Please note that this article contains major spoilers for Scream 4.
The synopsis widely tossed around for the latest Scream film, which arrives 11 years after the main trilogy’s story was definitively tied off in 2000’s Scream 3, seemed reasonable enough: the three aging main cast members would be reunited once more in a film sure to at least partially wrap up their involvement in the series while making room for a new, younger main cast that could herd the still-mooing cash cow forward. That this synopsis, as business-friendly and synergistic as it sounds, turns out to be unreliable is perhaps the most interesting element of the moderately-intriguing Scream 4, which is as generationally skewed a horror sequel as you’re likely to see and one that ultimately succeeds in saying something halfway-coherent about the current national zeitgeist, albeit inelegantly and sourly. It’s also a film that ultimately does what you’d like a Scream film to do: tweak and subvert expectations, but in a punk rock way that seems calculated to irk the film’s producers and financiers rather than create a traditionally satisfying experience for moviegoers.
That the horror genre has spent the intervening decade between Scream films dining on its own innards is something Scream 4 cops to right off the bat with a boilerplate quip about horror films being effectively un-greenlightable these days unless they are remakes of a known title. All credit to Kevin Williamson for more or less internalizing his own idea -- that there is nothing new to be said about the genre – and not proceeding to then beat us over the head regardless with 90 minutes of strained, name-drop zingers. Instead, Scream 4 stops only here and there for nods at obvious targets, like the Saw franchise, and otherwise restricts itself to telling a straightforward story that’s altogether noticeably less perforated with big laughs than the previous films. There’s an unpolished, humorless sheen to this entry that seems intended to reflect the coarsened culture of an America eleven years removed from the peaceful-and-prosperous 90s and stagnating on a number of fronts.
The film’s ungenerous spirit is evidenced first in its lack of concern with acknowledging the audience’s connection to the three main characters, who are re-introduced to us (and to each other) in a brazenly matter-of-fact series of opening shots more suited to an uneventful television episode than a franchise sequel appearing after a decade-long gap. (Sidney’s reintroduction to the series in Scream 3 after only a three year interval between sequels was played up as a far more emotional affair.) The fact that none of the main characters seem to have accomplished anything significant in the intervening years (Sidney has written a Woodsboro-related book, which hardly counts) is something they seem cognizant of (Gale Weathers is reintroduced as a stay-at-home, frustrated fiction writer and disappointed wife of now-sheriff Dewey) and being humbled in their personal ambitions has perhaps dampened their enthusiasm toward each other; there’s little else to explain why Williamson reacquaints them in such an abrupt, non-dramatic fashion.
Having managed to craft an amusingly meta opening scene that has little impact on the remainder of the film (early, false rumors suggested Neve Campbell would be returning only for Scream 4’s opener, and her immediate “exit” would catalyze all that followed) Williamson and Craven proceed to do the due diligence of setting up a new main cast of high-school age victims/survivors (including equally-plausible-as-survivor-girls Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere) while juggling the reunited OT cast and their quest to find the culprit(s) behind a new outbreak of Stab-esque murders. Too often these middle passages find the filmmakers dogpaddling for their lives, unable to thread the horror-comedy needle as effortlessly and cleverly as they did fifteen years ago and struggling to reinvest Ghostface with true menace. Saddled with newcomers lacking the charisma (and well-written zingers) of Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy, and Matthew Lillard, Scream 4 conveniently keeps things mostly dour and tense, playing victims off stage at a hurried pace, usually after they’ve received a rude cell phone call from an individual using a “Ghostface app” on their iPhone. Character-driven interludes such as Derek’s lunchroom serenade to Sidney in Scream 2 are not to be found.
The film’s pervasively glum tone allows for surprisingly few detours into outright horror, with 71 year-old Wes Craven restricting himself mostly to pop-up scares and abruptly cued loud noises this time around, with one notable exception being an unnerving, classically Craven-esque moment in which a deputy sheriff/red herring character played by Marley Shelton stands obscured by shadow while conversing with someone else, her facial expressions unreadable at a crucial moment. Craven manages to work in his signature body-dragging shot, naturally, but the bulk of the film is workmanlike, the output of a director who was, let’s remember, publicly complaining about working conditions on the film even as it was shooting and was seemingly unmotivated to (or prevented from) tweaking the kill scenes to meet their utmost potential as horror-comedy. Scream 4 is neither tight not taut, which sets it apart from even the much-maligned Scream 3, whose faults in retrospect lie mainly in its unbefitting-of-a-trilogy-capper, gasbag ending.
What mandates were imposed by the stars or the studio for Scream 4’s third act/ending are impossible to know (Bob Weinstein and Kevin Williamson reportedly fought bitterly over the direction of the script, and Neve Campbell had to be coaxed into reprising her role for some reason) but however it was arrived at, the ending (spoilers ahoy!) is remarkable in its expression of a continued preference for the (presumably expensive) OT stars over the younger lead cast members. The franchise torch isn’t so much passed to those fresh-faced starlets who have lined up to receive it as it is used to brain them and set their prone bodies afire, lest they get back up and try to take something away from the 40-ish Scream stalwarts who (aside from Cox, arguably) still count this horror franchise as their resume centerpiece. The film’s final moments, which see the last surviving teenager squaring off against the three OT stars and being put down quite mercilessly (complete with a heartless “don’t fuck with the original” quip that’s positively Gran Torino-esque), are strangely reflective of the gracelessness with which today’s more seasoned generations refuse to voluntarily cede ground to the young, either culturally or economically.
Given that horror history is filled with “original” stars who eventually bowed out and made way for newcomers (including Heather Langenkamp, brought back by Wes Craven himself only to be killed in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3) the decision by the horror veterans behind Scream to go about carefully setting up new, credible franchise leads only to brutally snuff them out one by one, leaving the originals defiantly alive and kicking once again (and leaving the series nowhere to go!), calls attention to itself quite loudly. Having looked into the abyss of the modern horror genre and found absolutely nothing staring back, Williamson and Craven have seized on cultural stagnation itself as their predominant theme. As is implied by the aforementioned final teen, in a villain-explanation speech chiding Sidney for continuing to revisit her Woodsboro nightmares for profit, celebrity – no matter how it’s gained – is now recognized by all as the most valuable commodity one can acquire. In an increasingly static world of shrunken opportunities, no one moves off stage voluntarily anymore, not even the heroes. Thematically intriguing, if hurried and slack in execution, Scream 4 is at the very least a worthy entry in a franchise that refuses to die.
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