Scream (2022)
The same movie critics who lauded 1996’s Scream for being original, self-aware, and revitalizing horror films will absolutely love 2022’s identically named Scream. Where the former was praised for going meta by calling out and breaking the cliched rules of the genre, the latest film in the series goes meta meta by referencing the series itself.
Scream (2022) opens with a scene that mirrors Drew Barrymore’s scene from the original’s opening scene. In the fictional Scream universe, a series of movies called Stab based on the events (murders) that took place in the Scream universe were released. When a new generation of teens begin to once again meet the Ghostface killer they quickly realize they are being targeted by a copycat murderer attempting to recreated the past, and the only people who can help the kids from 2022’s Scream are the ones who survived 1996’s Scream.
A pivotal bit of exposition toward the end of the first act explains to the teens (and viewers) what’s happening. “We’re stuck in a requel,” says one of the teens, all of whom are both potentially the killer and on the chopping block. “A requel is not quite a reboot, and not quite a sequel.” The character points out that requels don’t have any weight unless original characters connect it with the original franchise. She references several recent films including Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Halloween, and true to her theory, it isn’t long before Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Rules (David Arquette) have all returned to the Screamiverse.
Just as the 1996 film lovingly poked fun at horror films, the 2022 film attempts to do the same by eating its own tail. The characters end up partying in the same house that appeared in the first film, 25 years later. During one particularly meta moment, Ghostface sneaks up behind a teenager on a couch as she watches the scene from the fictional Stab in which Ghostface sneaks up behind a teenager sitting on a couch; that scene, of course, is a recreation of a scene in 1996’s Scream in which Ghostface sneaked up behind a teenager on a couch — the same couch in the same room we’re watching again — and killed them. As the teen on the television mockingly screams “look behind you!” unaware that Ghostface is standing behind them with a knife, the teen we’re watching also screams “look behind you!”, unaware that Ghostface is behind her, too — same room, same couch, same knife. Anyone who doesn’t see what’s about to happen would not survive as a character in a Scream film.
The returning characters have seen it all before, and while within a knife’s blade of the fourth wall, explain the formula to the other characters. They conject on who the killer or killers may be, who will die, and what will happen, and pretty much nail it all. That’s not to say there aren’t shocks and surprises along the way, but at the end of the day these characters have seen it, we’ve seen it, and now we’ve seen them see it, which is kind of the point.
I don’t know that the killer’s motive or the big Scooby-Doo reveal toward the end helps Scream make any more or less sense than any of the other films. Ten years after Scream 4 and 25 years after the original debuted, the new crew (RIP Wes Craven) bring the story to a mostly logical solution. The rules are both mocked and followed, and according to IMDB’s trivia section, the final rule of scary movies — something the actors and characters weren’t privy to at the time of filming — will be followed. Based on the success of this film, a sixth film in the series has already been greenlit.