Paramount Pictures
The very first Scream movie came out in 1996, and I might have watched it in theaters or soon after on rental video, but I don’t entirely recall. I did enjoy it for its sort of meta-approach to horror movies, even though I wasn’t even remotely a horror fan at that point. Since then three other Scream movies have come out, the last one Scream 4 in 2011 that almost seemed like a ‘reboot’ type at first before once again subverting the formula. But the trouble with subversion is that eventually you run out of things you haven’t already parodied.
The new Scream comes from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, the creators behind the blood-drenched and fun Ready or Not. Wes Craven directed the other four movies but he passed away in 2015 — one of the characters here is even named in his honor. It’s also the first sequel in the series to eschew the numbers, but that’s because this is a ‘requel’, a term with vague origins and disparate definitions that is meta-referenced in the movie itself as something that’s a sequel that’s also theoretically a reboot, like Creed or The Force Awakens.
The nature of media meta-commentary is itself one of the big themes of the new movie, with a lot of twists and turns that are mostly unsurprising, but also mostly satisfying. The film also heavily uses the movie-within-a-movie franchise ‘Stab’ to further comment on itself. The movie starts replicating the original Scream intro in some ways (for reasons that are later explained reasonably) as we watch young Tara Carpenter (a clear reference to famed horror director John Carpenter), played by Jenna Ortega.
But it’s not the same old same old, as was parodied in the highly problematic Scary Movie, even though Tara lives in the same old Woodsboro town. Here we follow Tara’s sister Sam (Melissa Barrera, playing it mostly very, very straight) who comes back to her hometown after leaving for mysterious circumstances to check on her sister. Along with her is boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid), and they work to try and figure out what’s really going on.
Paramount Pictures
As to be expected, Tara’s close circle of friends are all self-aware suspects, including paranoid Wes Hicks (Dylan Minnette), the son of the police officer Judy Hicks from Scream 4, smart and delightful twins Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who share self-aware Randy Meeks as their late uncle, and kooky Amber (Mikey Madison). No one is safe and no one is without suspicion, and the old school characters get involved in ways sometimes surprising (and sometimes not).
Playing their franchise characters, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, and Neve Campbell easily fall back into their old roles, but only Dewey really is given much to speak of in terms of interesting story content. And of course voice actor Roger L. Jackson returns to voice Ghostface like he has the whole series and he’s still got it. Naturally the movie focuses primarily on the newbies, as per the ‘requel’ paradigm, but it’s also entirely a movie about itself, its audience, its past movies, and the industry as a whole.
It’s a lot to jam in there, and I can’t say that it’s exactly high art or anything, but it was enjoyably fun and entertaining throughout, paced well with only a few annoying fake outs and jump scares. And I don’t think I had any ‘eye roll’ moments which is certainly a rarity for this sort of sequel thing. Overall, I think this is the sort of sequel that most fans of the franchise will really like, and some will feel personally attacked by — but that’s also part of the fun of this series after all.
Scream has a run time of 1 hour 54 minutes and is rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some sexual references.
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