BETWEEN SHRIEKQUELS AND SCREAMAKES

I was ten years old when Scream was first released in 1996 and thanks to a winning combination of careless parenting and unscrupulous salesmanship I was able to procure a copy from the local ice-cream man and watch it in on the sly. Initially, the horror of seeing the girl from E.T. mercilessly tormented and cut to bits by a masked killer was too much for me to bear; I almost crapped out my ribcage in fear. However, as Bart Simpson put it: ‘if you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitised it’; so I persevered. By the time it had reached its bloody denouement I was transfixed. This was the greatest film I had ever seen. And I had seen Jumanji.

Scream is often credited with reinventing the horror genre, but it also practically resurrected it. In 1996, the few horror movies receiving major general releases were comprised mostly of stale, clichéd sequels, like Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation or Hellraiser: Bloodline. Even high profile franchises such as these were flat-lining at the box office: The Curse of Michael Myers was by far the most successful of the three and it managed to pull in only a paltry $15million. By grossing over $100million at the US box office alone and spawning a further two sequels within 4 years, Scream breathed new life into a dying genre; rejuvenating it and paving the way for hit contemporary slashers like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend and arguably the only good Halloween sequel in seventeen years, Halloween: H20. When the poorly received albeit commercially successful third instalment Scream 3 concluded the franchise in 2000, it left Hollywood a horror-friendly establishment once more.

A decade later though, and things are once again looking grim. Where once there was a sickly stream of sequels now there is a tidal wave of remakes. It’s a movement that is endemic throughout contemporary cinema, but the horror genre suffers worst: a niche market, its age restricted content imposes an inherent limitation on ticket sales. No wonder a decision to green-light an original horror movie will be made far more carefully than if it were a romantic comedy or kids’ film. In a financially unsound environment a remake is often a safe bet, stemming from a marketing assumption that people will always choose an established brand over something new. This is why in the past couple of years alone we have seen Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Prom Night, Black Christmas and My Bloody Valentine to name but a few, all receive the remake treatment.

All of them, with the exception of the highly enjoyable My Bloody Valentine – the finest exponent of 3D yet to be seen in cinemas – were awful. The beauty of a remake is its simplicity: get rid of all continuity and go back to what made the film great in the first place. Yet each fails in its delivery. Billed as ‘gritty reimaginings’ of vastly superior films, they are monotonously formulaic, entirely bereft of humour and visually sterile; so dull in fact, that it is a wonder the victims don’t bleed gray. With Scream 4, writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven sought to take a scalpel to contemporary horror and dissect it in the same way they did in the original fifteen years before.

Scream is often inaccurately termed the first post-modern horror movie, but that accolade belongs to its director’s earlier work, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare: an innovative sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street, in which the hideously disfigured, razor-gloved child murderer Freddie Krueger breaks down the fourth wall and begins terrorising the cast and crew of the original film: Craven included. It was criminally overlooked on release but Craven would get a second bite at the cherry two years later after signing on to direct Williamson’s script.

Scream takes as its foundation the slasher movies of the 1970s, the finest example of which is John Carpenter’s Halloween. Slashers typically follow the same pattern. The villain is usually a male whose identity is concealed from the outset (Michael Myers), and the audience sees the killings take place from his perspective. The victims are young, attractive teenagers who are essentially being punished for engaging in vices such as underage drinking, drug abuse or pre-marital sex. Amidst these teenagers there will be one female who is chaste and does not indulge in these illegal activities (Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode). She is known as the Final Girl: in the third act the audience’s perspective will switch to hers, and we will follow her as she fights against the killer, and ultimately wins.

The characters in Scream know they are in a horror movie (or at least the killer’s recreation of a horror movie); they know the rules and they know what they have to do to survive. The term ‘meta’ is something of a buzzword these days; possibly because we live in increasingly self-referential times and it is used to imply something that references itself. The most accomplished scene in Scream is also the most ‘meta’: while film geek Randy sits on a couch watching Halloween, shouting at the screen, ‘he’s behind you, Jamie Lee! He’s behind you!’ we see the killer slowly make his way up behind him. The scene then cuts to a parked van outside the house, where two characters are watching a live video feed from a hidden camera planted on top of Randy’s TV. While the killer slowly makes his way up behind Randy, the characters begin to shout at the screen, ‘he’s behind you, kid! He’s behind you!’  With Scream, audiences were shown a horror movie that reminded them what a horror movie was. When the limitations of the genre had been recognised, they could finally be overcome.

Scream 2 operates in the same fashion, playing upon the fact that it’s a sequel, with an obligatory higher body count and gorier death scenes, and it is almost as good as it predecessor. Scream 3 was an attempt to ‘trilogise’ the franchise, and although it has its moments it was certainly a disappointment . If we’re feeling generous then perhaps we can allow Craven the postmodern excuse that he was deliberately trying to make a bad film to match the standard of the concluding part in any other film trilogy, awful as they all are (with the exception of Return of the Jedi); and if we’re feeling especially generous then we can look at his decision to replace Williamson, who wasn’t able to complete a script for the film, with the remarkably inferior Ehren Kruger because he was endeared to the screenwriter by his surname.

Scream 4, however, is Williamson back on form. After returning to the town where it all began, the series’ protagonist (or Final Girl) Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell, finds that someone is trying to recreate the original murders that occurred a decade ago: in short, they are trying to remake Scream. She must turn to the new high school film geeks to learn how the rules of the screamake differ from that of the shriekquel.

It’s not a perfect film. Many of the actors are squandered; both old and new (you can’t put President Laura Roslin in a film and give her only five minutes of screen-time). And for all the talk of remakes requiring extreme, inventive new killings, there’s very little evidence of it on screen. At times Craven’s performance feels almost as phoned-in as Courtney Cox-Arquette’s. But there’s also a lot to like. The film boasts possibly the best opening sequence of the series, and there is a suitably metafictional running commentary on the state of modern horror throughout; not just the remake craze, but the torture-porn of the Saw series, and also the trend in ‘found footage’ horror movies such as Paranormal Activity and [REC]. Neve Campbell is as fantastic as she ever was.

Yet compared with the sort of numbers that the original trilogy brought in, Scream 4 all but bombed at the US box office. Some blamed the April release, others the fact that 11 years is too long to wait between sequels and that fans of the original had simply moved on. Either way, it appeared to have put paid to a proposed fifth and sixth instalment. Worse yet, in a tragic irony that was perhaps too meta for even the filmmakers to have predicted, there were industry rumours that the next time a Scream film did hit cinemas it would most likely be a remake. In short then, it appeared that Scream 4 had failed where Scream had succeeded.

This month, however, Dimension Films, the franchise producers, tweeted the following message:

“How much do you love @Scream4? How badly do you want #Scream5? Come up with a clever tweet and we’ll RT!”

RT, for those who haven’t caught on to the whole Twitter thing, simply means re-tweet, although judging by the fans’ jubilant reaction they seemed to have the impression that if they tweeted loud enough they could save Scream. Unlikely as that sounds, last week Harvey Weinstein made the announcement that world-wide sales were so strong that a fifth installment was a go. All of which begs the question, where can the series go from here? Horror movies, sequels, trilogies and remakes are all established formats that have proved ripe for dissection. What comes after that is less clear, although perhaps the most logical progression would be a film in which the killer tries to inject new life into a dying horror movie franchise: that would be suitably meta. Unless of course, the rumours do turn out to be true and the fifth Scream film is in fact a remake. But that’s a twist of the knife more than the ten-year-old in me could bear.

John Gibb