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After more than a decade, a new Scream movie is unleashed upon us. The series was last seen when the slasher hype it helped create in the mid-’90s was starting to fade again, making way for Asian ghost stories and torture porn with films like Saw and Hostel. Now Wes Craven returns to the series together with the writer of the first two films, Kevin Williamson. Also returning are the three main survivors of the previous movies: Dewey, now upgraded to sheriff; Gale, a retired reporter and now Dewey’s wife; and Sidney, who has just finished a book about her experiences in the last three films and returns to Woodsboro to do a book signing on the anniversary of the original murders.
Yeah, really convenient.
I guess you all know where it goes from here. Kids are murdered, along with the occasional parent too. Where are these parents, by the way? I can remember only one in the movie: Sidney’s aunt, the mother of her niece Jill (Emma Roberts). None of these other kids seem to have parents. Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) is the only other one we see at home, and her parents are nowhere to be found either.
Wes Craven is an on-and-off director. For every A Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s Vampire in Brooklyn; for every Scream, there’s Cursed. He is a director whose material needs to be good, unlike James Cameron, who can make even a Pocahontas rip-off about blue aliens and turn it into one of the highest-grossing movies ever. So Craven must be thankful for Williamson’s script, which is pretty fun. It touches on the horror conventions of the last decade, like the slew of remakes dumped upon us over the years, including Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street. Again, the rules have changed—but then again, not that much.
Having watched all three Scream movies a couple of months ago, one aspect of what makes a good Scream movie is often overlooked: Woodsboro. Somehow this small town is a character of its own, like the house in A Nightmare on Elm Street or Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th. That is, in my opinion, one of the reasons the third movie didn’t really work. They took all the characters out of Woodsboro and put them into Hollywood, like fish out of water. Compare it to all those franchises that end up in space—it almost never works (Jason X being an exception).
When watching Scream 4, I had the idea in the beginning that they would focus more on the new teens to create a new trilogy, with the old characters passing the torch—maybe even by finishing them off, like they did with Jamie Lee Curtis after she survived Michael Myers at least three times. I don’t see another trilogy here, and this movie works as a nice conclusion to a quadrilogy, though there’s always the possibility of a Scream 5.
But wait with that, Kevin Williamson, until you have new horror trends to bash.
