Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #138 Scream 2 (1997)

They have fun!

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and disgraced former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I’ve been writing about the films of Kitaen and Gayheart in chronological order but out of deference to this spookiest of months, I’m skipping ahead to Scream 2 in my leisurely ramble through Gayheart’s filmography. 

The disgraced sex tape star and killer does not have a very big part in Scream 2. The role of Lois, ditsy sorority girl with a pastel wardrobe, impossibly clear skin (how DOES she do it?), intimidatingly perfect tresses and a head full of cotton candy amounts to little more than a cameo. 

Gayheart is seemingly in Scream 2 because everyone from the 1990s is in the sequel to the zeitgeist-capturing satirical smash that had such a profound and lasting impact on horror that the slasher genre can usefully be divided into two categories: pre and post Scream. 

Scream 2 doesn’t just bring back stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Liev Schrieber and Jamie Kennedy: it adds to an already potent mix Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jerry O’Connell, Timothy Olyphant, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Duane Martin, Omar Epps, Portia De Rossi, the aforementioned Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, David Warner as a darkly charismatic theater professor, Laurie Metcalfe and, as the stars of Stab, the movie-within-a-movie based on the events of Scream, Tori Spelling in the Neve Campbell role, a perfectly cast Heather Graham in the Drew Barrymore part and, best of all, Luke Wilson as the killer Skeet Ulrich played in Scream. 

Wilson’s sheepdog hair style alone—which I and every other misguided man in the 1990s adopted for some inexplicable reason, perhaps due to being straight, and consequently prone to tragically misguided follicular and sartorial choices—made me laugh more than most comedies do in their entirety. 

When I was a film critic for the A.V Club and The Dissolve I tried not to use the phrases “arbitrary sequel”, “money-grubbing sequel”, “opportunistic sequel” or “shitty sequel” because almost by definition sequels tend to be arbitrary, money-grubbing and opportunistic. Most are shitty as well. 

It’s much rarer for a sequel to feel necessary but as a pitch-perfect satire of slasher movies, Scream didn’t just justify a follow-up: it angrily demanded one. After all, what self-respecting slasher movie would stop at one after changing the very landscape of the genre the way Scream did, particularly after also grossing nearly two hundred million dollars on a modest budget, an impressive performance its sequel duplicated?

Besides, the horror sequel, and the sequel in general, gives returning director Wes Craven and returning screenwriter Kevin Williamson nearly as much to work with as the slasher movie conventions and cliches they handled so masterfully that the original instantly became synonymous with post-modern, meta-texual spooky fare. 

Scream 2 finds plucky, strong-willed “Final Girl” Sidney Prescott (casual badass Neve Campbell), a deeply traumatized survivor of the massacres of the first film, trading high school for college and trying to get on with her life in the long, looming shadow of her tragic, blood-stained past. 

But first Scream 2 pays reverent homage to its predecessor with an opening set-piece that tries to match and/or top the iconic opening sequence in Scream where Drew Barrymore kibitzes with slasher Ghostface about her taste in terror tales before meeting a grisly fate at his hands.

Williamson’s devilishly clever script opens with Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Phil Stevens (Omar Epps) discussing the racial elements of slasher movies and how they dictate that black people invariably die first while they prepare to watch a screening of Stab shortly before being the black characters who die first in Scream 2.

In the universe of Scream, Stab is based on grisly real-life murders affecting real people we get to know very well. Yet in an utterly ghoulish display, the audience for Stab is given Ghostface masks that conveniently obscure their identity. That would be like the audience for a movie about the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman being given Isotoner gloves and bloody knives but what this scene lacks in verisimilitude and taste it makes up for in atmosphere, spectacle and suspense. 

The same goes for Sidney starring in a college production of Agamemnon as Cassandra that similarly calls for the PTSD-rattled Sidney to be surrounded by mysterious hooded figures wearing masks. It’s not terribly realistic but then Scream 2 embraces its artificiality. At every turn it not just acknowledges but celebrates that it’s a movie about movies rooted in other movies and not anything that should be mistaken for reality. It’s theatrical and cinematic and wildly self-referential in a manner that suggested that there was way more life and juice in the meta-slasher than there turned out to be. 

Phil is brutally murdered while using the bathroom. Maureen meets a similarly gruesome demise in the theater itself in an artfully constructed opening sequence that doesn’t top or meet its inspiration but, like the film to come, comes close enough. 

The action then switches to Windsor College, where Sidney is incredibly popular for someone who is famous in no small part for seemingly everyone around her dying a brutal death. You’d think people would want to stay far the hell away from someone who seemingly brings mass slaughter with her everywhere she goes, yet Sidney nevertheless scores a hunky frat boyfriend in Derek Feldman (Jerry O’Connell) and attracts the advances of an extremely aggressive sorority. 

Scream became a pop culture sensation due to the cleverness of its post-modern aspects but it has endured due to the unexpected richness of its characters. Campbell makes Sidney one of the all-time great scream queens. She’s strong, autonomous and resourceful, the spunky antithesis of a damsel in distress. 

Cox’s Gale Weathers, a hard-charging reporter who doesn’t mind trampling all over the emotions of lesser souls in her zeal to get the big scoop and with it an equivalently gaudy payday, is less sympathetic but every bit as iconic. 

Gale is ruthless but fundamentally incapable of hypocrisy. She knows exactly what she wants and goes after it without apology or permission. She’s all ice and fury to David Arquette’s teddy bear warmth as lawman Dewey Riley.

In Scream Dewey qualified as comic relief. There’s an element of that here as well but with his limp, history and surprisingly reciprocated crush on Gale he cuts a surprisingly deep, sympathetic, even tragic figure as well. 

You’d think an actor as psychotically one-note as Jamie Kennedy would wear out his welcome the second time around but the role he plays here in delineating the rules of slasher sequels is as satisfying as it is predictable. 

That’s the thing about Scream 2: it does more or less exactly what you think it will do, and what it flat out says it will do in its dialogue but it does so so artfully and satisfyingly that you don’t mind. 

I don’t throw around phrases like “Frightmaster” lightly. In the horror genre, it is the greatest possible honor and Scream 2 illustrates incontestably why Craven was eminently worthy of such a title. 

Like Scream, Scream 2 takes the form of a whodunnit as history repeats itself, as it inevitably does in sequels, when a copycat killer begins murdering the people closest to Sidney. 

Scream 2 falls apart a bit at the end. The production was plagued by leaks that forced it to improvise and adapt in order to stay one step ahead of an online mob of spoilers. If the seams ultimately show at times the filmmakers made the smart decision to give wild-eyed “why I did it” monologues to a pair of wild cards who happen to be played by two of the best actors in the cast, both of whom clearly relish the opportunity to go way the fuck over the top and then keep going. 

I was very pleasantly surprised at how well Scream 2 holds up. I love its intense 1997ness (like Gayheart’s ebullient if brief presence) but it has also stood the test of time. In order to stay true to the slasher genre Miramax (the real villains of this enterprise, alas, and real-life ones at that) had to make a sequel. Alas, slasher movie conventions insist that a successful franchise can also never quit while it’s ahead, so this sequel that proved the exception to the rule that sequels always suck, and are made primarily, if not exclusively for the big paydays involved, was followed by two lesser follow-ups that fit that mold of arbitrary, opportunistic, money-grubbing sequels.

You can’t keep a good killer down, of course, so Scream 5 is on its way, apparently, and while no one can say for sure I’m going to say for sure that it won’t be anywhere near as good or as fresh as Scream. Sequels never are, with blessed exceptions like this.

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