New ‘Scream’ slays legacy sequel tropes
Meta horror series’ original stars join fresh creative team in inspired reboot
It’s hard to contextualize what a game changer the first “Scream” was upon its release in 1996. At first glance just another “teens in jeopardy” slasher flick, the practiced hand of director Wes Craven — and a quippy, self-referential script by Kevin Williamson — made the film a demarcation point in the history of horror cinema, with three sequels of varying quality following over the next 15 years.
Although the series seemed to reach its last kill with the fourth movie in 2011, it’s entirely appropriate that — just as Hollywood is overrun with legacy sequels — we now have a new “Scream” to critique legacy tropes the way the first one did with slasher tropes.
Like “The Force Awakens,” “Jurassic World” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” “Scream” is part sequel and part remake; and like those films, our focus shifts to a new lead: Sam (Melissa Barrera), a former Woodsboro resident forced to return to her old hometown after her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) is attacked in a manner similar to Drew Barrymore’s iconic cameo in the original. Of course, it wouldn’t be a legacy sequel without familiar faces, so it’s not long before franchise vets Dewey (David Arquette), Gale (Courteney Cox) and Sidney (Neve Campbell) are roped back in to unmask the new Ghostface.
While Craven (who helmed all four previous installments) died in 2015, the fifth “Scream” is ably directed by the team of Matt BettinelliOlpin and Tyler Gillett, from a script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick (Williamson remains attached as executive producer). The new creative team effectively taps into a quarter century of real-world affinity from fans for some clever meta commentary within the film (where the in-universe “Stab” franchise is critiqued and dissected just as sequels are in ours).
One thing that always set the “Scream” series apart from its slasher kin was the films’ central mystery. Unlike supernatural monsters like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees, Ghostface is just a person in a mask holding a knife. The quest to unravel the killer’s identity kept audiences rooting for the characters’ survival, as opposed to viewing them as sta
tistics in a ballooning body count.
The series also has continuity working in its favor, distinct from “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th” or “Halloween,” all of which had loose continuity from chapter to chapter, and all of which got the dreaded reboot treatment at least once. By contrast, this universe is the same one we first visited in 1996 — including some plot developments directly reliant on knowledge of that original installment.
The latest “Scream” leans heavily into the warm feelings attached to the original characters, not only for its biggest story swings but also its most emotional moments. Longtime fans will be glad the script makes Campbell, Cox and Arquette into meaningful players in the story, even while existing within a film very much focused on foregrounding the fresh blood.
That fresh blood includes Jack Quaid as Sam’s boyfriend, and Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown as the nephew and niece of Jamie Kennedy’s movie buff character from the earlier films. Importantly, the film does a good job making the new characters feel as fully formed and worthy of emotional investment as the returnees.
In addition to being the best of the sequels (with all the jumps, gore and quips we’ve come to expect), the new “Scream” is very much a movie for this moment, tapping into the vogue for legacy revisitations, and its own privileged status as an elder statesman on the horror scene, to show how the familiar can feel both comfortable and terrifying at the same time.