Still screaming
Campbell, Cox and Arquette take a new stab at meta-horror franchise in film that’s a reboot and sequel
Twenty-five years after “Scream,” Neve Campbell is still seeing Ghostface everywhere she goes.
This past Halloween, Campbell brought her children to a pumpkin patch in Hollywood, where they saw fellow visitors dressed in the groaning Ghostface masks worn by the murderers who have tormented her character in these undying horror movies.
Though the costumed revelers didn’t seem to notice Campbell, she resisted her older son’s urgings to reveal that they were in the presence of Sidney Prescott, the intrepid “Scream” hero she has played since 1996.
“My 9-year-old hasn’t seen the movies, but he obviously knows about them,” Campbell said. “And he was like, ‘Mom, you should go tell them!’ I’m not going to walk over and be like, ‘Hey, do you know who I am?’ ” She laughed, adding, “Although it probably would be fun for them.”
Hearing Campbell’s tale, her two longtime “Scream” co-stars joked about how their connections to the films affected them at Halloween. Courteney Cox, who plays the strident TV personality Gale Weathers, said that she kept her own supply of Ghostface masks. David Arquette said it was even easier to remind people of his screen identity as the hapless deputy Dewey Riley. “Why do you think I have this mustache?”
At its release, “Scream” reinvented the slasher picture, populating it with photogenic cast members who were well-versed in the genre’s rules and tired
of its cliches. It made a star of its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, reinvigorated the career of its director, Wes Craven, and kicked off a cottage industry of imitators and parodies.
The slow-burn success of the first movie elevated its lead actors: Campbell, a star of the TV drama “Party of Five;” Cox, enjoying her first flushes of success from “Friends;” and Arquette, a scion of a family of character actors. Three sequels bonded them for life, and Cox and Arquette fell in love and got married.
But following “Scream 4” in 2011, the series seemed to grow tired. By then, Cox and Arquette had separated and would later divorce; Craven died in 2015. A “Scream” TV series only loosely connected to the movies ran for three years on MTV and VH1 but gained little cultural traction.
Now, after a decadelong absence, a new “Scream” — with no numerals or subtitles, from new directors and new screenwriters — is back in theaters. It is both a reboot and a sequel, introducing new characters
(played by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid and others) to an audience equally accustomed to franchise do-overs like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and art-house horror films like “The Babadook” and “Midsommar.”
The latest “Scream” also brings back Campbell, Cox and Arquette as the founding characters, who have grown well into adulthood and been altered in different ways by their past encounters with the various Ghostface killers. For the actors, the proposition of returning to “Scream” is, well, a double-edged one: a chance to rekindle old connections and remember what made the previous films great — tempered by the fear that they will squander the series’ legacy if they cannot duplicate past glories.
When she was approached about the new movie, Cox said, “I was really like, ‘What? They want to do another “Scream”?’ ” But as she considered it further, she thought, “Why not go back to something that was such a huge part of my life and
play a character that was fun? They must have a real vision for this if they want to bring back the franchise and take the risk.”
Spyglass Media Group partnered with Paramount to produce a new entry written by James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac”) and Guy Busick (“Ready or Not”) and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of the filmmaking group Radio Silence (“Ready or Not,” “V/H/S”).
Naturally, this “Scream” sees another Ghostface once again plaguing the fictional California town of Woodsboro, requiring the return of Sidney, Gale and Dewey. But bringing back the actors who played them was hardly a certainty.
The biggest obstacle, they said, was the absence of Craven: “I don’t see how that happens — emotionally but also practically,” said Campbell. “Who’s going to do it as well as Wes?”
But one by one, the actors were placated by the film’s directors, who wrote them letters praising their past work and urging their involvement.
There will of course be conversations about further entries if this “Scream” hits its targets, but for now, its veteran leads are satisfied to have carried their characters to the quarter-century mark.
Campbell said she was grateful to have played a horror-movie protagonist who is never depicted as a helpless victim. “I’m very lucky, as a woman, to have gotten a role where people come up to me and say, ‘Sidney Prescott inspired me — Sidney Prescott made me more courageous, made me less insecure, made me stand up for myself,’ ” she said.
Cox preferred to draw more pragmatic lessons from her “Scream” experience and the shifting identities of the people who have donned its telltale mask in each installment.
“There’s a deeper meaning to the fact that anybody could be Ghostface,” she said. “What it’s taught me is that you don’t go into a parking lot, ever, at night. You don’t go to the bathroom in a movie theater. And anybody could go off the deep end.”