Film Review: Scream
It’s good to be back in Woodsboro
Ghostface is back and meaner than ever. The first entry in the franchise without Wes Craven at the helm, Scream combines a fresh cast with legacy characters for a bloody, ruthless whodunnit. Its winking genre-savviness isn’t quite as skewering or clever as it thinks it is, but Scream’s latest stewards of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett carve out a new brand of brutality while paying humble respect to the spirit of Wes Craven. It feels good to be back in Woodsboro. Minor spoilers ahead…
There’s nothing quite like the original Scream. Barreling through 1996’s front door just as the decades-long luster of slashers - Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger - was starting to wane, Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson upended the subgenre with a winking, bloody self-awareness. From its very first frames, Scream both utilized and weaponized film literacy to achieve a terrific potency: Drew Barrymore as subversive rug-pull, Jamie Kennedy’s Randy Meeks as trope-savvy soothsayer, and the open discussion of horror tropes and clichés bound everything together as ingeniously clever metatext. Flash forward 25 years and three sequels later, the franchise - in its own parlance - is getting the “requel” treatment, combining a fresh young cast with a smattering of familiar faces and a brand new killer (or killers). Helmed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not), 2022’s Scream finds a nastier edge while paying faithful tribute to the late master of horror, Wes Craven. Ghostface is back!
With its opening scene, Scream plays the formula straight; it’s no movie-within-a-movie fakeout. Once again, someone has taken their love of scary movies one step too far, this time harassing a terrified Tara Carpenter (an excellent Jenna Ortega) over her disused landline. It isn’t before long that Roger L. Jackson’s familiar snarl interrogates our victim: “What’s your favorite scary movie?” With Scream’s first-of-many updated winks, Tara dryly responds that she isn’t into hack-and-slash fare, and that she’s more of an “elevated horror” gal before namedropping a few critical darlings: Hereditary, The Witch, It Follows. But the chuckles don’t last - soon enough, Tara finds herself on the wrong end of Ghostface’s gleaming blade. More pieces start falling in place when Tara’s estranged sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), returns to Woodsboro with her boyfriend (Jack Quaid) amidst the new rash of stabbings, eventually enlisting the help of one washed-up Dewey Riley (David Arquette) to ferret out the killer.
“Helmed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett , 2022’s Scream finds a nastier edge while paying faithful tribute to the late master of horror, Wes Craven.”
With Scream, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett find themselves quite adept at remixing Wes Craven’s genre sensibilities with a new brand of brutality first seen in the duo’s 2019 survival horror flick, Ready or Not. Like its predecessors, the film shines at instilling fear through negative space, drawing out maximum suspense from empty rooms, closed doors, and pregnant pauses. Our new Scream also updates Craven’s signature cruelty with the blade, upping the ante with a slew of practical wizardry for its gory kills: slow steel sinks into shrieking flesh, unsuspecting victims are shredded to ribbons, bullets rip through faces, and torsos are gutted from belly to sternum. At one point, Dewey ominously observes: “This one just feels different.” He’s not wrong. There’s a meaner, nastier edge to this Scream’s kills, and it’s pretty great.
The new cast is mostly excellent; Jasmin Savoy Brown punches up the proceedings as Randy Meeks analogue (and niece) Mindy, and Mikey Madison adds a fresh dose of sardonic paranoia as Amber, but the real MVPs of the freshman class remain Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera. The pair play up their strained chemistry particularly well, and Ortega is especially effective at inhabiting the frantic, desperate victim through gritted teeth and bloodied limbs. Scream also wants us to feel a certain way about its legacy characters, but they’re mostly window dressing for the fans. David Arquette perhaps gets the most to chew on with an almost Shakespearian redemption arc, introduced with a rousing rendition of the old Marco Beltrami “Dewey’s Theme” rearranged by Brian Tyler, but Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott and Courtney Cox as Gale Weathers are given surprisingly little to do; Cox’s Weathers is softened to the point that you can barely recognize the prickly anti-hero from the Scream of yore.
“There are plenty of laughs to be had, but 25 years after the original and five films into the franchise, its ouroboros funhouse feels more like lampshades hung than tropes subverted.”
And what’s Scream without its signature self-awareness? This new iteration updates its metatextual callouts with its own takes on toxic fandom, legacy sequels, and the “new rules” for horror movies. There are plenty of laughs to be had and it’s all clever enough, but 25 years after the original and five films into the franchise, its ouroboros funhouse feels more like lampshades hung than tropes subverted. Self-referential horror isn’t exactly new anymore, with the intervening years giving us gems like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, and Cabin in the Woods; Scream knows the genre landscape and points the finger, but it doesn’t really know what to do with its own sentience, which at times feels oddly backdated. One of the characters also hides a surprising (and cool!) tether to the past, which is seemingly set up as a compelling source of tension, only for it to fizzle out halfway through the narrative.
That isn’t to say there’s no fun. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett handily prove that there’s blood still worth spilling in the slasher genre. Scream lands its hits with ruthless efficiency where they count: a rollicking whodunnit that will leave you guessing until the end, and nasty kills that will sate your inner gore-fiend. Don’t expect Scream to be another reinvention, the ground there is as ransacked as Stu Macher’s living room; instead, take it for what it is - a loving tribute to a dearly departed genre master with a new set of teeth.
