‘Scream’ (2022) — Review
Neve Campbell and David Arquette return in a new meta installment of the infamous ‘Scream’ franchise.
Before you read this, spoilers will be present and prominent in this review.
On January 14th, 2022, ‘Scream’ released exclusively to movie theatres, starring the loved legacy cast (Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette) as well as the newcomers (Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Kyle Gallner, Sonia Ammar, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding). It’s meta, it’s gory, and it’s quoted as a ‘love letter to the original’ said writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.
We all know and love the original Scream for being a self-referential slasher film, starting from Casey Becker mentioning horror classics over the phone to Randy saying ‘Jamie, behind you’ when his actor name is Jamie and the actual killer is behind you, which is one of the most noteworthy horror moments of the last couple of decades.
The new Scream, which is labeled as a requel, is a continuation of the franchise. All of the films are canon in this movie as one of the characters mention that the last time it occurred was in 2011, which is when Scream 4 released.
The new film connects most of the new characters to previous characters of the franchise, like Mindy and Chad, who are Randy’s nieces and nephews, Vince Macher, who is Stu Macher’s nephew as well as Sam Carpenter, who is Billy Loomis’s daughter.
Spoilers
The movie begins with a phone call from Ghostface, like the original. Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) eventually answers. The voice over the phone is disguised as a friend of Tara’s mom from group therapy. He starts discussing Stab, which is the movie within a movie based off of Scream, adding to the metatextuality of the entire franchise.
Ghostface eventually asks if Tara wants to play a game, revealing that he knows her identity and scaring her. He threatens to hurt Amber Freeman, who’s Tara’s friend, and makes her play horror trivia, like Casey Becker did in the original ‘Scream’ movie. Eventually, she gets a question about Billy Loomis and Stu Macher wrong and runs to the door where she’s stabbed by the killer. He disappears, calling her again, then proceeding to attack and incite blood from her stomach. This is definitely a tribute to the original Scream movie, as the directors of this film, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are huge fans of the original movie, ‘Scream’ as well as Wes Craven’s work as a whole citing A Nightmare On Elm Street as some inspirations for filmmaking.
This is the most similar opening to the original in the whole franchise, as it was at home and Tara was taunted by the killer, which stood out to me as well as Jenna Ortega’s acting. She was really able to realistically depict the fear you’d experience upon being hunted by a killer. This opening scene is either the best or the second best in the franchise, in my opinion.
After Tara’s chase scene, we slash to a haunting title card of ‘Scream’, which is titled the same as the original. We meet Sam Carpenter, Tara’s estranged sister and her pale boyfriend, Richie Kirsch, who reside in Modesto, California, which, from experience, isn’t the nicest town under any standards but appears that way in the movie.
We learn Tara actually survived her brutal attack and is in bad condition at Woodsboro Hospital. One pet peeve I have is that all the scenes in this movie that showcase the town look nothing like they did in Scream or Scream 4. The original was filmed near Sonoma, California, San Jose, California and around that certain area. Scream 4 was filmed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is pretty satirical considering how they literally made fun of filming location changes in that specific sequel.
I’m not a fan of the major differences between the appearance of Woodsboro in all the films, and there’s no way they’d remodel and transform into a whole new town in merely ten years.
We meet the teenagers, which consist of Chad & Mindy Meeks, Randy’s nephew & niece, who happen to be pretty nice people, Liv MacKenzie, a pink-haired girl, and Amber Freeman, Tara’s best friend and the comic relief of the group. Mindy is a slasher
Despite my concentrated nitpicks, I have to say Sam Carpenter’s performance was exceptionally good. The real shocker was when she revealed she was the separated daughter of Billy Loomis, the antagonist from the original film. She reveals it led her to narcotics, which broke my heart. Tara is enraged at her sister for being estranged, and in question of why she left.
Vince, Stu’s nephew (because everyone has to have connections, right?) dies after a non-pertinent bar scene
Then we meet Sidney Prescott, our ‘final girl’. She’s in a good place in her life, living in Chicago, married and with two girls. Dewey informs her of the killings to which, as any survivor would, says ‘good luck and good riddance’, and doesn’t return to Woodsboro, until one of the best scenes of the film.
After the sheriff, not Dewey, and her son are brutalized, all the cops are directed to her house and everyone forgets about hospitalized Tara, because all hospitals must be empty in slasher flicks. It’s really an inevitable film trope at this point if you think about it.
Ghostface finds himself at the hospital Tara’s at, and slashes Sam’s placeholder boyfriend, Richie, and threatens to hurt Sam’s sister while Dewey and Samantha rapidly drive to the hospital and shoot the mask-donner through the elevator, which was one of the more badass moments of Scream, to be quite honest.
They shot him down and were able to budge Tara out of that cursed hospital, but it wasn’t all peaches and cream, especially for any die hard fans of Scream and any or all of its sequels. Dewey goes back in an attempt to finish off Ghostface, and he’s about to shoot right in the mask. Until his phone rings.
Dewey’s distracted for a nanosecond, and the killer takes his chance and stabs him in the gut. I think that was a surprise for every one in the theatre, because noyone expected any of the legacy characters to die in the film. Everyone thought Sidney, Gale and Dewey were automatically slated to be survivors of every film, and the placeholder blonde teenagers were the ones who were supposed to die.
I think it’s realistic that Dewey ended up dying, because A, what else would incite Sidney to return to a town that’s traumatized her two times and B, the grace of the earth is not enabling Dewey to survive, so there’s that. What kind of broke me down was the way Gale reacted to his death. She was so heartbroken by the tragedy, which reminds me of Shakespeare works to an extent like the uneasy ending of Romeo and Juliet.
Sam makes the educated decision, unlike dumb people in horror films, to get out of Woodsboro and make an attempt to leave when Tara leaves her belongings… at 216 Turner Lane, which is Stu Macher’s house. These killers are the most derivative of it all (wink, wink if you remember Sidney’s phone call in act three). The end goes by very fast, and it’s Liv’s all-in-all party. Mindy, Randy’s horror fanatic cousin, is attacked by Ghostface in an amazing tribute to Jamie Kennedy.
Skipping over to the killer reveal, Liv, our pink-haired girl played by Sonia Ammar, who’s a Tunisian model, gets shot in the head by the killer, Amber, who had five minutes of screen time besides the killer reveal at the very most. I expected her to be a meaningless part of the kill count, and I was wrong. ‘Welcome to act three’, said Amber as she shot Liv in the face.
Amber and Richie orchestrate their monologue out to Sidney and Sam, and they reveal that the killers met on the ‘Stab’ subreddit because of their dislike towards the eighth installment, which they say was directed by Rian Johnson, who directed Knives Out. A good movie hasn’t been made since the original and Richie and Amber are giving them a story to go by, according to the killers’ monologue. It ends with a bloody mess, with Sidney throwing hand sanitizer and her face and Gale tackling her after a bitchy, callous comment about Dewey. ‘Yeah, and he died like a p — y!’
Amber has a grisly, gory end when she’s shot twice by our protagonist, Gale Weathers, and goes FLYING onto a stove, practically turning her into a baked alaska. Then Sam stabs Richie and delivers some unneeded quips.
This article has been far too long, and I’m just gonna say it — this was a good film. If I was asked to describe it in one word, ‘good’. It’s a 3.5/5. It seems like something that’s transpired before in the Scream movies though, and there isn’t much new things brought to the film if I say so myself. It feels like they tried too hard to honor Wes Craven, and ended up making a Scream that combined all the plots of one, two, three and four.
In a final conclusion, I give this movie a three stars out of five. Despite its over-copying, I think it made its way as a good Scream film, good with its gore, making sure it’s very meta, amping up the self-referential dynamic even more than the original’s following sequels. Good job to the team behind Radio Silence, and I’m surprised that a good Scream movie was produced without the creative involvement of Wes Craven. This movie stands in third place on my ranking, which is good prestige.
★★★
