Review: Scream (2022)

We live in a movie culture flush with legacy sequels, such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens or The Matrix Resurrections, which continue popular franchises by bringing back old characters, introducing new ones, and retreating to familiar narrative beats in order to capitalize on audience members’ memories and nostalgia. Obviously, the popularity of such films speaks to the dearth of originality in Hollywood at this current moment. Considering the current state of affairs, there’s likely no better franchise to mine this moment than Scream, the clever meta slasher series designed to comment on contemporary Hollywood trends as much as to scare viewers.

The new Scream movie from Ready or Not directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (also known as Radio Silence) is both an example of and a direct engagement with the proliferation of legacy sequels—or requels (reboot sequels), as this movie terms them—in Hollywood. The movie is a self-conscious exercise in autocritique: it is upfront about being a Hollywood requel made for crass commercial reasons, while also using its commitment to being a requel to comment on the industry as a whole. The movie’s title is even the same as the 1996 original, demonstrating the movie’s commitment to the bit. And surprisingly (or not, depending on your affection for the series), the approach works very well, with brutal kills, clever twists, and a lot of laughs to break up the tension.

There are new characters who slot into the same functions as the old ones—Samantha Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) is the heroine with a troubled past, like Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in the original; her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) is the first victim, like Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker; Tara’s friends, Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), are the movie buffs who understand the tropes of the genre, like Jamie Kenendy’s Randy; and so forth. And then there are the original heroes themselves, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Presccott, Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers, and David Arquette’s Dewey Riley, who show up to help the new characters solve the mystery.

It’s impressive how dedicated the movie is to every little aspect of the Hollywood requel. The structure not only mimics the beats of the original film—which isn’t all that complex—but also plays to beats of other requels like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and David Gordon Green’s Halloween (which are both namechecked in the movie). The way that a grizzled, older Dewey, no longer sheriff, comes into the story mimics Han Solo’s appearance in The Force Awakens; gruff reluctance giving way to mentorship and heroism. And unlike in many other requels (such as The Matrix Resurrections or the new Candyman), the meta aspect of the film fits within the storyworld of Scream. This was always a self-aware series. Turning that self-awareness and self-critique up to 11 doesn’t break the mechanisms of storytelling. It simply amplifies them.

Every new Scream movie starts with a riff on the first film’s iconic opening, in which Drew Barrymore (the film’s biggest star at the time) answers the phone call of a mysterious stranger, is teased and terrorized over the phone, and then brutally murdered by a killer in a ghost mask. And every new movie tries to outdo the cleverness of the original, which points out genre tropes while also using them to throw the viewer off-guard. Arguably, none of the sequels do this better than Scream 2, where Jada Pinkett Smith (pre Smith) attends a movie premiere of Stab, the movie-within-the-movie based on the original film, and critiques its racial dynamics and tired use of slasher tropes before being terrorized and then killed by a killer in a ghost mask.

This new movie doesn’t try to out-meta past entries (it’s unlikely anything would ever get more movie-within-a-movie than the opening of Scream 4). Instead, it offers a variation on the original film’s opening in order to show how horror has changed over the years. For instance, instead of threatening her boyfriend, the caller threatens Tara’s friend, Amber (Mikey Madison); when quizzed about slashers, Tara says she only watches “elevated horror,” movies with supposed real stakes and thematic takeaways. She thinks slashers are beneath her. And most importantly, Tara doesn’t die. She’s severely wounded, but survives in order to move forward the plot and provide commentary that brutal violence is fine to show on screen these days (the attack is much more violent than in the original film) so long as there’s no delight in the death of an innocent.

The degree to which this new movie impresses you will likely depend on how clever and original you think the meta humour in the original film is. If you have soured on the original Scream over the years, or think its metatextual observations on slasher movies have grown pat after the genre absorbed self-awareness in the wake of the original films and the work of Joss Whedon, then you will probably think this new Scream is more of the same. But being more of the same is a part of the point. The more familiar you are with this series—and the conventions of horror cinema throughout the years—the more enjoyment you’ll get out of the way this film plays with expectation and tropes and does and does not conform to the original film. 

The best scene in this new Scream demonstrates how deftly this series can play with expectation, mining genre familiarity to great effect. After a character has been dispatched right outside his front door, unaware Wes (Dylan Minnette) gets out of the shower and goes about preparing for supper. We know the killer is right outside or possibly inside the house, and so every time the camera follows Wes and places him in profile against an open door frame, we expect Ghostface to swing around the corner and stab him. And yet, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett never do the obvious. Wes opens the fridge and the door blocks the rest of the frame. We expect Ghostface to be behind it as Brian Tyler’s music swells, but when Wes closes the door, there’s no one. This builds and builds, using the geographic space of the house and the restricted frame of close-ups to toy with the viewer, until finally the tension breaks. It’s something similar to what Sam Raimi does so well in the Evil Dead films or Drag Me to Hell: alternate between humour and horror to manipulate tension and increase the payoff. The bigger a fan of horror you are, the more you’ll understand the expectation of the set-up and the more enjoyment you’ll get out of the execution.

Not that the new Scream loves all kinds of fans. It ultimately comes down hard on entitled fans who think they deserve to be masters of the entertainment they consume. But Scream was never a series for those sorts of fans; you need only watch the famous Halloween sequence in the first film to understand how the series treats with contempt those people who think they’re “too smart” for slashers. It’s a series for horror fans who think it’s clever and fun for a film to go left instead of right, only to double back and go left after pointing out how dangerous it is to do so. It is made with the belief that self-awareness is a means to amplify the fun of gruesome on-screen kills and narrative twists, not deflate it. The clever appeal of this Scream is that by mining the shallowness of Hollywood requels, it becomes one of Hollywood’s best requels. Once again, by exposing the mechanisms of horror filmmaking, the Scream series has proved the very appeal of the much-maligned genre in the first place.

8 out of 10

Scream (2022, USA)

Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett; written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, based on characters created by Kevin Williamson; starring Melissa Barrera, Jack Quaid, Jenna Ortega, Dylan Minnette, Mikey Madison, Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sonia Ben Ammar, Marley Shelton, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Neve Campbell.

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