Wes Craven’s Scream 4 opens on the fifteenth anniversary of the Woodsboro murders that started the whole thing. Two high school students, Marnie Cooper and Jenny Randall, are dead before the title card. Sidney Prescott comes home the next day to sell a self-help book about surviving trauma. Within hours, evidence turns up in her rental car and she is the prime suspect.
That is a clean setup, and Scream 4 knows it. The film brings back Neve Campbell as Sidney, David Arquette as Dewey Riley, now county sheriff, and Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers-Riley, stuck on a book and ignoring her husband’s orders to stay out of it. Craven directed. Kevin Williamson wrote the script. It runs 111 minutes and carries the tagline “New decade. New rules.”
Trailer, via Dimension Films.
A New Generation at Woodsboro High
The new kids are the point. Emma Roberts plays Jill Roberts, Sidney’s teenage cousin, coping with the infidelity of her ex-boyfriend Trevor Sheldon. Hayden Panettiere is Kirby Reed, her friend. Erik Knudsen and Rory Culkin play Robbie Mercer and Charlie Walker, two high school cinephiles.
Charlie has a theory. The killer is not following the old slasher rules but the rules of horror remakes. That is the film’s sharpest idea, and it is the one it leans on hardest. Scream 4 wants to satirize the clichés of film remakes, and it also provides commentary on the extensive usage of social media and the obsession with internet fame.
The supporting cast is deep. Marley Shelton is Deputy Judy Hicks. Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody are Deputies Perkins and Hoss. Mary McDonnell plays Kate Roberts, Jill’s mother. Alison Brie is Rebecca Walters, Sidney’s publicist. Roger L. Jackson returns as the voice of Ghostface.
The Killings Move Fast
The body count climbs quickly. Olivia Morris, a friend of Jill and Kirby, gets a threatening call, then is murdered while Jill and Kirby watch from across the street. Sidney is later confronted by Ghostface, and they fight until Perkins and Hoss arrive and the killer flees.
Then the film slows down. Sidney fires Rebecca after learning the publicist wants to use the murders to move more books. Rebecca dies in a parking garage. Gale enlists the help of Charlie and Robbie. Gale and Sidney conclude the killer will likely strike at the “Stab-a-thon,” a screening party held in a barn where teenagers gather to binge watch all seven installments of the Stab franchise.
That middle stretch is where Scream 4 starts to sag. The rules talk is fun. The staging is not. Craven could build a scare, but too much of the second act is people standing around explaining the genre to each other.
Casting That Almost Wasn’t
The casting history is more interesting than some of what made it to screen. Variety reported in September 2009 that Campbell, Arquette and Cox were returning. Craven told Entertainment Weekly what that meant: “It’s a total integration of those three and new kids. The story of Sid, Gale, and Dewey is very much a part of the movie.”
Ashley Greene was offered the role of Jill before it went to Roberts. Lake Bell was set to play Deputy Judy Hicks and dropped out four days before filming over scheduling conflicts, which handed the part to Shelton. Lauren Graham was cast as Kate Roberts and left a few days into principal photography.
Liev Schreiber, who played Cotton Weary in the first three films, said at a press conference for Repo Men that there were no plans for his return. Williamson kept shooting down rumors of Jamie Kennedy coming back as Randy. His reasoning, given to FEARnet: “I would love nothing more than to have Jamie Kennedy in the film. However to have Randy in the film, it sort of just takes it… I mean Scream 2 was a lie, you know? It’s a false move. So I just won’t do it. I can’t do that. I just won’t do it.”
That quote is worth sitting with. Williamson is talking about the rules of his own franchise, and he is right. Randy died in Scream 2 and stayed dead. Bringing him back would have been the exact cheap move the films claim to hate.
What the Remake Rules Actually Buy
Here is the problem. Scream 4 announces that the killer is following remake rules, then mostly follows the original’s rules anyway. The kills are bigger, the cast is bigger, the meta-talk is louder. The structure is the same.
The film also wants to say something about social media and the obsession with internet fame. It gestures at it. But the commentary never lands, because Scream 4 cannot decide whether it is mocking the new rules or just listing them.
The Order of the Stab Films
The Stab-a-thon gives the film its best set piece and its clearest joke. The party is a marathon of all seven Stab movies, the films-within-the-film that dramatize the Woodsboro murders. The order matters to the characters, which is the joke. Ranked by how much they actually matter to Scream 4:
- Stab, the original, the one everyone in the franchise treats as scripture.
- Stab 2, the sequel the characters cite when they argue about what a real follow-up looks like.
- Stab 3, the one that set up the events of Scream 3.
- The remaining installments, which exist mainly so the marathon can run long enough for Ghostface to show up.
That list is the film in miniature. Scream 4 is fluent in its own history and never quite sure what to do with it beyond putting it on a screen in a barn.
Dewey, Gale and the Weight of Fifteen Years
The returning trio is the reason to watch. Arquette plays Dewey as a man who has been through this before and hates that he is going through it again. Cox plays Gale as a writer who needs the story more than she needs the marriage, and the film is honest about how ugly that is. Campbell plays Sidney as someone who has decided she is done being a victim and keeps getting dragged back.
The veterans are not cameos. They carry the plot. That is more than most legacy sequels manage.
Where Scream 4 Sits in the Series
The series was meant to be a trilogy. In July 2008, the Weinstein Company announced a fourth film was in development. Craven was confirmed to direct in March 2010. Casting ran from April to September 2010. Principal photography started in June 2010 and wrapped that September.
Dimension Films distributed it. Outerbanks Entertainment produced it. It is the sequel to Scream 3 and the fourth entry in the series.
So this is a film made by people who had done it three times and were being asked to justify a fourth. That pressure shows. The best scenes have a weary intelligence. The worst have the feel of a franchise going through motions it has already named.
The Score on Scream 4
Scream 4 is not a bad film. It is an unnecessary one, and it knows it, which is both its charm and its limit. The cast is strong. The Stab-a-thon is a real set piece. The Dewey and Gale material has actual weight.
But the satire is soft. The remake rules are announced and then abandoned. The social media angle is gestured at and dropped. Craven and Williamson built a film about how remakes are lazy, and then delivered something that coasts on the original’s structure rather than rebuilding it.
The published critical score is 5.2/10, and that is about right. Metacritic sits at 52/100. This is a middle-tier Scream, better than the third, well behind the first, and remembered mostly for what it promised rather than what it did.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
