The brutal and darkly comic beginning of Scream 4 plays on what we know of the horror genre and quickly establishes the use of self-referential meta-humour, a hallmark of the series.
In the opening scenes, two young women decide which scary movie to watch for the night, alluding to Drew Barrymore’s original meeting with the masked killer. Like Barrymore before them, they are quickly disposed of in gruesome fashion.
The humour comes from the revelation that what we have just witnessed was a moment from a movie-within-a-movie. Two other young women watch the horror fans get slaughtered on screen. Life imitates art as one girl stabs the other, suggesting she shut up and watch the movie, in a move that will either garner an appreciative laugh or a disappointed exclamation.
It is only after these two clever vignettes that the real bloodbath begins.
Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to her hometown of Woodsboro, on the last leg of a tour promoting her autobiography about her three previous run-ins with Ghostface.
Her plans to reconnect with her cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her kooky aunt are interrupted when another masked psycho begins slashing his or her way through the small town, pitting Prescott and a cast of both new and familiar faces in a plight to stop the massacre.
Among the returning cast are David Arquette as Dewey Riley, Woodsboro’s man-child police officer, and Courteney Cox as his acid-tongued former journalist wife: Gale Weathers.
Our quirky outcasts soon discover the killer wants to remake the original Scream, leaving them to learn the rules of horror in the 21st century. The latest sequel acknowledges the audience’s awareness of slasher film conventions and the formula of its predecessors by toying with them, staying true to the film’s tagline, “New decade. New rules.”
The decade-long hiatus has opened the franchise up to a slew of new takes on the genre. No one is safe from the chopping block in the digital age as one of the many film-literate characters conveniently explains to the analog heroes, even “virgins can die now."
Director Wes Craven and scribe Kevin Williamson, both veterans of the horror trade, make another effective collaboration. By combining delightfully gruesome kills with pitch-black humour, they create a mock remake that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Scream 4 still delivers plenty of scares, while constantly playing off our love/hate relationship with new horror… or maybe just our hate! The in-jokes and obscure references will divide occasional horror viewers from diehard genre buffs, but with razor-edged wit, Scream 4 slashes the competition.
It offers a welcome break from soulless bloody fare, which has become an unfortunate staple of this decade’s horror playbook. Another Saw entry this isn’t, but it’s still brutal and bloody enough to satisfy genre fans.
It’s a little hard to wrap your head around the film’s self-spoofing film-within-a-film format but with Craven, Williamson and the same welcome cast I can guarantee it will be well worth the ride.