Scream 4 Review

Parody serves a very necessary purpose. Like a narrative enema, it acts as cleansing relief whenever a genre gets a little too far up its own ass. All those tropes and traditions and cozy safe go-to storylines that get repeated so often that they cease to be simple clichés but come to embody and define the genre itself are pulled apart, dissected and exposed for the mindless derivative tripe that they are. And this is a public shaming, a professional one, an official record made and disclosed of everything that now no longer counts as acceptable storytelling. For if a work embodies the tropes so humorously eviscerated by parody, it becomes itself a parody, a mockery of everything it intended to be. Essentially, parody stands as a mandate for originality, a grand outcry for a paradigm shift.

The original Scream trilogy accomplished this with the slasher genre and so spawned a brief resurgence in the late nineties, one now defined by self-aware and savvy protagonists, mysterious killers and a lot of tongues in a lot of cheeks. No longer could horror get away with stupid screaming bimbos running upstairs and losing their shirts; now they had to be vaguely intelligent, they had to be funny and likable. But of course, sometimes things have a way of looping back on themselves and the self-aware slasher was eventually replaced with the murder porn remake epoch we currently inhabit. Rather than strive for wit and cleverness, the purveyors of horror opted instead for a brute force plundering of long-gone decades.

And this wasn’t impudence or sheer force of will, it was an act of cowardice; the studios greenlight remakes because they’re existing brands, established names that people recognize and like: in essence easy money. They’re considerably less risky than taking a chance on a new idea. It’s not hard to understand this rationale, but sadly this isn’t the sort of mentality that typically results in quality storytelling, just the same sorts of sloppy crap we’ve seen a million times before but with names and faces we used to remember more fondly.

And that’s where Scream 4 comes in. Because it too is part of an established franchise, a major franchise that defined horror in the nineties as much as A Nightmare on Elm Street defined it in the eighties. It must have been a truly salivating notion for the studios to realize they could milk that cow again. And therein lies the brilliance, the impudence and the sheer force of will of Scream 4: it manipulates the motives of the studios and producers that enabled the remake craze in order to use their own money to shame them. Publicly. And you just got to love the utter brazenness of that.

Everything old is new again.

Scream 4 structures itself consciously as a remake of the original film, much in the way the first Scream was consciously structuring itself as a traditional slasher movie with a twist; it returns to the original town, the original house, a very similar pattern of murders, etc. But the difference is that the new cast is supplemented with the old cast, who get to bear witness to their own living replay. This latest iteration comfortably inhabits the realm between sequel and reboot and so offers commentary on how horror has changed since the old days.

The opening montage of… well… openings acts as a sort of recap on the last ten years, taking us through the self-aware slasher days, into murder porn and then bringing us straight into the movie proper. It’s a funny sequence (and I do love the casting of Anna Paquin – the star of True Blood – as the voice against fetishized violence) that highlights all the things horror fans already know: the movies these days are pathetic, disgusting, lacking in even the flimsy characterization of their predecessors and – most offensive of all – they just aren’t scary anymore.

Of course, Scream isn’t itself devoid of these weaknesses, but they are lessened. The characters for example are not exactly complex, but they are usually likable and well established. We get a very clear social dynamic and a sense of their personalities long before any of the killing starts. And that’s a key element missing from a lot of modern horror: the creation of a world and lives for the would-be victims. Most movies these days just jump straight to the dying, sometimes not even bothering to name their corpses; others preface their slaughterfests with bacchanalian parties with all the proper characterization of a Girls Gone Wild video.

But in Scream 4, we spend a few minutes learning about these people, getting to know them, their habits and their wants. It actually sucks when some of them die now; and that should be such a basic tenet of horror moviemaking, but it’s so rare these days that it actually feels like progress whenever somebody takes even a cursory stab at it. But more than that, this approach helps to establish a sane and relatable world that is invaded by psychotic forces. The killings actually feel like an intrusion on these people’s lives, as opposed to things like the Nightmare on Elm Street remake or Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, where all the main characters seem to exist solely to fulfill their role in the violence.

And that’s the thing that actually makes these killer-in-suburbia stories frightening: they play off the “This could be my town” fear by striving for an everyman sort of realism. The scare tactics in Scream aren’t especially sophisticated – usually just a bunch of red herring jumpscares – but it’s at least smart enough to include this basic element: this idea that violence is a violation, not just a spiffy thing to show on screen.

And also the trademark phonecalls are genuinely creepy, if a tad predictable.

The equally trademark wit also helps with this. It maintains a level of energy and enthusiasm that keeps every second of the movie entertaining, not just the parts where bloody things happen. The new characters fit nicely into the Scream tradition of funny self-reflexive humor and the old characters prove they can still hold their own. Sidney is as strong and unflappable as ever. Dewey is as affable and dopey as we remember. And Gale remains the ever-undaunting bitch queen. She even gets a new plucky young female foil to be all sassy with.

Uh-Oh Spaghetti-O's!

Still, Scream 4’s masterstroke isn’t its return to form or its ability to out-horror horror. These are nice qualities, certainly, but this movie’s great success, its grand and definitive thesis statement is in the one thing that I really can’t talk about. Because it’s a spoiler you see. The mother of all spoilers. The… ah… screw it.

Here There Be Spoilers

Okay, so, history lesson first.

Our current murder porn epidemic didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s actually been building steadily over the decades right alongside all the slasher classics it so gleefully butchers. People like to accredit the original Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the birth of the slasher genre, which is to say these movies helped found the notion that horror can be brutal and gruesome and purely depraved. But they did more than that. Or, more accurately, Texas Chainsaw Massacre did more than that. It didn’t just sell us violence, it sold us Leatherface: this bizarre gimmicky figure that stood out amongst his family even though he wasn’t really written as the star of the show.

Leatherface became the posterboy of his franchise and the focus of the various sequels and remakes. Long after people forgot the names of the victims or the names of the killer family or – for some – that there even was a family, they remembered Leatherface. And it wasn’t long before others would exchange the flesh-face for a hockey mask and the chainsaw for a machete. And then the hockey mask became Captain Kirk’s face and the machete a kitchen knife. Then the mask was discarded for burns and a fedora and the knife became a glove and a new generation of stars was born. After all, everybody knows Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, but fewer people will readily remember Nancy Thompson or Laurie Strode or anyone from any Friday movie.