1. No sex! 2. No alcohol and no drugs! 3. Never say “Hello?”, “Who’s there?” or “I’ll be right back.” Since “Scream!” revolutionized horror cinema with its self-referential references in 1996, every fan knows that if you want to experience the end credits as a character, you better know the rules of the slasher genre inside out. At least that was the case for the first four parts, all of which were directed by Wes Craven (“Nightmare”) and written by Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson, with the exception of the weakest part “Scream 3”.
But after the death of the horror pope in 2015, the directing duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (“Ready Or Not”) have taken over the helm – and the characters of their simply “Scream“ captioned Requels one would definitely like to recommend another film to improve their chances of survival: The fifth “Scream” is namely the “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” of the slasher series – and from this self-awareness the authors James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac “) and Guy Busick (“Castle Rock”) another super clever meta firework that is as exciting as it is fun and this time it’s particularly brutal.
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Five years ago, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) ran away from her hometown. But now that her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) has been badly injured by an attacker dressed in a Ghostface costume, she returns to hated Woodsboro with her boyfriend Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid). Of course, it doesn’t stop with one (attempted) murder. Soon there will be more attacks and also the first deaths.
The ex-sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who now lives in a trailer, wants to help the teenagers who are in mortal danger with his insider knowledge of the previous series of murders. News host and best-selling author Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) quickly returns with a camera crew in tow — and finally, now-mother-of-two Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is forced to take Ghostface one more (and arguably forever) one last) time to oppose…
(No) elevated horror
Real “Scream” fans can probably only smile wearily at the quiz tasks that Ghostface asks its first victim for the film-within-a-film series “Stab”, which has now grown to eight parts. But teenager Tara quickly reaches her limits even with simple questions – because as a Generation Z horror fan she only watches “high horror” with a socially critical message, i.e. films like “It Follows”, “Hereditary” or her personal favorite “The Babadook “. But don’t worry: “Scream” doesn’t take this horror hype (which is much too elitist for a slasher series anyway) as a template for its meta gimmicks. Instead, this time it’s all about the ongoing trend towards so-called Legacy Sequels or Requels (combined from “Reboot” and “Sequel”).
In films like “Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens”, “Halloween” or “Ghostbusters: Legacy” a new group of protagonists* is introduced – but at the same time there are also returning ones legacy characters, which should ensure a connection to the franchise roots despite the fresh start. So Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette are now the Carrie Fisher (cameo in “Scream 3”!), the Mark Hamill and the Harrison Ford of the Ghostface universe. That may sound a bit random at first – but how precisely “Scream” imitates the dramaturgical and, above all, emotional beats of “The Awakening of Power” is almost uncanny. In addition, of course, there is the usual unpretentious self-mockery, when one of the characters asks himself whether the makers of “Stab 8”, simply called “Stab”, really believe that they will get away with this nonsensical naming.
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After “Scream 4” took aim at a social media phenomenon that was unusually broad for the series, “Scream” is now all about films, their rules and the associated pop-cultural trends from fan fiction to Marvel and Star Wars used de-aging technology up to Mary Sues and toxic fantum. But all these meta antics are of course the icing on the cake. The basics are much more important: Is it exciting and is it fun? Luckily, in both cases, the answer is a big, fat “YES!” The best example of this is an extended sequence with bleached “dead girls don’t lie” crush Dylan Minnette, which is not only particularly well done because of its gender reversal.
After starting the shower with a lot of washboard abs and a “Psycho” quote, the trope with the open door, which is often the subject of the “Scream” films, and behind which there is either nobody or only a harmless figure when it is closed, is so often faster sequence repeats that one almost imagines oneself in a horror parody à la “Scary Movie”. At some point you really don’t know whether to laugh or be scared. But that was precisely Wes Craven’s great art, which Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are now mastering with somnambulistic certainty: making fun of their own staging tricks – and at the same time landing a full-bodied hit.
Would you like a little more?
Speaking of impact hits: With the exception of the spilled guts shots in “Scream” and “Scream 3”, Wes Craven held back the violence more often than you might remember in retrospect (especially if, like me, you watched the first part when she was 13 and then didn’t sleep for a week). The new directors are stepping on the gas a bit – in the tradition of their hide-and-seek splatter fun “Ready Or Not”. The first victim has to take many times the stabbings of Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) – even if it takes a little good will to believe that Tara actually survived this attack.
But at the same time, the increased level of violence, including a hunting knife slowly shoving its way through a throat, also somehow fits the resolution, which this time proves to be a particularly bitter reckoning with one of the film’s themes…
Conclusion: As a franchise fan, one could only hope in the run-up that series newcomers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett didn’t sully Wes Craven’s larger-than-life legacy too much. But puff cake: all the worries turn out to be unjustified! The new “Scream” is smart, exciting, bloody and a bit silly in the right places – like the original from 1996, it plays in the very first league of slasher films.
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