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.
(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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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.
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.
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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).
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.