Hey Emma Roberts! Watch out! There’s a dude behind you with a knife! You’re in a horror movie — watch your back.
Scream 4 ushers in new cast holds on to meta playbook
Wes Craven’s reboot of his teen horror film franchise Scream 4 asks the question “How meta can you get?” No seriously one of the characters actually asks that in the movie.
Craven’s first clever Scream was built around characters who referenced the tropes of horrors films as they lived through one themselves. So where does a director go after two sequels 15 years and an aging original cast that didn’t even look like teenagers in 1996? Why you start referencing your own film of course!
Scream is a genre onto itself so Craven must have realized it would be ridiculous to keep the same premise and just replace Drew Barrymore with the girl from Degrassi: The Next Generation. But he lets you think he will…. And then he kinda does.
The film starts off like the original with teenage girls (two this time) getting creepy calls from a scratchy-voiced dude. It’s way easier to be the ghost-face killer in 2011 thanks to the plethora of iPhones ripe for the stealing and/or calling. There’s also an app that makes your voice sound like him. Silly Neve Campbell with her cordless phone.
So those girls get stabbed — and eyes and heads roll — and here we are longing for Drew’s blond bob. But then it turns out Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell are actually watching a fictional movie called Stab. (Are all of my favourite television characters in this movie? Seth Cohen plays a cop.) They start talking about how lame and predictable this franchise has become. Oh Wes are you doing that thing where you insult yourself before anyone else gets a chance to?
Too bad he can’t resist his classic opener. We eventually end up in Sidney Prescott’s hometown of Woodsboro where two blonds are killed on the anniversary of the first killings. These girls turn out to be friends with Sidney’s teenage cousin Jill (Emma Roberts). She and her group of pals think that the killer’s copying the popular Stab movies which are based on the first Woodsboro murders. So meta.
As a fan of the original it’s nice to see some of the cast back including Neve Campbell as Sidney who’s in town for her book tour and Courteney Cox and David Arquette as the now-married Gayle Weathers and Sheriff Dewey.
Craven works in a twist ending that hits you over the head with warnings about this generation’s obsession with instant viral fame. But there aren’t really any “new rules” as the movie poster promotes just an extra dose of self-reference. It’s a rehashing with a few vampire and Saw jokes tossed in and a different cast of teens. And apparently being a virgin no longer keeps you safe — you have to be gay. Oh how times have changed.
