Horrorfest 2015: Cravenfest - Scream 4

Hey, I just realized I watched and wrote about 32 horror movies this month instead of 31. So now we're in bonus time! Although I guess technically a bunch of the posts were about TV episodes and/or segments of episodes, so I guess it's fair.

Now for the last film Craven ever directed: 2010's SCREAM 4, released about a decade after the last sequel. This time Kevin Williamson came back, and it kind of shows, though this was not the franchise-saver that the filmmakers and fans probably wanted.

 

This flick brings us back to where it all began, sleepy small town Woodsboro where David Arquette is now a bumbling sheriff and Courteney Cox is now married to him. She has writer's block! But Neve Campbell does not have writer's block. Because she has finished a self help book and is now on a book tour – last stop… WOODSBORO!

 

Also it's the anniversary of the murders from the first movie.

 

We meet a new crop of teenagers led by Campbell's never-before-mentioned cousin (Emma Roberts). There's Hayden Panettiere, Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen as the resident horror film buffs and Nico Tortorella as Roberts' estranged boyfriend.

 

The bodies start piling up, everyone starts wondering who is doing it, etc.

 

The movie opens with a series of "gotcha" "scares" as we quickly learn there have been way more STAB movies than SCREAM movies in the intervening 10 years, with only the first 3 being based on the original "true life" murders and the rest getting crazier and crazier. During this sequence we get a staggering number of cameos of all of the actresses offed in the various openings of the various STAB movies, including Kristen Bell and Lucy Hale.

 

I guess this is Williamson's attempt to outdo the meta-ness of the other flicks but like the movies-within-the-movie in both SCREAM 2 and SCREAM 3, it seems like a wasted opportunity. We're shown this stuff but what are we supposed to do with it? What's it mean?

 

This time out Williamson attempts to school us on some "new" horror rules (they all seem made up to me and not based on real movies) as well as the rules of a "remake" (although this is not a remake). Enough has happened in the realm of horror in the last 10 years that I think Williamson and Craven could have probably come up with something clever – references to torture porn flicks or Japanese horror or something. I guess CABIN IN THE WOODS basically already skewered all that stuff so there's not much left for SCREAM 4 to take on, other than maybe itself, which it pretends to but doesn't.

 

One way this could have worked would have been to go fully insane and make it a literal remake of SCREAM. Then, talking about remakes would make sense. Maybe the characters have even seen the original movie. So it's not slasher clichés they're familiar with so much as the specifics of an actual movie.

 

Or, this would be funny. There's copycat crimes inspired by the movie SCREAM. So, in a sense, the crimes are the "remake." But it's been over 10 years since the original film so none of the teens even know what the fuck it is. Some nerd has to be like, "Wait, this is like that movie SCREAM," and then everyone else goes, "What movie?"

 

Anyway – that's it for CRAVENFEST. SCREAM 4 is not Craven's best work, but it's way better than his worst and it's cool that he kept creative control of this series, instead of the insanity that went down with the NIGHTMARE flicks. He didn't quite get the chance to reinvent horror for a fourth decade, but he definitely made his mark.

 

You might notice I skipped some movies. The best of these is THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW. I didn't watch it just because I've seen it before, but it's super awesome. I also didn't watch RED EYE since I've seen it before, and it was fine. I skipped NIGHT VISIONS because I'd seen it and because it sucked.

 

Craven had a really interesting career. Basically three big spikes in popularity, with spotty films in between. It's not every guy you find making a made for TV movie right after a huge game changer. Then again, it's not every guy who changes the game three different times in as many decades. The thing is, with the exception of CHILLER, all these movies are pretty entertaining, they're all imaginative and they all have some legitimate scares.

 

Happy Halloween! Time to go watch MUSIC OF THE HEART.