Scream 4
Fifteen years ago, director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson breathed new life into the horror-slasher genre with “Scream,” which took the cliches of the genre and looked them straight in the eye at the same time it was turning those cliches on themselves. On the surface, returning to the hit franchise looks like a gratuitous money grab for all involved, but the horror landscape has changed a lot since 1996, and Craven and Williamson have new territory to cover.
Even as it has torn the “rules” of its genre a new one, however, the “Scream” series has set up its own rules, many to which Williamson and Craven remained true in this film. One thing that is consistent with the “Scream” franchise is that, in the end, everything comes back to Sidney Prescott (the heroine played so superbly by Neve Campbell) whose personal tragedies have driven the “Scream” films and inspired the franchise’s film-within-a-film franchise, “Stab.” “Scream 4” is no different as Sidney returns to Woodsboro after her self-imposed isolation. She has written a book on her emotional journey, and she is in town to promote it when the killings start up again, timed to the anniversary of the original Woodsboro killings Sidney and her friends went through. Thankfully, Sidney has family (including Mary McDonnell as Sid’s aunt and Emma Roberts as her cousin Jill) and friends (like David Arquette’s Dewey and Courtney Cox’s Gale, now married) she can count on to understand and to help when the going gets tough.
Revisiting the first three “Scream” movies recently, a few things stood out: The consistently strong performances by Campbell, Cox, and Arquette; Marco Beltrami’s mood-enhancing scores; the dark visuals of cinematographer Peter Deming in “2” & “3” (he makes a welcome return to the series here, and he hasn’t lost his eye for lensing horror); and the clever blend of smarts, satire, and suspense Craven and writers Williamson and Ehren Kruger (who wrote “3”) brought to each film. Something else stuck out to me as well: How much “Scream 3,” which is still largely successful, jumped the shark in wrapping up the original trilogy in 2000. (I mean, really, how is it that the secret life of Sidney’s mother outside of Woodsboro remained a secret from father AND daughter during her life?) It’d be easy to just blame it on the fact that Williamson didn’t write “3,” but his work on “4” (though very much a return to form for the franchise) is equally flawed, albeit in different ways; “Scream 4” has so many red herrings and tip-offs to who could be Ghostface this time it borders on self-parody. And the prolonged conclusion? I’m surprised the aforementioned shark didn’t pull a fin with the amount of jumping he does during the finale.
Wes Craven is an intriguing filmmaker within the horror genre. In large part due to the success of the “Scream” franchise, he has become a master of this type of pop-horror filmmaking; his more idiosyncratic genre films, on the other hand (like last year’s “My Soul to Take” and 1995’s bomb “Vampire in Brooklyn”), are more ambitious while failing more definitively. That isn’t always the case; his 2005 teen werewolf thriller, “Cursed,” bombed after years of production woes, but by and large the most commercial of Craven’s films– be it 1984’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” or his criminally underrated return to Freddy-land “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” the “Scream” films or his 2005 thriller “Red Eye” –are the ones with which I have been more impressed over the years. And in the end “Scream 4” is no exception to that rule.
Like any other movie, this, too, boils down to story and characters. Williamson has some strong ideas on the state of horror nowadays that he delivers with sharp wit and fun (the opening scene, in particular, is the best for the franchise since film one), and he has an entertaining gallery of characters he’s lined up here: In addition to three familiar faces, we meet Dewey’s protege/admirer, Marley Shelton’s goofy Deputy Hicks; Hayden Panettiere’s sexy horror buff, Kirby; Rory Culkin’s geek-chic Cinema Club president, Charlie; and of course, Emma Roberts’s young Jill Roberts, who finds it cumbersome to live in the shadow of her famous cousin, the older, wiser Sidney Prescott. I know Craven and Williamson have ideas for a fifth and sixth film, but leaving “Scream 4,” I wonder what all is left to be said… at least for now.
