Scream 4 is a movie in desperate need of a reappraisal. Wes Craven’s final film is a great entry in the Scream series. Situated 11 years after the popular original trilogy, and 11 years before the popular resurgence, Scream 4 offers its brand of commentary on a specific generation and target.
Classic reviews will contain spoilers.
Scream 4
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere
Scream 4 Review
The year is 2011. It’s been 11 years since we last saw an installment of the Scream franchise. The first 3 Scream movies were released within less than a three-and-a-half-year period. The lack of time between them effectively ran the series into the ground. In 1996 Scream arrived as a biting social and genre commentary laced within a clever slasher whodunit. Scream 2 quickly followed with a successful sequel formula of offering more of what people liked done bigger and louder. With two giant hits in their pocket a third movie was inevitable. While Scream redefined the slasher genre, Scream 3 seemed ill equipped to engage in meaningful commentary on its own series. That path would be examined to much greater effect, and financial success, in the fifth entry Scream (2022). This leaves us with Scream 4…a movie that has been begging for reappraisal since the moment it was released, and whose case only becomes stronger as the years go by.
Released in 1996, Scream was a perfectly timed masterpiece. It’s a movie about and aimed at 17 and 18 year old’s who grew up watching slasher movies. It came out 18 years after Halloween launched the slasher genre into the stratosphere. If you were 18 in 1996…you’d literally grown up with slasher movies defining horror. By they early 90s the genre was on its last legs. Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers were deep into diminishing returns and save for a Child’s Play 2 here or a Candyman there…slasher movies had been relegated to a forgotten corner of your local video store.
In 1994 director Wes Craven returned to his most famous character Freddy Krueger to examine storytelling in a new way. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was a meta look at what making horror films does to the people who make them. It was ahead of it’s time (two years ahead as it turned out) and didn’t recapture the imaginations of the Freddy fans who had abandoned the franchise years before. Scream took the idea and turned it on the audience. What effect does horror have on the people who watch it? It was nothing short of a sensation.
It’s hard to say if the movie would have had the same level of success if it had been made at any other time. The final years of Generation X were becoming adults, they’d grown up knowing the rules of slasher movies, and the growing popularity of cell phones meant that the call could actually be coming from inside the house. Scream uses all of this to its advantage. Its immediate sequels were limited by there being no sweeping change in film, culture or technology to comment on.
Scream 4’s greatest attribute is also time…namely the passage of it. The rise of the millennial was upon us, every horror franchise saw a glossy reboot, and we’d gone from talking on a phone you could keep in your pocket to live streaming video from it. The time was right to do a sort of reboot of their own. Because this is a Scream movie it couldn’t be as simple as actually rebooting the franchise, of course.
Gone was the winking slapstick of the third chapter…replaced by a much meaner and more brutal purpose. It learns the lesson from where its immediate predecessor lost its way. “This isn’t a comedy it’s a horror film” Ghostface says to one of his victims early in the movie. It’s as much a signal to the viewer that the series has remembered what made it special in the first place. Scream was a violent, mean spirited and clever movie that happened to be funny. Scream 4 remembered what was most important. It’s a return to form for the franchise if not all of the characters.
Dewey and Gale are living in Woodsboro, married and drifting apart. We find Gale far removed from the ambitious reporter who would walk over anyone and everyone to get her story. Here she is truly lost until Ghostface’s return provides her with another mission. Dewey is no longer the oafish lovable buffoon…now the town’s sheriff he’s a respected, and weathered, part of the community. It’s a bold choice for the Dewey character. 11 years is a long time and if you hoped to reconnect with the wide eyed somehow optimistic Dewey you loved through three movies…you’d only get hints of it still existing beneath his surface. It’s the right call, for what it’s worth. The character had seen to much, lost too much, to have the energy and enthusiasm of the Dewey in his 20s. That Dewey lacked depth…this one was burdened by it. David Arquette would get to show an even deeper side of this character 11 years later in Scream (2022).
Series protagonist Sidney Prescott, and the franchise itself, returns to Woodsboro for the first time since the original movie. She’s moved past her previous trauma and is using her experiences to help others. Coinciding with her arrival…the ghostface killings begin once again. It won’t be possible to have a discussion about Scream 4 at this point without going into heavy spoiler territory…but the movie is well over a decade old so the statute of limitations on this are well expired. If you haven’t seen the movie…stop here and come back once you have.
Sidney’s cousin, Jill Roberts, is positioned as the new Sidney…the center of a group of friends of would-be killers or will be victims. In keeping with the reboot motif…Jill turns out to be the one behind the murders and not the target of it. Her motive…to become Sidney. A beloved, and most importantly, famous survivor of a killing spree that gains national media attention. The idea of millennials being obsessed with fame is quietly pushed from the opening of the movie. After two fake out openings that are actually catching us up on the film within a film Stab franchise…we arrive back in Woodsboro where two teen girls discuss the Stab movies. “At least Woodsboro is known for something” one of them says. And that’s the tip off. Sure, it’s a horrible set of murders…but at least it’s a famous horrible set of murders.
Jill’s plan is insane, she uses her classmate Charlie to carry out a plan to film and upload their crimes so the whole world can see what she supposedly survived. With no need to share the spotlight she dispatches her partner and explains it all to Sidney before seemingly killing her as well. “How does anybody become famous anymore? You don’t have to do anything.” Most of these movies have solid reasons their villains do what they do…Scream 4 might just have the best one. In an era where reality tv dominated television and people were famous for being famous…the timing was just right.
Unfortunately for Jill…Scream 4 wasn’t a reboot. We didn’t need a new Sidney…and as Jill learns at the hospital in the film’s final scene, just before Sidney and company take her down permanently, the first rule of remakes is “don’t fuck with the original”.
Scream 4 seems to largely exist as a response to reboot happy Hollywood. I’ve often wondered if it was only made because someone at Dimension Films floated the idea of doing an actual reboot of the property and Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson said…hold on…let us just do another one. At this time EVERYTHING was getting a reboot. Scream 4 came out two years after the Friday the 13th reboot and one year after Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street was rebooted. Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas and nearly a dozen others name dropped in the movie by Jill’s friend Kirby in the movie, had all seen their stories retold to mostly ineffective results. It was only a matter of time until Scream’s number was up.
Scare Value
Scream 4 is the final film that Wes Craven would make in his lifetime. One of the most important and influential makers of slasher movies, he injected the genre with new life not once…but twice. First in 1984 as the golden age of slashers were beginning to wane, he gave us Freddy Krueger and brought the murder into your dreams. In 1994 and again in 1996 he basically created the meta-horror genre. If not created certainly perfected. Scream 4 is a fitting final statement on the genre he helped popularize. Fame and cheap copies are no match for an original idea.
4/5
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