Movie Reaction: Scream

Formula: Scream ^ Scream 2 ^ Scream 3 ^ Scream 4

 

Scream really should be among my favorite horror movies. It combines two of my favorite things – horror and meta commentary – in a very satisfying way. It came out at the perfect time for me as a budding horror aficionado. I was 9 in 1996: young enough for horror to still feel intimidating but young enough to want to try anyway. And it is undeniably a key text in horror history, marking a shift in the way horror was made and discussed. As is, I respect the movie more than I love it. At the risk of sounding like an opening to a Scream movie, slashers have never been my thing. I do assume that at the rate my estimation of it is growing, one day that respect may turn to love. What I do know is that I really should’ve rewatched one or several of the movies before seeing 2022’s Scream.

 

As with any proper Scream movie, it’s hard talk about 5’s story (that’s what I’m calling this one for simplicity) without referring to itself a lot. Explaining it feels derivative and familiar…on purpose. In this one, after her sister (Jenna Ortega) is attacked by Ghostface, a young woman named Sam (Melissa Barrera) returns to Woodsboro with a secret that connects her to the massacre in the first movie. Sam’s sister has a group a friends similar in structure to the 1996 movie, full of suspects. Eventually, she employs or receives help from figures from the franchise’s past – Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) – to solve a string of Ghostface murders inspired by both the actual Woodsboro events and the Stab films based on them.

 

Scream is allowed to be up its own ass in ways that other movies can’t get away with. It’s patient zero when it comes to self-aware horror, so where a movie like Matrix Resurrections winking knowingly at the camera annoys me, in Scream it excites me. And 5 does a really good job playing with how much it can recur on itself. There are several scenes that mirror classic ones from the franchise or escalate on them. They have discussions that sound like they are quoting a review of 5 in real time. It’s so much fun seeing how brazenly 5 has its cake and eats it too. 5 ends up being the second-best Scream movie by being about how it could never be better than Scream.

 

At some point I have to get past the fact that everything I could say about this movie is also commented upon in the movie. This is a great Scream cast. Melissa Barrera (fresh off a star turn in In the Heights) is a great 2022 edition Sidney Prescott. Her sister’s collection of friends is a “teen character all-star” group of TV standouts: Dylan Minnette (13 Reasons Why), Jasmin Savoy Brown (The Leftovers), Mason Gooding (Love, Victor), and Mikey Madison (Better Things). The movie does right by the returning cast members, knowing when to be reverent to them and when to push them to the side. David Arquette in particular gets to exercise acting muscles I’ve never seen from him.

 

It’s hard to find much I didn’t like about the movie. It’s the only franchise I’ll allow attempts to critic-proof it by calling out its problems in the movie. 5 does feel a little light on deaths. There’s a little too much plot armor happening and you start to wonder how no one is getting stabbed in vital organs. I wish they found 5% more for Campbell and Cox to do. The movie does get so fixated on how it can mastermind something clever that it forgets characters can make some choices naturally too. Again, anything I try to pick at about 5 sounds like I’m asking it to be less of a Scream movie. Instead, I’ll leave it with this. 5 is the most natural of the Scream sequels and is the best ode to what Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson did in the original. It could only be made 25 years later by people who were able to be shaped by the franchise itself.

 

Side Note: I also wish this movie would’ve gone harder at “elevated horror”. I hate the term although I do love the movies people are referring to with the term. I was surprised that 5 takes more of an “us vs. them” stance on classic slashers and “elevated horror” rather than attacking the very notion that only a certain brand of horror is worth praising. Granted, I would’ve been happy if the movie turned into Jenna Ortega and Jasmin Savoy Brown having a My Dinner with Andre-style discussion of horror.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend