Twenty-five years ago, Scream — starring Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox — revitalized horror with its highly self-aware take on the increasingly stale and formulaic slasher genre. This Friday, a film again entitled Scream — again starring Campbell and Cox — returns to breathe new life into the… you get the idea.
“Thank God we are working in a franchise, and in a universe, where it’s okay for a movie to be wildly self-reflexive,” co-director Tyler Gillett told AFP.
“There were more instances of that meta experience than we can count when we were making the movie.”
Just like in the 1996 original, characters in the new Scream spend much of the plot debating the tropes of horror movies in order to guess which one of them — female? Black? virgin? — will be killed off next. They realize that the latest swathe of attacks in their bafflingly violent California hometown is targeting people related to the killers from 25 years before. Handily, one character explains horror audiences’ new fondness for “requels” — films that follow chronologically from previous movies, but reboot the franchise with younger characters related to the original cast.
“There are certain rules to surviving — believe me, I know,” a returning David Arquette tells his younger, new co-stars.
The film also revisits several locations and scenarios. It starts with a scene that evokes Drew Barrymore’s infamous and shocking death in the original, when she ill-advisedly answered her landline, with the killer on the other end, before the opening credits have even rolled.
In the new film’s opener, a Gen-Z teen is so baffled to find that her parents’ old landline still functions that she initially does not even answer.
“The disregard we all have for landlines… for us, it’s fun,” said co-director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin.