Jonah Weiner
Do you like scary movies?? That?s the question posed constantly and ominously by characters in the Scream series. Meanwhile the films themselves have winkingly asked the same question of audiences. The inaugural Scream (1996) was a watershed in its genre: a scary movie about scary movies, featuring masked murderers who buried their blades not just within trembling flesh but also within strata of quotation marks. When the movie?s hyper-verbal, seen-it-all teenagers weren?t busy stabbing or being stabbed, they were parroting Psycho dialogue, debating Friday the 13th trivia and reciting survival maxims they?d gleaned watching countless other horror films.
The movie was a phenomenon. ?At test screenings people were coming up saying, ?Can you play it again?? ? said Bob Weinstein, founder and chairman of Dimension, which made the film. Scream earned over $160 million worldwide and quickly spawned two blockbuster sequels, each one ramping up the splatter and the self-referentiality. In Scream 2 (1997), characters discussed the merits of sequels, and both it and Scream 3 (2000) featured a film within the film: an adaptation of the ?real life? events of the first movie, entitled Stab. If all the blood loss didn?t make the Scream heroes dizzy, the snake-eats-tail plotting should have.
On April 15 the franchise returns to theatres withScream 4. In the intervening 11 years the horror landscape has changed. After the parade of recent remakes and reboots (My Bloody Valentine 3D, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freddy vs. Jason, and so on), undead titles might soon outnumber undead villains. Since Scream rejuvenated the slasher genre and inspired a wave of self-aware horror, all-out parodies have even emerged (Scary Movie and its three sequels). And with the rise of the so-called torture porn subgenre, graphic gore and complicated deaths have become almost de rigueur (Saw, Hostel, Final Destination), making the notion of a psychopath armed with nothing more than a nasally voice and a knife seem almost quaint. The achievement of the original Scream was not just its meta-layers, but also the way those meta-layers worked to enrich the thrills. By the ?90s it had become ritual among horror audiences to call out clich?s?a way to interact with a film, but also to release tension and shake a narrative?s frightful grips. Here was a movie that explicitly invoked the clich?s, folding them back into the horror and wielding our own jadedness against us.
Kevin Williamson, the creator and principal screenwriter of Scream began imagining another Scream almost as a lark. ?I started playing ideas out,? he said, ?and one thing led to another.? And Weinstein approached Wes Craven, who directed the original trilogy. When it came to joining Scream 4 he was cautious, but ?committed once I saw the script.? (A fifth and sixth movie are in the offing, provided Scream 4 performs well.)
Weinstein was also certain that Scream boasts an appeal resistant to passing trends. He convinced the series?s three main stars, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, to return, explaining that ?the thing that separates Scream from other horror franchises is that people have fallen in love with those characters.?
Scream 4 grapples with ?profound moral and psychological questions about a generation that knows itself via tweeting and texting, not face to face,? Craven said. ?You know, I?d get this creepy feeling walking around the set, seeing everyone?s head turned down toward a screen.?
Naturally he couldn?t resist a movie reference: ?It?s like, ?It?s the pod people!? ?