It’s sad that the 2022 Scream reboot (or “requel,” as one of the characters would call it) ends with a dedication “For Wes Craven.” Not sad because horror lost one of its great filmmakers seven years before the film’s release, but because the movie is pretty actively bad. Spyglass Pictures and Paramount’s attempt to resuscitate the previously Weinstein-produced franchise after a fifth film from Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson never materialized seemed like it could be a slam dunk in a market driven by “elevated horror” (a term derisively employed in the film, despite one of the character’s purported fondness for The Babadook). After all, Scream had become the metatextual staple of the horror genre after the first film’s release in 1996 made waves with audiences and critics who’s grown tired of the bombardment of overly formulaic slasher sequels that had become easy cash cows for newly multi-national corporatized Hollywood system of the 1980s.
It might not have been the first slasher-about-slasher—John Waters’ Serial Mom came out only two years prior, and also featured Matthew Lillard talking tropes in a video store, which I’m sure wasn’t lost on Craven and Williamson—but Scream was the shattering of a tired formula. It wasn’t another introduction to a wannabe iconic movie monster systematically slashing through a group of disposable teens until we reached the final girl. Instead, it was a whodunit, where the “monster” could be anyone in a game where everyone knows the rules because they’ve all watched too many movies.
It was a fresh take that knowingly became a parody of itself when its sequel cold-opened with a murder at the movie adaptation of the events of the first movie. The post-Scream era of self-aware horror whodunits produced very few good movies outside of the main franchise, with the notable exception being the excellent Williamson-written I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). In this sense, Scream was a subgenre mostly made up of itself. It creates a sort of untouchable work outside of the core team of Craven, Williamson, and their stars, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. Within this framework everything is a game, up for grabs. But it’s important to remember that while Scream has its fun riffing on one framework, it’s a framework itself, with its own tropes and trappings.
The first time Scream tried to chase that idea was also the first time Williamson didn’t write the screenplay. While Scream 3 (2000) is maligned, Ehren Kruger’s screenplay paired with Craven’s operatic direction incisively cut through Scream’s logic-play by creating an impossible maze built out of hollow Hollywood sound stage versions of the original murders and amorphous mansions. It’s a ride that no longer allows the audience to be as clever with it, because the director of the horror film is always in total control: he makes the rules, he just lets you play along. It's a conclusion to a trilogy that was aggressive, hard-hitting, and, like so much of Craven’s work, sincere in the end. The franchise would continue under Craven’s direction over a decade later with an attempted generational shift in Scream 4 (2011), with Emma Roberts taking on the apparent final girl baton from Neve Campbell, although not without its own twists. That sequel was meant to spawn two more from Craven and Williamson, although they never materialized before Craven’s death in 2015.
With another 11-year gap in the bag (not including the all-but-already-forgotten Scream: The TV Series), a new Scream was hitting theaters. This time the film was helmed by the indie-credentialed Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence, directing a screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, attempting to once again update Scream for a new generation. They try to start with as fresh a slate as they can by establishing a new core cast centered on a pair of sisters played by Melissa Berrara and Jenna Ortega. It is a full-hearted attempt to remix a metatextual work mired in 1990s culture for a Gen Z that’s grown up in a world more self-aware and self-conscious than ever, and Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s approach fundamentally doesn’t work: it’s not reshuffling a game built out of genre conventions, it’s totally trapped by it.
Scream (2022) simultaneously tries to live up to the inventive, playful aspirations of Craven’s four films while at the same time being obliged to wink and nod towards what fans of the series would want to see. And the film is all too aware of the trap it’s beset in, and it’s angry about it. The killers are revealed to themselves be obsessive fans of real (in the film’s diegesis) murders that inspired the Stab movies, and the final girl’s anger is textually a “fuck the fans” moment. It doesn’t play like that to an audience, because that’s exactly what they wanted to see in the first place. Maybe the anger on the behalf of the filmmakers is justified to an extent then, although it does make the film an unsavory misanthropic exercise.
The most egregious part isn’t how the film tries to write itself out of the corner it was born to live in, but that the filmmaking lacks the heft and grandiosity of Craven’s camera. It’s fascinating that Craven’s roots, with down-and-dirty pictures like The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), aren’t representative of the filmmaker he’d ultimately become, which is that of a masterful showman. By the time Craven arrives at directing Scream, his style has become refined into a sly combination of classical thriller techniques and extraordinary explorations of the environments. Rooms have clear geometry, audiences understand how to traverse a space and how long it takes, they know where the characters are or where they think they are. It’s in the world of the film, the physical world of it, that Craven has so much fun in playing with the audience, and I’d imagine a reason those films are so beloved above so many others that try to be like it. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s mise-en-scene is, by comparison, extremely basic. So basic, in fact, that you don’t realize that the party in the climax of the film is taking place in the house from the end of the first Scream until it’s revealed as a twist. Perhaps the poor direction was just obfuscation then, working to keep the big “wow!” moment of the film under wraps as long as possible. Like the ouroboric problems of the screenplay, that just makes for a bad Scream movie.