The movies are doing an awful lot of talking directly to their fans these days. Within a month, the MCU’s Spider-Man: No Way Home served Spidey-lovers a three-course nostalgia dinner; Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix: Resurrections took the franchise back from both a possessive fandom and corporate control to make something wholly her own; and now Scream delivers an even more pointed missive to those who have invested perhaps a bit too much in the franchise: back off, calm down.
Though it shares a title with the 1996 slasher satire that launched a new era of meta moviemaking (and three sequels), 2022’s Scream actually follows the model of 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens: task beloved characters from the original film with handing off the baton to a younger generation. And so the main character, Sam (Melissa Barrera), has mysterious family ties to the first murders in Woodsboro—and as such connections to original characters Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette), all of whom return. The reunion is precipitated by a new killer wearing the iconic Ghostface mask, who is targeting Sam and her younger sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega).
The mechanics of all this are wittily explained in a monologue by one of Tara’s friends, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), who tells the group that they’re trapped in a “requel”—a combination of a reboot and a sequel. (I still prefer my catchall term: a reheat.) As the Scream universe also includes a horror franchise, Stab, inspired by the original Woodsboro murders, this doesn’t seem far-fetched. And indeed, given the ire we see directed at Stab 8—think of the “you’ve ruined my childhood” reactions to Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace in 1999—the line between Sam’s “reality” and the movie-within-the-movie reality is paper thin, easily sliced by a gleaming knife.
If Scream isn’t quite as successful of a reheat as The Matrix Resurrections, it’s because it doesn’t progress much beyond its self-referential, meta playfulness. (Resurrections largely left that behind after its first third to offer a story that was genuinely inventive and new.) Co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not) deliver fairly rudimentary scare scenes, while Barrera (In the Heights) is an uninspired anchor as Sam. And yet there are moments—including one where Mindy talks to the screen while watching a Stab movie, in which a character talks to the screen while watching a slasher movie, and all three of the characters are being stalked by a Ghostface figure—that function like a disorienting horror echo, something like an M.C. Escher print dripping with blood.
Scream’s climax, which I won’t give away, is its most direct address to the franchise’s more toxic fans—those who have given it more importance in their lives than it deserves and who punish others when they’re disappointed. Of course, the meta irony is that even as Scream 2022 is telling certain fans to back off and calm down, it’s also wooing a new generation. Luckily the film is clever enough to earn such … well, let’s call it appreciation, rather than allegiance. It’s just a movie, after all.
(1/13/2022)
