The Fifth Scream Movie is a Legacy Sequel Done Right
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.
In a neat bit of overlap Scream is also an entry in The Great Catch-Up, the project where I let you, the Happy Place patron and/or Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas paid subscriber decide which movies I should watch and write about that I inexplicably missed during this site’s six and a half years of existence through polls.
1996’s Scream was not the first post-modern, self-referential slasher movie. Heck, it wasn’t even the first post-modern slasher movie that Wes Craven directed in the mid 1990s.
That distinction belongs instead to 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which found Elm Street’s notorious knife-gloved child murderer leaving his fictional realm for the real world in order to terrorize the cast and crew of A Nightmare on Elm Street .
Scream didn’t pioneer the concept of using a horror movie to comment satirically on the genre as a whole but it was so successful and so wildly influential that it’s damn near impossible to write about self-referential horror movies without mentioning Scream. The history of slasher movies can be divided into two distinct eras: pre-Scream and post-Scream.
Scream is like Pulp Fiction: a great movie that inspired not just a knock off or two but rather an entire sub-genre of wannabes that overwhelmingly sucked.
It didn’t take long for the clever commentary of Scream to become a ubiquitous, insufferable cliche. Theaters and video stores were soon overrun with shameless Scream clones in much the same way that Pulp Fiction created an unfortunate boom in campy, verbose crime movies about philosophical lowlifes that were so pleased with themselves that they didn’t even bother to seek the audience’s approval.
Wes Craven beat the odds and delivered a sequel to Scream that wasn’t just worthy; it might actually be better than the original. The same, unfortunately, was not true of Scream 3.
Scream 3 is of interest to me because I am writing The Fractured Mirror, a book about American movies about filmmaking and even though every Scream movie is fundamentally about horror movies and horror movie conventions Scream 3 is the only Scream movie that fits the criteria for the book because it’s the only one that focusses on the making of a movie, in this case Stab, a slasher movie based on the real-life events of the first movie.
Scream 3 was, alas, just another subpar Scream wannabe. The same was true of 2011’s Scream 4, which was both too clever for its own good yet not quite clever enough.
Then Wes Craven died in 2015, a year before Scream roared back to life as a television show that lasted three seasons.
After an eleven year absence Scream returned to the big screen with 2022’s Scream. Late in the game sequels have a less than stellar track record but as with Scream 2, the fourth sequel to Scream was a critical and commercial success that managed the tricky feat of resurrecting everything that people love about the first two films without feeling like the big screen equivalent of a rerun.
The homages begin with the requisite cold opener in which a sinister man using a voice distorter calls up a beautiful young stranger to inquire about her taste in horror movies.
Only this time the terrified young movie lover is Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) and the movies she talks about loving to a knife-wielding maniac are “elevated horror” and movies like The Babadook, It Follows, Heredity and The Witch instead of Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
In his most relatable moment, the Ghostface Killer who is not the Ghostface Killah admits that the concept of “elevated horror” sounds kinda boring. I would add “pretensious.”
The film is walking a knife’s edge. Usually when characters in movies begin discoursing on recent films I roll my eyes in irritation. In that respect the Scream series is, in some ways, a victim of its own success.
When Pulp Fiction and Scream indulged in pop culture references it felt fresh and revelatory. When pretty much any other movie did the same it came off as a sad, desperate attempt to mimic better films.
Scream, however, is the rare horror movie that can engage in Scream-style winking commentary without making audiences want to stab themselves through the ear with a pencil in aggravation.
This opening sequence is a grabber like the legendary beginning of the original Scream. It replicates that tricky balance of scares and laughter, horror and humor.
And it has a badass heroine in Jenna Ortega as Tara Carpenter. She’s tiny but mighty, five feet and one hundred pounds of iron will. She’s so tough that she survives her run-in with the new Ghostface but not without scars of the literal and figurative variety.
It seems that the sleepy Woodsboro is once again afflicted by a stab-happy mass murderer in a Ghostface mask. It’s been twenty five years since the original. That makes the original Scream not just a classic but an old movie as well.
Scream introduces us to a new group of teens. In keeping with the odious spirit of the time they are a diverse bunch. Diversity in casting is a form of white genocide. How will the white race ever survive if every character in pop culture isn’t white to the point of being translucent?
Scream is a legacy sequel so it introduces a plethora of new characters with links to the original films. Tara’s older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera), for example, is secretly the illegitimate daughter of Billy Loomis, one of the murderers from the original Scream.
As in previous films, there are red herrings a plenty. Scream was first and foremost a slasher movie and secondly a meditation on the corny yet irresistible appeal of slasher movies but it was also a whodunnit.
To help solve this mystery, Sam and her boyfriend Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid) make a pilgrimage to visit Dewey Riley, the Deputy David Arquette played in the previous four films.
Dewey is obsessed with Courtney Cox’s ruthlessly ambitious Gale Weathers, who has unsurprisingly divorced her goofy ex-husband. Arquette doesn’t exactly make it to the end of the film but he nevertheless exudes an incongruous dignity. Also, he looks amazing. He’s a silver fox who only seems to get better with age.
Dewey isn’t the only alum of the first film to make a return. The dynamic duo of Gale Weathers and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) return to Woodsboro to confront with the return of Ghostface and their own demons.
As the bodies pile up, so does the meta-textual cleverness. The essence of Scream is that it is a horror movie about characters are intimately familiar with horror movies to the point that they seem to understand, on an existential level, that they themselves are characters in a horror movie.
This self-awareness can be obnoxious in Scream knockoffs but it works beautifully here.
Watching Halloween Ends made me appreciate Scream even more. I spent the entirety of that godawful sequel wondering why the hell they didn’t just leave a small town with nothing to offer but traumatic memories and the very real possibility that they’ll be slashed to pieces by a masked maniac.
So I was particularly receptive to the moment where, deep into the third act, Richie quips to Sam that they’re going to do what characters in these movies never do: leave town and get the hell away from the epicenter of all the murder, madness and mayhem for the sake of their own survival.
Scream may not be elevated horror but it is a deeply satisfying legacy sequel that honors the films that came before it without feeling overly derivative.
When a dedication to Wes Craven appears at the very end it feels like an honorable, deserving tribute rather than an insult to the man’s memory and legacy.
This is how you do a legacy sequel. It may not be elevated horror but it is a whole lot of nasty fun.
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