Scream 4 a nice throwback to fun 90s horror

In the age of social network murders, torture porn flicks like the hostile Hostel two-parter and the excruciating Saw series, there has never been a more pertinent time for Scream to make a comeback. Groan as you might that it’s just another sequel, it still reigns as one of the most intelligent slasher flicks around, even if it is more than a bit tired now, 15 years after the original and 11 since the last instalment.

It starts on the 15th anniversary of the Woodsboro massacre as two high school students are murdered by a new Ghostface killer. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the target and survivor of the first attacks, comes back to town to promote her new book about her experiences. The coincidence of her arrival and the recent deaths marks her as a suspect. But then again, everybody is a suspect in a movie like this.

Scream 4 is what you would call an ensemble piece, meaning that the list of major characters with lines reads like the credits of a Robert Altman movie. All of the usual suspects are here of course, including Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) but with a host of others, many who appear only in brief cameos before they are routinely dispatched.

A large part of what makes the Scream franchise so good is its self-awareness. It’s just like one character says, “It never happens the way it does in the movies.”

You know and ‘it’ knows that everybody knows how formulaic horrors are. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson takes these rules of thumb and thumbs his nose at them. Characters who open doors and then turn their backs don’t always live in another series but here, anything goes. While characters recite these rules, the viewer is always left to wonder which ones will apply and which ones won’t. The answer only comes when someone gets stabbed and when the killer takes off the mask.

Needless to say, with so many characters there is a direct correlation with the number of stabbings. Scream 4 is bloody as ever but still less so than Saw 7. Thankfully this one isn’t in 3D.

It also requires you to pay fervent attention to who’s who. Everyone has a potentially plausible motive in this whodunnit. The intellectual game many viewers play while watching these kinds of shows is to make an early guess at the identity of the killer or killers and to take a stab at what his or her possible motive might be. It’s much like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None novel but adapted for today’s audiences. Everyone is a suspect and no one is safe. Some of them are annoying and several seem to be vying for the title of New Scream Queen.

The Scream series is always refreshing. Certainly it’s repetitive as any horror movie but these ones have at least minor character development to go along with plots that haven’t been cranked out by studio bosses looking to fill in summer release schedules. Williamson made his name as the wunderkind of scripts from the 90s with other hits including I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Faculty. It’s great to see him come back to form, along with maestro Wes Craven. He has been having a sour string of luck lately, since about 2000 when Scream 3 came out. Still I hope that there is no Scream 5.