A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a new killer, who targets the girl and her friends by using horror films as part of a deadly game.
The late Wes Craven will probably be best remembered as the man who introduced Freddy Krueger to the world in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” While the Elm Street films became his legacy, he had an asymmetrical career that included many hits but also his fair share of misses. His first feature, the exploitation horror film “The Last House on the Left,” was a breakout hit for him but it was mired in controversy because of its violence leveled towards the two young teenage protagonists. He would go on to direct such movies as “The Hills Have Eyes,” its abysmal sequel “The Hills Have Eyes Part II,” the aforementioned “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the last in the Elm Street series, “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” as well as “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” “The People Under the Stairs,” “Vampire in Brooklyn,” “Cursed,” “Red Eye,” and the inspiring drama, “Music of the Heart,” which starred Meryl Streep, Cloris Leachman, Aidan Quinn, and Angela Bassett.
In 1996, he would direct a horror film called “Scream,” a movie nobody thought at the time would amount to anything more than direct-to-video entertainment. Boy did he prove the naysayers wrong, including the movie’s then-executive producer, Harvey Weinstein. “Scream” was a worldwide smash hit that spawned three sequels that Craven directed as well as “Scream: The TV Series,” and a new “Scream” movie to be released on January 14th of 2022, bringing back much of the original cast including Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, and Roger L. Jackson. “Scream” successfully incorporated elements of black comedy and a “whodunit” mystery, along with the customary violence that was ancestral to the slasher genre, even satirizing many of the clichés of said genre.
The story follows young high school student Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who along with her friends get caught up in a twisted game of cat and mouse, as a masked killer, known only as Ghostface because of the Halloween mask he wears, hunts them down, one by one, until only Sidney is left to battle him but when his true identity is revealed, it opens up a Pandora’s Box of revelations and surprises that not even she could have predicted.
“Scream” works best when it is parodying the quintessential horror tropes that are embedded in every slasher flick but instead of trying to add new components or attempting to change the horror genre, writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven embrace them in their blood-spattered, murderous glory. They allow the characters within, not just the audience, to be aware of the tropes as they are happening, permitting characters to question their motives during said point in time, as they realize there is indeed a homicidal killer in their midst, giving them the opportunity to act accordingly, and not traipse down into a dark basement when there is a perfectly good front door right in front of them.
“Scream” and “Scream 2” were the best in the series, while “Scream 3” and “Scream 4” began to metamorphose into the very films they originally parodied. With the new iteration right around the corner, I will be curious to see how directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett handle the new expedition, and with many of the actors from the original film returning in their respective roles, it might just erase the painful memories that were “Scream 3” and “Scream 4,” which we all got to sadly experience collectively.
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