Wes Craven’s Scream 2 is a sequel that knows exactly what it is, and says so out loud. The tagline puts it plainly: “Someone has taken their love of sequels one step too far.” Kevin Williamson’s script works through a college campus while a killer in the Ghostface costume picks off students, and the film runs 120 minutes. It holds a 6.2 of 10.
The film is smarter about its own machinery than almost anything else released in 1997, and less scary than the movie that came before it. That is a critical judgment, not a fact the film announces. What the film does announce, constantly, is its own awareness.
Trailer, via Fathom Entertainment.
Windsor College and the Stab Premiere
Scream 2 opens two years after the Woodsboro murders. Sidney Prescott, played again by Neve Campbell, is a student at the fictional Windsor College in Ohio. She has a roommate, Hallie McDaniel, played by Elise Neal, and a new boyfriend, Derek Feldman, played by Jerry O’Connell.
Before Sidney appears, the film stages a killing inside a movie theater. Two seniors, Maureen Evans and Phil Stevens, attend a sneak preview of Stab, a film based on the Woodsboro massacre. Phil steps out to use the restroom and is killed by someone in a Ghostface costume. The killer takes Phil’s seat beside Maureen and stabs her repeatedly. The crowd around her is too loud to notice.
Maureen climbs onto the stage to beg for help. The audience thinks it is a publicity stunt. She falls dead. It is the best sequence in the film, and the one moment where the satire and the violence occupy the same body.
Gale Weathers, Dewey Riley and the Returning Survivors
The news media descends on Windsor College, including local journalist Debbie Salt, played by Laurie Metcalf. Two other Woodsboro survivors arrive: Dewey Riley, the police deputy, played by David Arquette, there to protect Sidney, and Gale Weathers, the reporter, played by Courteney Cox, there to cover the story.
Gale brings a cameraman, Joel Jones. Together they try to stage a confrontation between Sidney and Cotton Weary, played by Liev Schreiber, who is chasing fame off his exoneration for the rape and murder of Sidney’s mother, Maureen Prescott. The stunt fails.
Craven and Williamson keep the returning cast busy, but the film’s attention is split. Dewey and Gale are the sequel’s comic engine. Sidney is its emotional center. Randy Meeks, played by Jamie Kennedy, is its chorus, and he gets the film’s thesis.
Randy theorizes that the killer is likely someone Sidney already knows and is patterning the homicides after a movie sequel.
That line is the whole architecture. Scream 2 is a movie about a killer who has seen a movie about a killer.
Delta Lambda Zeta and the Name Game
Sidney and Hallie attend a party at the sorority house Delta Lambda Zeta. At Omega Beta Zeta, a nearby sorority house, Ghostface murders a student named Cici Cooper, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. After the partygoers leave to look at Cici’s crime scene, Ghostface enters Delta Lambda Zeta and attacks Sidney. He injures Derek, then flees when police arrive.
Gale works out the pattern. Cici is a diminutive for Casey. The new Ghostface is targeting students whose names echo the Woodsboro victims. It is a clever mechanism, and it gives the middle of the film a spine.
It also exposes the film’s central weakness. A pattern is not a person. The kills in Scream 2 are organized, legible and frequently bloodless in effect, because the movie is more interested in the rule than in the terror. The original Scream, in this paper’s view, made its characters afraid of what they knew. Scream 2 makes them recite it.
The Leaked Script and the Rewrites
The production history is more dramatic than most of what made it to screen. Williamson wrote a five-page outline for a sequel while auctioning his original Scream script, hoping to tempt bidders with the idea of a franchise. After Scream tested well and became a financial and critical success, Dimension moved ahead with the sequel while the first film was still in theaters.
Then the script leaked. An extra posted Williamson’s script online in full, revealing the identity of the killers and much of the plot. It was the first time a film was significantly affected by an internet leak. The production kept shooting on a partial script while Williamson rewrote, working against both the leak and a rushed schedule. The finale changed. The killers changed. The roles of Randy Meeks and Joel changed drastically.
To stop a second leak, actors did not get the last pages until weeks before shooting. Pages that revealed the killer’s identity were handed out only on the day the scene was shot, and only to the actors in it. Scripts were printed on specialty paper to block photocopying and often destroyed after use. All present were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Security focused on closed film sets and strict limits on who could be there and who could see the script.
In 2017, Williamson said the leaked script was a “dummy draft” built to protect the real one, and that three dummy endings had been written.
The Casting and the Television Pipeline
Campbell was contracted to return as Sidney before filming on Scream had even started. Her character was the only one from the original guaranteed to survive and lead a new film. Once a sequel looked inevitable, Dimension added options for the survivors: Cox as Gale, Arquette as Dewey, Kennedy as Randy, Schreiber as Cotton. Roger L. Jackson came back to voice Ghostface.
For the new roles, the production went after established and popular actors, largely pulling from television of the time. That is why Scream 2 feels like a crossover event. Gellar was on television. Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps were cast as Maureen and Phil, the two who die first. Olyphant plays Mickey, Metcalf plays Debbie Salt.
The casting is a genuine strength. The problem is what the film does with it. Several of these actors get one scene and a body. The movie trades on recognition and then spends it.
What Scream 2 Gets Right, and What It Does Not
Scream 2 satirizes the cliché of the film sequel while being one. That is a real trick, and Williamson pulls it off in the writing. The film combines slasher violence with comedy, satire and whodunit mystery, and it does so with more discipline than most films that attempt the mix.
Craven directs it cleanly. The set pieces are staged with care, particularly the Stab premiere and the sorority house attack. Marco Beltrami returned to provide the music, and the score does steady work.
But the film is a step down from Scream, and the reason is structural. The first film had a small cast and a single location logic that made every room feel unsafe. Scream 2 widens the world to a campus and a media circus, and the widening costs it tension. There are more characters to suspect and fewer to fear for.
The rushed schedule shows. Williamson’s final script was detailed in some places and thin in others, and Craven wrote and developed certain scenes as they were being filmed. You can feel it in the back half, where the film moves through its reveals with efficiency rather than dread.
The leak is the part worth watching. A film about a killer who copies a movie was itself rewritten because the internet got the script first. That is not trivia. That is the whole story of 1997 in one production, and it explains why Scream 2 feels like a film assembled under pressure rather than a film that chose its shape.
The 6.2 of 10 is fair. Scream 2 is a clever, well-acted, historically important sequel that understands its own premise better than it executes it. It is worth seeing for the theater scene, for Kennedy’s Randy, and for the fact that it happened at all. It is not worth seeing for the fear.
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