‘Scream 4’ (2011): Hooptober Challenge #9

Scream 4 (2011) – Hooptober Challenge #9

Requirements:

• 5 Films from De Palma, Wes Craven, Ken Russell, Hitchcock and/or Moorhead & Benson (2/5)

Perhaps I’m just feeling curmudgeonly these days. Perhaps I am speaking from a place of hurt after some stuff in my personal life. Perhaps I’m just, despite it being the Halloween season, not in the right mindset for horror movies. But I want to talk about the concept of “No Gods, No Masters.”

What does it mean to be a “horror master?” There are director names, writer names, and actor names that have been canonized by the horror community, so much so that they are recognizable by just one name. Lovecraft, King, Lansdale. Price, Cushing, Lugosi. Carpenter, Fulci, Raimi. Hell, Hooptober is named after one. Wes Craven is a name that is on that short list of horror masters, and that name is seen as unassailable. But here’s the thing… with Scream 4, I have seen 14 of the 27 director credits to his name, and there’s a good portion of those movies that I find pretty assailable. 

Craven truly helped innovate with Last House on the Left. He left an indelible impression on our bad dreams and nocturnal fears with A Nightmare on Elm Street and came back to control Freddy’s claws in my favorite entry in the series, New Nightmare. The Hills Have Eyes has major flaws, but it is a classic and enduring staple of the genre. The Serpent and the Rainbow is one of the most slept-on films in all of horror. With writer Kevin Williamson, he helped spearhead horror entering the world of the post-modern (alongside Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness and Craven’s own New Nightmare). But what about the rest?

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People Under the Stairs was memorable and fun but definitely not good. Screams 2 & 3 are fine but not worthy of lionizing. Shocker was painful. Swamp Thing, as well. Red Eye works best as an in-flight movie. Vampire in Brooklyn should be buried and forgotten. The ones I haven’t seen are either considered his lesser works or are never even mentioned except as obscure trivia. Sorry, I haven’t seen his Disney TV movie, Casebusters (yes, that’s a real thing).

But this isn’t me just taking a dig at Craven as it seems. A vast majority of our horror legends have an uneven filmography or a litany of forgettable stories. I just got through writing about an Argento Dracula film so bad it belongs in the same conversation as The Room and Verotika as a psychotronic midnight flick. Every major horror icon I’ve seen has had movies I thought were flat-out bad. Carpenter had Vampires. Hooper had The Mangler. And on and on.

So, what does it mean to be a horror master? Best I can tell, because I’m not going to abandon the concept, it means that you are the following. You have at least one stone-cold classic, or you created something that exponentially furthered the discourse or lexicon of the genre. You have dedicated a sizable portion of your career to horror. And most importantly, you have publicly and unapologetically embraced the genre and its community. And for those reasons, despite my thoughts on Scream 4 or Swamp Thing, Wes Craven is a true horror master.

New decade. New rules. So claims the tagline of Craven’s fourth and final entry into the Scream franchise (before the keys were handed off). But is it true? If it is, then this movie didn’t do anything to prove it to me.

I’ll preface this by saying I’ve never much cottoned to the slasher subgenre. The films rarely, if ever, give me the chills the way a haunting or a possession or a werewolf stalking the world at night can. But I do consider myself something of a student of horror, and I’d be remiss to not school myself in the slasher’s ways. So, I’m by no means just a tourist; my credentials in slasher speak are legit.

So what do we get in Scream 4 if we’re not getting new rules? Honestly, a lot more of the same. The film opens well enough– going for a meta double fake-out before getting back to the basics of the franchise with an opening kill. From there, we’re off. 15 years have passed since the Woodsboro murders of the original. Prescott (Neve Campbell) is back in town to promote her new book about reinventing herself out of the role of ‘victim’ from her traumatic past. Sure enough, it spurs a new batch of murders featuring ole Ghostface himself.

Several talking points are taken to point out to us, the audience, that everything is on the table. More than that– the stakes have to be upped. This is made out to be, thanks to our Randy stand-ins Charlie and Robbie, more along the lines of a franchise reboot than a sequel. Much ado is made about the evolution of technology and that it would make sense for Ghostface to move on from starring in a slasher film to making a slasher film from his own point-of-view (thanks to the concept of livestreaming).

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This all translates to very little difference. Sidney’s cousin, Jill (Emma Roberts), is the ‘new’ Sidney. Her ex-boyfriend, Trevor, is the ‘new’ Billy Loomis. Jill’s friends are the ‘new’ Sidney’s friends, and so on and so on. We see the return of Dewey, now the sheriff of Woodsboro, and his wife, Gale Weathers. 

It causes an awful lot of deja vu in the movie, and unless one is super-attuned to every minute detail from the previous three entries, results are a lot more of the same. The kills are not at all creative or innovative. The set-up is also full of tropes and extremely minor tweaks. What’s worse is that for all the talk of upping the stakes (SPOILERS AHEAD IN THIS PARAGRAPH), all the principal characters wind up ultimately safe despite the threat of not surviving. Even Scream 2 killed off Randy. Scream 4, however, focuses on the wrong things to keep alive (it should be concepts and not characters) and lets all the legacy alumni live to see another sequel.

For my money, Courteney Cox was a very logical person to snuff to amp up the “no one is safe” concept and get rid of a probably highly-paid and mostly aged-out character that adds little, if anything, to the movie.

So when all is said and done, we have another nearly note-for-note rehash of the formula that seemed novel-ish in the original. There is self-glorifying genre blabber about the wide world of horror– phone calls where people namecheck all the hallmarks of horror-dom in rapid fire, and even a needless mention of Shaun of the Dead with far too much footage shown (the movie is incredible, but I don’t need Scream 4 to tell me that, and it’s mainstream enough that horror newbs probably also already knew about it).

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And then there’s the obligatory Kevin Williamson diatribe delivered by a character– talking about the ills of the age of social media, where people are starved for instant recognition and stardom in an effort to feed the beast of dopamine hit likes and follows. It’s said aloud by a young person but has all the makings of “Old Man Yells At Cloud.”

The film, to its credit, does a great job of cherry-picking up-and-coming talent that would go on to bigger and better things. Alison Brie, Kristen Bell, the aforementioned Emma Roberts, Anna Paquin, and Anthony Anderson all make an appearance. They also had some zeitgeisty casting choices in Adam Brody and Hayden Panettiere. Rory Culkin does a great job as one of the two resident horror film experts– but his talents are wasted on a weakly developed character who just rehashes other characters from previous films. To see what Culkin is capable of and to understand why he might still blow up like his brothers before him, watch the movie adaptation of the black metal true crime book Lords of Chaos, where he plays Swedish metal pioneer Euronymous.

For all its bluster about outdoing and reinventing its predecessors, Scream 4 is an exercise in retreading badly worn territory and milking a franchise’s teat dry. All it manages to do is tarnish some of the shine off Craven’s legacy. It’s no wonder it took so long for another entry. 

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