mystery works effectively, and the reveal that the killers are trying to reboot the franchise in a way that pleases hardcore fans is a clever tweak of current movie culture, in which toxic fans demand ownership of a franchise and the right to reset it in their own image. Meta has been the name of the game for the Scream saga since Drew Barrymore was asked if she liked scary movies, and the self-referential nods set it apart from other slashers.
But it’s not just enough to know the tropes of a scary movie; countless would-be YouTube critics can count their sins. A good Scream movie works because it’s also just a good movie, and this new addition doesn’t lose sight of the fact that it must also work on its own.
Return to Woodsboro, again
Revisiting the Scream franchise, I found that while its meta aspects were what gave it its personality, there’s a heart to the series that brings its most ardent fans back. It’s the rare slasher series where the majority of the core cast has returned for every film, making it less about who will be offed in each entry and creating an effective thread about its main characters as survivors. The best Scream movies offer a cast of characters who aren’t simply waiting to die or be revealed as killers; they’re often a close-knit group that has their own dynamics and relationships, even as they all have their own potential motives and opportunities to be the killer. Scream (‘96), Scream 2 and Scream 4 work because their characters are well developed, believable and competent; when they’re turned into meta cartoons, as in Scream 3, the film lands with a thud.
Scream (‘22) may not have a cast as instantly charismatic as the first film’s, but its teenage leads are believable as a friend group. Tara is instantly sympathetic because she’s a movie fan; she discusses watching scary movies to bond with her mother. Sam has her secrets (which we’ll talk about in a bit) and dark side, and the rest of the friends are made up of the concerned/suspicious boyfriend, the movie geek with a family tie to the first film, the outsider who the group can’t quite peg, and the best friend. Williamson’s masterstroke was that the Scream films were never just slashers; they were clever whodunnits. And Vanderbilt and Busick’s script is just as smart, keeping its villains in plain sight — one even points out how he was specifically suggested — until everything explodes in the final act.
I don’t find slasher movies particularly scary at age 42, but I can be drawn in by an effective suspense sequence. Radio Silence has proven in the past that they can balance fun and tension, and this Scream has some of the more effective slasher scenes in the franchise. The ending uses our familiarity of the first film against us, pulling the rug out at just the right moment, but there are other moments that work just as well. A scene involving the town sheriff (Scream 4’s Marley Shelton) and her son (Dylan Minnette) features one surprising attack and playful use of our knowledge of people hiding behind doors and dark entryways. Another sequence outside a party makes sinister use of a phone tracking app and then complicates things for its victim when the blood on his hands makes it impossible to call for help on his touch screen phone. And while we’ll talk more about the film’s masterful and heartbreaking hospital sequence more in a moment, the film channels Craven’s mean streak by making matters even worse for the injured Tara as she tries to escape a killer in her wheelchair. The film is also one of the most brutal and bloody of the Scream franchise; it’s never over-the-top, but it raises the stakes in a series that has been chided for playing it too safe.
That argument has been made, of course, because of how long its kept those main characters around. And I’ve made the case, too, that the Scream franchise couldn’t maintain an edge without killing one of its main characters (I used to suggest that Sidney should die in the opening sequence, but I’ve since come to realize that would be a betrayal of the series’ ethos). And while Dewey, Gale and Sidney have a limited amount of screen time in this, they make it count, particularly Arquette.
As with any good requel, the new heroes need a grizzled hero to guide them through these waters, and it works better if that hero has seen some hard days and has some regrets. Arquette’s Dewey has been fired as sheriff, his wife has left him and he’s hit the bottle. And while that admittedly makes him a good suspect, Dewey is this film’s Han Solo — or maybe more accurately, its Luke Skywalker, bitter and regretful over his past adventures. But, of course, Dewey is too kindhearted a character to look the other way, and he’s the requel’s big sacrifice. And he goes out a hero, but also gets one of the franchise’s most brutal and heart wrenching deaths, gutted by Ghostface while his ex-wife is trying to call him. It’s an effective moment, and preceded by some of the best work Arquette has done in this franchise (he’s often a bit too tic-prone for me, but he’s really good in this entry).
Gale and Sidney don’t have a ton to do but offer guidance for the new characters; that is, of course, their role in a requel. But Scream gets a lot of mileage out of the idea that these two have seen this movie play out too many times. It twists the requel template by allowing them not to be the old vets won over by the new kids but rather the ones smarter and one step ahead of them, coming in to save the day because they know the new heroes are out of their depth.
It all culminates in a third act cleverly revealed to take place at the same house where the killers revealed themselves in the first Scream. And the film has a great time jumping back and forth between sudden reveals (the gunshot that identifies one killer is a great jolt) and keeping us off balance over who to trust. As I said before, the killers’ desire to reboot the franchise the way they think the story should go is a nice poke at ugly fandom, and Quaid in particular is a lot of fun to watch once he’s allowed to be unhinged (also, I appreciate the film presenting him as a noobie who becomes obsessed with the Stab films when, in reality, he’s a Stab superfan). It all, of course, ends with a brutal bloodbath in which our heroes narrowly escape and the bad guys are killed.
And it’s mostly effective; but it’s also the area where I have my biggest issues with the film.
CGI creates psychos
The first issue I have is more in terms of execution. And while it reaches its apex in the final act, it’s actually a problem throughout the film.
Early on, we learn that Sam is actually the illegitimate child of Billy Loomis, one of the killers in the first film, portrayed by Skeet Ulrich. Her mother was a high school fling and, after Billy was revealed to be a psychopath, she kept it hidden until Sam found out.
I don’t have a problem with this reveal; as the killers note at the end, having the lovechild of the first film’s character come back for revenge is an interesting angle. And the idea of Sam wrestling with the fact that she has a killer’s DNA could be intriguing. But aside from a brief shot of her downing pills early in the film, there’s not much to suggest Sam is truly struggling with any psychotic tendencies. She might be a bit depressed, but there’s never a hint that she’s wrestling with her sanity; she’s never plausible as a potential killer, despite the film trying to keep us on our toes.
Instead, her link to her father is portrayed by having Ulrich return in reflections using very bad CGI de-aging. Leave aside the fact that there’s no reason why Sam would see her father as a teenager in the same blood-soaked clothing he was wearing in Scream (maybe it would be more intriguing if he showed up aged as the father she never knew), it’s just an awkward and bungled reveal (I could entertain an argument that this is poking fun at similarly bad CGI resurrections in films like Rogue One). Ulrich shows up to nod and suggest his daughter take some violent action, and at the end of the movie he’s almost sympathetic, basically nodding with a “that’s my girl” when she dispatches the film’s villain.
That moment is, of course, super-violent (we’ll get to that in a moment) but there’s nothing in it to suggest that Sam is capable of becoming an unhinged serial killer. She’s framed as a heroine, another final girl who poses no threat to anyone other than the bad guys, and having Billy Loomis show up to nod approvingly and almost lovingly is a weird approach for a franchise that has firmly established him as a murderous psychopath.
And that actually ties into the second issue I have with the film, which is the over-the-top, brutal stabbing-slashing sequence in which Sam takes down her murderous boyfriend. Most Scream movies end with the heroine putting a bullet in the bad guy, but this one has Sam turn into a rage machine who stabs the villain more than a dozen times before slitting his throat. If it followed it up by presenting Sam as an additional threat who had embraced her dark history, it might work. If the film ended with a hint that Sam was going to continue the franchise by being the new Ghostface, it might have worked. Instead, it’s just a moment where the hero stops the bad guy by being just as vicious.
Which is a weird undercurrent that I’ve noticed through the Scream franchise during my rewatch. Sidney and Gale seem almost eager to finally kill the bad guy in several of the films; Scream 3 ends on a moment where Sidney blows her villainous half-brother away and then holds his hand as he dies. In this film, Sidney flat out states early on that she wants to help Sam kill the new Ghostface because she has kids who she doesn’t want to be in his sights. Gale and Sidney show up at the home to finish the villain; when it comes time to kill her, Sidney asks Gale if she would like to “do the honors.”
I get that this is a violent slasher movie and that, ultimately, the bad guy has to be put down. But there’s something about the heroes being so willing to do it that puts a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s because, at their core, horror movies are about good versus evil; to make the good guys just as willing to take a life (however justifiable the film tries to make it) doesn’t work. It should be a last-gasp moment of desperation and survival, not a badass moment to cheer. And making their target be a teenager girl also just feels a bit too far (although her final jump scare moment is effective). It’s a brief moment in the movie but, like I said, it’s present throughout the franchise, and it feels a bit too callous.
They usually come back
Despite those issues, like I said, I’m a fan of Scream. And it ends on a perfect note to close the series, with a final shot echoing that of Scream (96). But with a healthy box office take this weekend, is it truly the end?
On the one hand, I’m fine if this is it. There are five Scream films; four of them are good to great. The slasher genre has been effectively critiqued and tweaked, and I think Gale and Sidney’s stories don’t have much farther to go at this point.
But one of the fun things about the Scream franchise is how it serves as criticism for the trends currently at play in the genre. And horror is constantly shifting and cycling, just as other genres are. In another 10 years, it’s conceivable that it would be worth returning to Woodsboro to comment on the next batch of clichés and tropes, and the film leaves a few openings. Maybe they will explore Sam as the new Ghostface. I wouldn’t be surprised if in another 10 or 15 years the saga shifts to focus on Sidney’s children.
I’m happy to have Scream back. And as long as the horror genre keeps shifting, I don’t mind them taking another stab at this every decade.