Scream 4 (2011)
Directed by Wes Craven
Fifteen years after the original Woodsboro murders, Sidney Prescott returns home to promote her new book about surviving trauma, only for a new Ghostface killer to emerge, targeting a new group of teens.
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30 films that influenced Scream 4
What critics say influenced Scream 4
Though Michael Powell's Peeping Tom does turn out to have a connection here, not once is one of modern horror's new standards ever given its due.
With references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and even Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (the first movie "to show the killer's point of view," we're told), Scream 4 is like a perpetual film studies course, a reboot with a lesson plan.
Fun, fancy window dressing that occasionally hits the right note – name-checking the great but often unheralded Peeping Tom as the first true slasher movie will undoubtedly give film buffs a warm glow – but also slightly detracts from Scream 4’s true purpose: taut setpieces of bloody carnage.
Despite the surveillance/found footage trend of presenting deaths as supposedly being caught on amateur camera – either by accident or filmed Peeping Tom style by the voyeuristic killer – this theme only gets paid lip service.
Williamson and Craven are smart enough to know that the brand of slasher films resurrected by the first "Scream" movie has long-since gone out of style.
Director Wes Craven resuscitated his career with the original “Scream,” a movie smart enough to fuse hipster dialogue with genuine shocks.
This is a crucial question that perfectly captures the gist of just why screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven have chosen to revisit the " Scream " mini-franchise (because really, at only four films -- seems like there have been a bunch more, doesn't it?
The great pleasure in the " Scream " movies is that the characters have seen other horror films.
Two things you need to do before seeing Scream 4. The first is simple: promise me you will never, ever spell it Scre4m.
The buzz: Somehow it’s been 15 years since the original “Scream,” whose self-referential cleverness (courtesy of “Dawson’s Creek” creator Kevin Williamson) led to a decent sequel and a moronic conclusion to the trilogy.
Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
Wes Craven is at his best when he’s being most subversive with films like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The People Under the Stairs (1991), and while he gets close to that with Scream 4, it’s more in the nature of a near miss than a direct hit.
And director Wes Craven (“The Last House on the Left” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) was able to do so by successfully combining the bloody violence of mystery-filled slasher films with sharp comedy that satirized horror movie clichés.
Back in 1996, when Wes Craven released the first Scream, his first collaboration with screenwriter Kevin Williamson, horror had become somewhat marginalized with a number of horror franchises based on slashers like Michael Myers, Jason and Craven's own Freddy Krueger from the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" movies, and none of them were doing a lot of business.
With its masked murderer (nicknamed Ghostface) following such angels of serial death as Halloween's Michael Myers and Friday the 13th's Jason, as well as Craven's own dream weaver Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream series twisted the genre rules in a pop-modernist way that complimented the movies' fans for their hipness even as it eviscerated their on-screen doppelgängers.
There's a proven track record here and, if we all recall, the last time Craven returned to a franchise he created, we got one of the best films in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, New Nightmare.
To prove smarter than the genre while producing an effective genre product just the same--something Wes Craven couldn't quite pull off with his New Nightmare (though it was a good try).
-- this really doesn't yet quite qualify, at least as far as the horror genre goes) a full decade after " Scream 3 " (which Craven directed but Williamson did not write).
Still, it's an improvement on the disgraceful "Scream 3." Torture porn may have gotten serious traction at the box office in the last decade but Craven is clear that such bloody body modification has no place in his ironic micro/meta slasher movie.
Let me be more specific In spirit and in ideas, “Scream 4” bears the strongest resemblance to the first installment (in moments it feels like a direct sequel to it), rather than a continuation of where “Scream 3” ended.
"Scream 3," in 2000, was more overtly comedy-oriented and less scary.
Craven also toys with texting and vlogging that weren't invented when Scream 3 debuted, several months after The Blair Witch Project made slasher conventions obsolete except in remakes.
That perception of freshness could come from the fact that it has been 11 years since “Scream 3” was released, but in my opinion there’s much more to it than that.
And it should be pointed out, that when Craven deviated from his fave genre, by making “Music of the Heart,” a sentimenal biopic starring Meryl Streep, he fell flat on his face.
Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
…out of The Hills Have Eyes (July 20/02) Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
Having genre veteran Wes Craven, who had added indelibly to the genre in both the 1970s (1972’s Last House on the Left, 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes) and’80s (specifically 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street and its legion of sequels), helm the film was a small stroke of genius, marrying the old and the new for a postmodern spin that gratified audiences by respecting their knowledge of the genre while still producing genuine scares and even (horror of horrors!) sympathetic characters and a sense of mystery and intrigue.
After the worst film of his career, the dreadful “My Soul to Take,” Wes Craven proves yet again that he has the ability to bounce back and offer a bloody slice of entertainment as well-made as most of the films he has inspired in the decades since his debut.
Director Wes Craven continues to make movies in a universe where teenagers throw parties to celebrate serial killers (see My Soul to Take), while writer Kevin Williamson once again uses the terms “cinema” and “slasher flick” in the same breath.
Unlike Craven’s recent writing/directing effort My Soul to Take (read our review ), Scream 4 is brought to life once again by the surprisingly cohesive collaboration between the director and Williamson’s script.
In 1996, director Wes Craven (2010's " My Soul to Take ") and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (2005's " Cursed ") broke barriers and single-handedly jump-started a dying genre with " Scream ," a post-modern, part-satirical, part-scary comment on characters well-versed in pop culture and the so-called rules of horror movies who find themselves at the center of their very own slasher film.
A thunderously boring and astonishingly inept piece of work, My Soul to Take follows several teenagers as they're knocked off one by one by a mysterious figure that may or may not be the ghost of a notorious killer.
Wes Craven is at his best when he’s being most subversive with films like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The People Under the Stairs (1991), and while he gets close to that with Scream 4, it’s more in the nature of a near miss than a direct hit.
Craven mastered this approach to greater effect with "The People Under the Stairs" -- a freaky 1991 flick that took aim at how our society discards the poor.
"Scream 2" featured both a parody of "Scream" (in the form of "Stab," the movie-within-a-movie based on the events of the first film) and a clever tweaking of horror sequels.
The following year's "Scream 2" was arguably even better, with 2000's third part weaker but still enjoyable.
While “Scream 2” was the best of the original trilogy, “Scream 3” was the weakest.
The next four years produced two sequels, both helmed by Craven, although only Scream 2 (1997) was written by Williamson (Ehren Kruger did writing duties on 2000’s Scream 3, working from Williamson’s outline).
However, there’s no doubt that Scream 2 and (especially) Scream 3 failed to live up to the bar set by the original.
The Stab series of hit horror films based on Gale’s oeuvre have spun off interminably since commencing in Scream 2 and 3, leaving Sidney in an existential lurch and Gale herself in a career funk.
(Hitchcock did that decades before and so much better in "Psycho.")
With references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and even Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (the first movie "to show the killer's point of view," we're told), Scream 4 is like a perpetual film studies course, a reboot with a lesson plan.
The Scream franchise has its die-hard fans, I know, but for many people the demand for a fourth instalment (a decade after 2000’s just-okay Scream 3) mirrored that of, say, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles or a new Leprechaun flick.
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Since the film is so self-referential I wish the characters had sought out Craven on the set of his next film and killed him or at least tied him up and pried open his eyelids like Malcolm McDowell in "A Clockwork Orange," and then made him watch all his "Scream" films in an endless loop.
(Unlike, say, the “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” movies, a new killer is revealed under the mask in each installment.)
With its masked murderer (nicknamed Ghostface) following such angels of serial death as Halloween's Michael Myers and Friday the 13th's Jason, as well as Craven's own dream weaver Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream series twisted the genre rules in a pop-modernist way that complimented the movies' fans for their hipness even as it eviscerated their on-screen doppelgängers.
Mixing in a clever whodunit aspect to the carnage, the picture bred so many imitators (e.g., 1997's " I Know What You Did Last Summer ," 1998's " Urban Legend ," 2001's " Valentine ") that, today, it's easy to forget just how groundbreaking " Scream " truly was when it initially came out.
On the Side: I knocked Ehren Kruger in the opening of the review, but in addition to apparently doing touch-ups on Williamson’s script for Scream 4 he also wrote The Ring and Arlington Road, two movies I really enjoy.
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Scream 4 is not My Dinner With André —the dialogue often drifts from snappy to functional (has anyone ever said the word cyberspace out loud?) and the actors sometimes sound as if they're still in rehearsal.
"Shaun of the Dead" is brilliant because it's funny, it's gory, and it actually makes you care about the characters.
Craven and Williamson drag the action into the age of Facebook, Twitter and iPhones, while generating easy but genuine laughs at the expense of current genre trends (“Saw” is name-checked in the cleverly supersized opening sequence, “Shaun of the Dead” is seen on a TV and just about every horror remake of the last few years is rattled off in one remarkable run by co-star Hayden Panettiere).
But then the film goes on to explicitly reference Shaun of the Dead , as if to accidentally suggest that if meta horror has been done to death, it went to a place way beyond anything the Scream series ever dared dream about -- even in this latest film -- before it died.