Review: Scream (2022)

 Scream (2022)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some sexual references

Score: 4 out of 5

Scream is a horror franchise that, now that it's old enough to be considered retro, seems to have enjoyed a second wind of popularity, especially among kids who weren't even born yet when the first movie came out. As someone who's always loved the series, I'm not remotely surprised. The 1996 film by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson stands the test of time as a horror classic, fusing a slasher movie structure with the twists and turns of a soap opera and much higher production values than most '80s slashers, its elements coming together to make for a gripping story that at once pulled back the curtain on the genre's mechanics and then, when the viewers were lured backstage to get a closer look, closed the curtain behind them and trapped them with a terrifying killer who was willing to exploit all those mechanics to gain an additional lethal edge. It brought the slasher formula back down to Earth after the increasingly outrageous exploits of Michael, Jason, Freddy, and their many imitators, proving that you can make all the jokes you want about stupid killers stalking some big-breasted girls who can't act who are always running up the stairs when they should be going out the front door (it's insulting) -- a masked murderer with a knife and a grudge can still gut you like a fish as easily as he can those hapless airheads. The sequels, too, still hold up; the second film was a worthy successor, the fourth was a nice throwback that proved horrifyingly prescient of the worst excesses of social media culture, and even the third, which I still maintain doesn't wholly work all the way through, deserves a second look for how it was willing to take on Hollywood's ugly history of sexual harassment and assault -- and right under producer Harvey Weinstein's nose, at that.

(The less said about the TV series, though, the better. Liked some of the actors and not much else.)

This fifth film, titled simply Scream rather than Scream 5 in the tradition of recent "back-to-basics" sequels like the new Halloween and Candyman films, may be the first film in the series that wasn't directed by Wes Craven (who unfortunately passed away in 2015), but the crew they brought in to fill his shoes immediately grabbed my attention. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella together make up the Radio Silence filmmaking team, whose most recent feature film Ready or Not is not only one of the better horror films in recent memory, but one whose mix of brutal horror violence and dark comedy seemed a natural fit for the sensibilities of a Scream movie. And for the most part, it worked. The new Scream is easily the best in the franchise since the first two, a film that is at once a love letter to fans and a film that is not afraid to directly challenge fandom in general, all while simultaneously telling a new chapter in the lives of the returning characters and introducing an interesting and lovable cast of new teenagers to the party. The film may diverge from some of Craven and Williamson's specific style on the surface, but it still maintains the core of what makes this series at its best work while still feeling fresh. Did some of the meta humor at times feel a bit too on-the-nose? Yes. Do I have a few minor but nagging questions about certain plot details? Yes. Could there have been more chase scenes where Ghostface goes after his victims? Yes. But at the same time, did I enjoy myself in a way I rarely get to with a pure slasher like this? Oh hell yeah.

Set 25 years after the events of the first film, this one largely focuses on a "next generation" of Woodsboro teens and young adults. Among them is Samantha "Sam" Carpenter, a bowling alley attendant in Modesto, California who fled her childhood home thanks to a dark trauma in her past: namely, she learned as a teenager that she was Billy Loomis' illegitimate daughter, the revelation destroyed her parents' marriage, and she's spent the rest of the life having run-ins with the law. However, she's forced to return home when her teenage younger sister Tara is attacked and badly injured in her home by somebody wearing a Ghostface mask, dragging her, Tara, her boyfriend and co-worker Richie, and Tara's friends into a brand-new murder plot. Turning to the experts -- Dewey Riley, now a bitter retired cop living in a trailer, Sidney Prescott, now happily married with kids and about as eager to return to Woodsboro as Sam was (i.e. not one bit), and Gale Weathers, now the host of a morning talk show in New York -- for help, they find that all the rules go out the window when somebody's keen on doing a "re-quel" to a horror classic.

As you might guess by the title dropping the number "5" and going by simply Scream despite not being a remake, the big horror trend this movie is homaging is the recent one towards horror sequels and other nostalgic reboots that aim to pull a franchise back to its roots, with the 2018 Halloween, among other films, mentioned by name. The arthouse "elevated horror" trend comes in for some ribbing too, both affectionate and otherwise, but at its core, this is fundamentally a film about Scream's legacy and how it has become a nostalgic classic in its own right, just like the '80s slashers that the original sent up. The setting and characters are awash in references to Stab, the Scream series' in-universe version of itself, with two sets of new "rules" for surviving a horror movie discussing both the Stab films and what the film calls the "re-quel" trend in horror as the characters start to speculate that the killer this time is attempting to do one. In particular, the latest Stab film, the eighth in the franchise, hangs over this movie's events like a storm cloud. It's mentioned that Stab 8 was directed by "the Knives Out guy" Rian Johnson, and the various changes he made to the story proved to be about as controversial as his real-life work on The Last Jedi, a more experimental horror film that broke all the rules and was lambasted by series fans for, among other things, an unrealistically hyper-competent heroine and a scene where Ghostface wields a flamethrower. (On that note, I loved the cameo by James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca of Dead Meat as the hosts of a hacky YouTube commentary channel who made a video about what a "TOTAL FAILURE" Stab 8 was.)

The specific reference to Johnson and The Last Jedi is important in setting up the villains, who I personally believe were close to perfect in how despicable they were. After five movies, I've come to develop a theory that a key element that makes a proper Ghostface is an extremely petty motive, one that they layer in self-serving justifications that fall apart like a house of cards the moment anyone presses them on such, revealing the killer to be a pathetic sack of shit who really needs to get a damn life. And without getting into spoilers, the killers here read like a snapshot of everything wrong with modern fandom culture at its most extreme and obsessive, a message that one could apply to film and TV franchises, K-pop groups, and even CEOs and politicians. The actors playing the killers here both did great jobs conveying the kind of moral detachment and twisted logic that's central to a good Ghostface, the "leader" of the duo with a misplaced feeling of betrayal and the "accomplice" with a psychotic glee at getting to kill people. Before the reveal, too, Ghostface was in top form, especially in an opening scene where Roger L. Jackson initially almost manages to make his creepy Ghostface voice sound normal before he starts to tighten the screws. Ghostface is always a very human killer who makes mistakes, nowhere more so than here where the opening victim manages to (barely) survive, but at the same time, they're a brutal killer, nowhere moreso than here where Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett inject a dose of very modern gore that goes above and beyond even the fourth movie. Even when characters survive, we see the stab wounds and hear their screams, and the ones who die get brutal kill shots.

The returning characters Sidney, Gale, Dewey, and (from the fourth film) Judy Hicks are here placed in the background and largely assist the new heroes, another tradition that this movie shares with the Star Wars sequel trilogy. All of them have grown since the last movie, they're where you'd logically expect them to be in 2022, and their arcs take them to some interesting places, especially Gale. The new guys, meanwhile, were a remarkably likable group of people whose actors all kept them interesting even if they roughly fell into archetypes. Jenna Ortega was a standout as Tara, the survivor of the opening scene who was pulled into the events of the film by circumstance yet chooses to fight back even though she spends much of the movie in a hospital bed, in a wheelchair, or on crutches. She proves to be a worthy successor to Sidney Prescott, and one who I see going places and who I hope returns for Scream 6. Chad and Mindy, the football player and his movie geek twin sister, were also instantly memorable, the former being far more likable than the usual "jerk jock" and saving his aggro side for people who threaten him and his girlfriend Liv while the latter fills the role that Randy once did in supplying both the film's meta commentary and some of its best jokes. Richie is the total outsider to both Woodsboro and horror fandom, the man who, despite being a grown man, represents the young viewers just getting into horror movies (and felt like Jack Quaid bringing a lot of Hughie from The Boys to the table, which was fine by me), while Tara's friend Amber, Chad's girlfriend Liv, and Judy's son Wes seem vanilla at first but take their seemingly unassuming natures in surprising directions. The interesting cast of characters on display here always left me guessing as to which ones were the killers, and while the ultimate reveal of who they were made logical sense, I would've been fine if any of them turned out to be evil.

The one weak link for me within the cast was unfortunately a central one, Sam. On paper, the idea behind her, that she's Billy Loomis' bastard daughter, was already questionable and felt like something out of a bad fanfiction, and to the film's credit, the film seemed to recognize that. I did like Melissa Barrera in the part, especially when she went to town towards the end and demonstrated her ass-kicking chops, and I liked how the film ultimately utilized that seemingly cliché backstory during the finale, especially with how it played with the actual killers. That being said, the visions she has of Billy Loomis (played by a de-aged Skeet Ulrich) as a sort of "spirit advisor" or hallucination were jarring and felt like they belonged in a different film, and not once did I buy her as the potential killer that the film was setting her up as, not with how, despite her rough past and signs that she was mentally ill in a genre where that kind of thing is usually a Bad Thing, she proved herself to be too good-hearted to be a villain. While I bought the "heroine" side of Sam's character, I didn't buy the "bad girl" side outside of a couple of admittedly very good scenes. I also had a few questions regarding dates and continuity, especially where the film's depiction of the Stab franchise was concerned, though to be fair, I do have a personal headcanon regarding how everything could have played out.

Behind the camera, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett don't really try to emulate Craven's style much beyond similar musical cues from Marco Beltrami, and utilize a lot more old-school dread, especially in a scene involving Judy and Wes where Ghostface isn't on screen but is implied to be lurking like Jason Voorhees. They're not ones for long, drawn-out chase scenes, their take on Ghostface instead being an ambush predator who's often lurking in wait and strikes quickly and hard when they do come out to play. They took this movie and made it their own without diverging too far from the brand laid down by Craven and Williamson, their style looking more grounded than the visual splendor that characterized the first film but without the ugly orange color palette and Vaseline-smeared lens of the fourth. I was hoping for some quality after they served up Ready or Not, and they delivered.

The Bottom Line

Tied with the second film as my second-favorite in the series behind only the original, the new Scream is both a treat for old-school fans and has a lot to offer newbies to the series. If you're a fan, you've probably already seen this and gotten your tickets for a second showing, but even if you're not, I highly recommend checking this out back-to-back with the original (the order is up to you).