In order to illustrate exactly what’s so wrong with Matt Bettinelli-Olphin and Tyler Gillet’s Scream (from here on referred to as 5cream, because I genuinely think I might have a psychotic break if I keep trying to talk about both the original film and this reboot), I’ll present to you a working theory of mine about the intentions behind Wes Craven’s Scream series and how they slowly changed over time. You see, the Scream movies have never really focused on “criticism,” as we might imagine it — they’re not dialectical takedowns of the horror genre or anything — but, as is especially true with the first two parts, used audience expectations and the codifications of well-worn genre conventions to surprise and entertain a media-literate audience of amateur film nerds. Now, I’m not talking about the Tarantino-style dude who worked a video store and spent their weekends in college drunkenly arguing about whether or not Tsui Hark or John Woo was the best filmmaker to emerge from Hong Kong in the ’80s: I’m really just referring to the kind of culture-consuming person who processed a ton of slasher films while growing up and became able to anticipate what was going on just through experience. It’s easy to see, say, Seth Green’s character as a form of Craven pulling back the curtain and revealing the secret texts of the Right-Hand Path of Horror for the masses, but I’d argue he’s simply telling the crowd what they already know through experience and making them aware of just how clearly those behind how keenly they’re aware that the ticket-buyers know more than they’re often given credit for. Scream and Scream 2, its superior sequel, are anarchic romps through the slasher subgenre and are, of course, incredibly entertaining. Craven’s an undisputed master of the form, and the movies themselves are genuinely well-constructed on a scene-by-scene level filmmaking-wise and well-considered as a thematic whole.
It’s when Craven began to pull from experience that the series dipped in overall quality yet became more texturally rich as a form of autobiographical processing. You have Scream 3, which essentially acted as Craven’s “Goodbye to All That” within the parameters of Dimension Films, the longtime home of both the series and of the horrid Weinstein brothers, trying to grapple with their evil within the studio system that the filmmaker found himself in by the ’90s, a metatext that attempted to destroy Hollywood and was ultimately destroyed in the larval phase by the kind of meddling that those fuckers were used to doing — especially when they perceived a slight. It seems he had every intention of leaving the series behind, at least until his own films started being remade at the beginning of the IP craze that wound up dominating the release calendar in the late ’00s. Hence, Scream 4, which isn’t so much offended by the idea of remakes and reboots as it is bemused by them, acting as an acknowledgment that the characters and conventions of the slasher had, indeed, remained relevant, but that the franchises themselves had become stale through both oversaturation and a lack of innovation. It isn’t a broadside against what at that point had become an inevitability — and, indeed, ultimately acknowledges that a whole lot of good has come from remakes (The Thing, The Fly, etc.) while also criticizing the profit motive as an insufficient replacement for the passion that drove filmmakers to force a re-evaluation of the things they loved through re-interpretation. This is the closest that the metatextual element of the Scream movies comes to criticizing horror as a whole, and it was deeply motivated by a sense of passion and duty, an expression of a point-of-view from a master in what would turn out to be the winter of his life that reasserted his relevance as a fountain of knowledge about the genre while also showcasing that he still had the ability to make a cracking good yarn when he wanted to.
This is a lot of explanation to work towards a very simple point: Without Wes Craven, there is no Scream. This isn’t comparable to Star Wars, either, given how involved Craven was in the process from beginning to end (remember, George Lucas didn’t direct Empire or Jedi, only returning to reinforce his creative control in full when the prequels came around). Without the decades of experience working within the trenches of the genre, his understanding of the intelligence of the audience and their desire to be challenged and entertained, and his frequent defiance of the studio system’s rigidity, Scream would have fallen into the same patronizing bullshit that we get every time someone sets out to Make A Statement About Horror Cinema. There is no better proof of that than 5cream, which attempts to do what Craven did for the remake/reboot for the “rebootquel” era, here referred to as a “requel” by our new assemblage of off-the-rack CW and Disney Channel stars without any sort of the wit or verve or audience understanding that its creator possessed. It is a diatribe about the current era of cinema made in a form that cannot possibly sustain it, which seeks to ensure its audience that they are, in fact, the good horror fans rather than provide them with the essentials: fun, momentum, payoff, and, of course, entertainment. It rewards not close viewing or prior experience within the genre on the behalf of the crowd, but rather how much one has given a good goddamn about online discourse about wholly unrelated matters in “nerd” cinema over the last half-decade. In short, 5cream is a lengthy performance of audience flattery masquerading as provocation, going specific where Craven might have gone broad, were he around to see how audiences had changed. He also wouldn’t have scolded in the way that Bettinelli-Olphin and Gilet do here, and he most certainly would have directed the hell out of it.
By now, you should be able to fill-in-the-blanks of a Scream movie’s introduction like it was a sheet torn from a screenwriter’s book of Madlibs: Tara (Jenna Ortega), a normal-ish high schooler, gets a phone call from a stranger one night when she’s home alone and getting ready to make plans. The person worms his way into discussing horror films with her — it turns out she’s a big fan of elevated horror, namechecking The Babadook, Hereditary, and any number of movies that fall under that umbrella — and eventually forces her to play the same game that the original Ghostface did: If she answers three questions about slasher films, specifically the Stab movies (the in-universe equivalent of the Scream series), he’ll let her friend, who he is spying on, live. Two rights and one wrong on a technicality later, she’s attacked by a killer wearing the same garb as all the others, who only is able to wound her before having to flee, as the incoming Woodsboro sheriff’s department response times have improved over the interim. Her friends — a collection of slowly-molding high school student stereotypes whose slimy greenery has been scraped off and repurposed to appeal to what people think Gen Z wants — immediately gather around her, and one of them calls her estranged sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), to let her know what has happened. Sam’s nursing a pretty intense secret that she discovered some years ago, which fucked up her teenage years and caused her to flee the town she grew up in, but she vows to return that instant to take care of her sister. Her boyfriend (Jack Quaid) accompanies her, and as more bodies start to pile up, the three realize that they’ll have to stop the killer all over again, provided that they can get help from the OGs.
So the pair reaches out to Dewey (David Arquette, who does a really good job here despite the film not really understanding his character), now divorced from uber-reporter Gale (Courtney Cox) and retired from the Sheriff’s office who spends his days whiskey-soaked and draining away the pain in a trailer park on the outskirts of town. He initially refuses to help the kids, because, as he says, he’s already been stabbed and shot enough and that he walks with a limp because of it, but decides that, after all, he will help them. He fills in Gale (via text message) and calls Sydney (Neve Campbell), the franchise’s eternal heroine, who has moved far away from all of this bullshit and now is a boring mom of two lovely children — exactly, perhaps, the ending that she always deserved in the first place. Sydney refuses to come back to Woodsboro, which leaves Dewey as a Man Among Zoomers, each of whom is as skeptical of him as he is of each of them, having been unwillingly steeped in genre convention through his series of encounters with folks who took the wrong lessons from their Saturday evening viewings of Halloween. If you’re noticing a similarity to, say, the Disney Star Wars releases in how the “legacy” characters are presented here, that’s done by design: With the exception of Sydney, the characters have fucked up or reverted to form in their on-screen absence, whether or not it makes any sense for them to have in the interim, given that they’re simply just credibility-establishing objects for our directors to play with. But it’s less interested in subversion than, say, that trilogy, with the limited amount of screen time each character gets and the pomposity with which they’re used coming across as something closer to the ’84 crew being wheeled out of the old folks home for the end of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, complete with CGI Ghost of Long-Dead Character (though, thank Christ, the actor isn’t actually being brought to life with digital effects).
5cream has each and every excuse for its bullshit baked into the text of the film as a way to knowingly justify the kind of laziness typical of your modern rebootquel without having to do anything to counteract it. Craven took each of his dead-ends as challenges: Horror sequels suck. Let’s make a good one. Third installments in trilogies suck. Let’s try to cap this off in a way that makes sense. Reboots suck. Let’s make a reboot that’s also not a reboot but would be if it were more interesting. There’s a decent argument to make that Scream 4 already covered all of this ground in the act of making a legacy sequel before we had the chance to really articulate what that meant and before their conventions were codified: Rewriting franchise history in order to exclude bad series entries, applying psychological complexity in the writing that was really only present in the critical interpretation of the work after its release, etc. I was already a dissenter on the pair’s previous film, Ready or Not, which quipped its way to death while not really providing any extra benefit in practice, and the same holds true here. Gone is Craven’s ability to stage a pre-kill chase sequence with any amount of verve or slapstick, and it’s replaced by the issues typical of rebootquels: Brutality as a substitute for creation, settings meant to evoke nostalgic wonder (which typically fall flat when you can’t even really remember what they look like — the house from the OG Scream isn’t as iconic as the Jurassic Park showroom, no matter how hard you try) — and little reward for those with only a passing remembrance of the films. Sure, it’s vaguely bloody, but every kill in the much-maligned Halloween Kills at least was executed with a kind of precision absent here.
Yet the greatest sin of 5cream is that it, for whatever reason, is a film about the Fandom Wars, importing the issues from a wholly unrelated genre in order to try and score points with the right-minded folks in the audience. It doesn’t really care about the modern slasher film, given how it seems vaguely scared to mention Blumhouse beyond a cursory cheer for Jordan Peele, but what it really does care about is the response to The Last Jedi, a film that released a full four years ago but still somehow holds captive a set of folks on both sides of that debate’s aisle to the point that it’s heavily referenced here. Whether or not you think that Rose Tico is the antichrist or that Rian Johnson is a compelling and interesting filmmaker (or to downplay any of the abuse or frustration that I know some have definitely suffered from in their personal lives), one point can still be agreed upon: that movie came out ages ago, and most people, like it or not, have moved on. But much like how the 2016 Primaries and General Election still maintain an anxiety-causing sleeper hold on the airways of many who participate in political discussion spaces online, the response to The Last Jedi has folks crafting defenses of Johnson’s film even after the dude fucked off from the franchise to make pretty entertaining whodunnits. Of course, there are Hiroo Onodas out there, still fighting what they believe to be the last war and being shitheads online to people who don’t deserve it, but even the most committed Star Wars nerd is probably rewatching The Book of Boba Fett‘s first few episodes right now instead of thinking one iota about that movie. Why are we still paying attention? Why are we relitigating this discussion in the confines of a totally unrelated franchise, perhaps beyond co-writer James Vanderbilt’s experiences working on the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films?
The answer, I think, is that the film needed to say something, and when it discovered that it actually had nothing interesting to say about the rise of elevated horror for fear of biting all of the hands that feed it, it chose to go back and fight this battle, a “good” war that would reward the right members of the audience and hopefully unnerve those with idiosyncratic views. I, in a lot of ways, should be a member of that cheering throng: I really liked The Last Jedi, and thought that the response to it was frustrating (to say the very least). Yet even I’ve moved on: There are other movies to watch, other things to experience, places to go where one could theoretically touch grass and say things beyond the confines of a single review or 280 characters. Perhaps if 5cream would have come out in Ready or Not‘s slot back in 2019, it might have had some sort of punch to it, especially in advance of The Rise of Skywalker hitting theaters that winter. It is hard not to feel like Allen Iverson being asked about missing practice at a presser — “We’re talking about ‘The Last Jedi.’ Not- not ‘Scream.’ ‘The Last Jedi.‘” — when this sort of shit happens and being right about one aspect of a culture war isn’t the same thing as being relevant or challenging. Plenty of well-meaning movies are ascribed to the dustbin of history because they are boring, flattering the viewpoints of their intended audience without a hint of true provocation or entertainment. It is flattery, the cheapest of all kinds of talk, and say what you will about Wes Craven’s budgets: the man was never cheap where it counted.