Eleven years after “Scream 3,” the casting director of “Scream 4” had a lot of lost time to make up for. While the original film in 1996 brought big-screen attention to “Party of Five” star Neve Campbell and “Friends” star Courteney Cox, this installment isn’t content to pick out a couple Next Big Things.
Rather, we get just about every young actress who has been on a beloved TV show in the last decade: Lucy Hale (“Privileged” and “Pretty Little Liars”), Shenae Grimes (“Degrassi” and “90210”), Anna Paquin (“True Blood”), Kristen Bell (“Veronica Mars”), Aimee Teegarden (“Friday Night Lights”), Brittany Robertson (“Life Unexpected”) and Emma Roberts (“Unfabulous”) just for starters.
It’s reflective of the copycat-dominated Hollywood that these young stars have emerged into — but also kind of sad — that they all get a turn in a franchise that belongs to the previous wave of young stars, a franchise that was groundbreaking and cool 15 years ago.
With director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson returning to their posts, “Scream 4” makes a fair try at saying something new for today’s horror fans. “Scream” showed how teens had picked up the “rules” of scary movies, and therefore weren’t as helpless as the victims from the 1970s and ’80s wave of horror films. Those young characters were — to use an overused term — savvy. But that savvy gradually morphed into cynicism, so in “Scream 4” a character notes that the “Saw” films are just blood and gore without any character development. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be ironic that that criticism is also valid for “Scream 4.”
Pop-culture references and self-reflexive storytelling in the 1990s were cues that you were watching something plugged into the zeitgeist (not coincidentally, a prime example is Williamson’s “Dawson’s Creek,” where Dawson — a stand-in for Williamson — wanted to be the next Spielberg). In 2011, our TV shows and movies have gone well beyond merely admitting the existence of real-world TV and movies in their characters’ lives. Today, Williamson is adapting “The Vampire Diaries” from the novels and Craven has sat back and watched almost all of his ’70s and ’80s films be remade “for a new audience” by new filmmakers who aren’t encouraged to come up with anything new.
Today, we have the term “meta,” which takes insider-ness to further and further extremes, and acknowledges — wisely but somewhat bitterly — that no original creation exists in a vacuum.
In “Scream,” Jamie Kennedy’s Randy felt like he was in a scary movie. Then Gail Weathers (Cox) wrote a book, and that became the movie “Stab,” which is the movie-within-a-movie in “Scream 2.” Taking the next leap in meta-ness, a character in “Scream 4” is documenting this latest string of Ghostface killings in Woodsboro with a headset webcam. Why wait for a book and then a movie when you can see everything as it is happening? We’re living in the future, and “Scream 4” recognizes that by commenting not only on the instant-but-shallower communication of webcams, but also the instant-but-shallower fame of reality TV and tabloid magazine stardom.
Still, those layers are just something for movie geeks and critics to talk about. At its core, “Scream 4” really hasn’t advanced much beyond “Scream.” What was once scary is now going through the motions, and what was once surprisingly clever is now expectedly clever. Granted, I suppose someone seeing their first scary movie might find “Scream 4” scary, but while watching this movie and its characters (savvy, cynical and meta, rather than naïve and innocent), it’s hard to imagine such a person exists (of course they do, although I imagine the age at which kids are first scared by a horror film has gradually dropped over the years). Furthermore, I like to think that I am not so cynical that I can’t be scared by a movie anymore; “Scream 4” didn’t scare me (it did strike me a quite violent, though, so the franchise still has that going for it, I suppose).
There is one major saving grace to “Scream 4”: At least they made a “shriekquel” rather than a “screammake” (terms copyrighted by one of the characters in the movie). At least they moved the story of Sidney, Gail and Dewey — and the discussion of how we view horror films — forward a bit rather than literally remaking “Scream.” Because you know someone somewhere in Hollywood likes the idea (or rather, the commercial prospect) of remaking “Scream,” even after only 15 fast-moving years.