Horror Review: Scream (2022)

We decided to watch Scream (2022) for Halloween and we’d really like to have those nearly 2 hours back. Needless to say, there will be SPOILERS. Oh, and since the filmmakers decided to not number their sequel, we'll be referring to the 5th entry in the franchise as Just Scream so we don't have to keep adding the year.

Ghostface is back in Woodsboro and their first victim is Tara, who shockingly survives the attack. This brings her sister, Sam, back to town for the first time since she left for mysterious reasons years ago. After she gets a call from the killer and is herself attacked, she realizes that this new batch of killings are connected to a family secret. With her boyfriend, Richie, she asks for Dewey’s help in finding out who’s behind all this. The most obvious suspects? Tara’s group of friends: Amber, Wes, twins Mindy and Chad, and Liz, Chad’s girlfriend. But there’s also Richie - after all, it wouldn’t be the first time the heroine’s love interest turns out to be the killer. And what about Sam? Can she be trusted when she doesn’t really trust herself?

Once again, the surviving trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale must share the screen with a bunch of newbies: tormented Sam; Tara, who exists mainly as Sam’s tough and justifiably upset sister, and barely spends time with her own friends; Sam’s boyfriend, Richie, who drove us crazy trying to figure out where we’d seen the actor before (it’s Hughie from The Boys!), and who’s so supportive of this girl he’s been seeing for 6 months that he stays by her side even as people keep dying; twins Mindy and Chad, who stand out by virtue of being related to Randy Meeks, and the fact that Mindy takes over from her uncle as the snarky movie expert; Amber, who’s Tara’s protective best friend; Wes, who appears to have a thing for Tara and somehow manages to come across as duller than Sam; Liv, who’s Chad’s girlfriend and isn’t having sex with him (really, that’s the only thing we’re told about her). Returning from Scream 4 is Judy Hicks, who’s replaced Dewey as the sheriff and is also Wes’s mother, though there was zero indication she had a kid when she was hitting on Dewey and being all weird around Sidney. There’s also Vince, who’s related to Stu Macher, Billy Loomis’s accomplice, harasses Liv and serves as a possible suspect for about 5 minutes. The veterans don’t do much other than provide a shocking death for the audience and some backup for Sam. Dewey clearly drew the short straw and ends up an unemployed drunk who left Gale because he couldn’t handle the move to New York. Oh, and he also gets to die in an incredibly stupid way. After saving Tara from Ghostface in a suspiciously empty hospital (really, where is everyone?), and putting her, Sam, and Ritchie on an elevator out of there, he goes back to shoot Ghostface on the head and make sure he stays dead (and also get himself sentenced for murder in the future because shooting an unarmed assailant to kill when they are already on the ground and you had the chance to escape tends to be illegal). Naturally, Ghostface isn’t where he left them and Dewey ends up being the victim, instead. Does the movie really expect its audience to believe that a veteran of not 1, not 2, but 4 Ghostface killing sprees would be this dumb? Seriously? Ugh! Before his ridiculous demise, Dewey has time to impart some useful advice, like telling Sam that the killer’s motivation lies in the past and that they’re someone she knows, which includes Richie because it’s always the love interest. Except in Scream 2, Scream 3, and Scream 4, so basically most of the franchise. Have the people behind this not watched the other movies or are they pretending they don't exist? Sidney and Gale fare better than Dewey in the sense that they survive, though they don’t do much until the final confrontation and then the focus is more on Sam and Tara. Sidney shows up after Dewey’s death, near the end, just in time for Sam to ignore her warnings, as you do when the survivor of over half a dozen psychos offers advice on how to deal with your own psycho. Gale gets to talk to Dewey for the first time since they broke up and later, avenges his death by shooting his killer. You’d think sidelining the original characters would allow the movie to fully develop the new ones - you’d be wrong. We’re shown so little of the newbies that it’s impossible to become attached to any of these potential victims, and despite the occasional “Where were you?” back-and-forth after an attack, the movie also fails at creating suspense around Ghostface’s identity. It’s only near the end, where everyone ends up at Amber’s house, that things get momentarily a little more interesting, with Amber, Mindy, and Liv all making a good case for why one of them might be the killer. And honestly, any one of them could’ve been Ghostface and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. We may be told that Tara and the others are a close-knit group of friends, but they barely interact on screen and when they do it’s only to provide exposition. This lack of interaction undermines what should’ve been shocking betrayals and reveals. Really, who are these people, what do they mean to each other, and why should we care whether they die or turn out to be psychos?

The death’s are a mixed bag. Apart from Dewey and the 2 killers, there’s Liv, Vince, Wes, and Sheriff Hicks. Vince’s is quick, just a stab in the neck, and feels random, as if the filmmakers realized that the body count was too low. Wes gets another neck stab, and a very strange one. The killer slides his knife through the side of his neck and the tip comes out of the other side - it basically looks like rubber rather than real flesh. These 2 plus Tara’s survival and ability to not only leave the hospital so quickly, but also successfully fight for her life shortly after, made us wonder if one of the killers was going to have some medical training given the precision on display, but there was no mention of that. The best 2 killings have an element of surprise: Liv, who goes from murder suspect to victim in the same scene, and Sheriff Hicks, who returns home thinking her son is in danger and gets attacked in the porch. The killers’ misses were hard to believe. Fine, they didn’t kill Tara because they needed Sam to come back, even if the fact that they managed to not to hit any vital organs while frantically stabbing her was a tad unbelievable, but Mindy surviving her neck stabbing after the audience saw 2 other people die like that, and Chad not dying after his brutal attack was just ridiculous. At least one of them should’ve died. After all, the movie had no problem killing Dewey, so why keep them both?

In the centre of this new killing spree is Sam. But what is the deal with her? Why did she attract the attention of Ghostface? What is that terrible family secret that turned her into a teen drug addict, made her leave town at 18, and not contact her little sister for years? Well, turns out she’s Billy Loomis’s secret daughter and Tara's father left the family after hearing her confront her mother about it. Only she’s not the killer, so who cares? The filmmakers, apparently. We see Sam hallucinating her dead bio dad, which is very troubling and cause for an urgent hospital visit. Really, having hallucinations when sober isn’t normal, people. She’s secretly afraid of becoming like him and hurt people with knives instead of just boring them to death with her blank expression and vacant stare that would make her very convincing as a dead-eyed psycho if she weren’t so aggressively dull. Seriously, Sam’s struggle should be interesting but the movie does a terrible job with it. Worse, in the end, Billy is almost her spirit guide, encouraging her to embrace her genetic inheritance when it’s time to defeat Ghostface. This would’ve been fine if Just Scream was supposed to be the birth of a psychopath, but the Sam/Billy Loomis connection feels like nothing more than a lame attempt at making the new lead seem edgy. Sidney barely gets to react to the reveal and of course, she has no idea that Sam is hallucinating Billy and even looking to him for inspiration. This could’ve been used to create a situation in which Sidney once again projects her experiences on someone else and that blinds her to their true nature. However, despite the movie showing her wiping the bloody knife à la Ghostface, there’s no evidence that Sam should be seen as a psycho. If the audience were meant to be suspicious, the perfect time to signal that would’ve been when Sidney and Gale see how she has repeatedly stabbed Richie (because, yes, it is the love interest) (see? She’s just like Sidney!) well beyond what was needed to stop him. Only, instead of being worried that there may be something wrong with Sam, neither of them shows any concern and they even let her shoot him just to make sure he’s dead (which, again, we’re fairly certain would be considered murder if he had still been alive). 

And who’s Richie’s accomplice? Amber! That she’s Tara’s best friend should mean something, but Tara barely reacts to the reveal that her bestie orchestrated her brutal attack and has been bumping off their friends. This also raises the question of how the hell did no one know that she was this obsessed with Stab. How long have these friends known each other? Was she pretending around them the whole time or did everyone just forget that little detail when the Ghostface killings started again and they all decided that the culprits were likely Stab fans making their own movie? Did Amber never mention that her house was Stu’s old house where the original Scream final massacre took place? Because that seems like something that should’ve come up when they were all wondering who could be targeted next. Richie being able to fool Sam is a lot easier to believe than Amber being able to fool her friends. Anyway, she reveals herself with one of the standout killings by nonchalantly shooting Liv on the head at a time when it looked like she might be the killer. Unfortunately, after the killer duo explains their plan, she becomes a joke. The theory was right and Richie and Amber really are a couple of obsessive Stab fans. They met on a subreddit and were so upset with the declining quality of the series that they decided to give the filmmakers some good real life inspiration. And how did they know about Sam’s shameful secret? Because her mother is a drunk. Wait, does this mean that Sam’s mother is going around blabbing about her eldest daughter’s bio dad being one of Woodsboro’s Ghostface killers? Why did no one else know? It was hard to take this Ghostface duo seriously because we couldn’t stop rolling our eyes at the ridiculously obvious meta commentary on fandoms they represented. They’re just 2 caricatures of demanding fans that are so obsessed with a movie that they’re willing to kill for it, but end up suffering horrible deaths at the hands of their stars: Richie gets repeatedly stabbed by Sam after she activates her serial killer genes, and Amber gets shot and (accidentally) set on fire by Gale. Maybe it would’ve worked if they were just facing Sidney and Gale, but not with super serious Sam and her daddy issues. Not to mention that this feels like a retread of Scream 4, though Just Scream’s predecessor did its crazy motivation way better. As for Sam’s role in all this, she was supposed to be the new Stab villain. Wait, does this mean Richie deleted all security videos from the store where they both worked so that the police wouldn’t see that she was nowhere near Woodsboro when her sister was attacked? And that there were no other coworkers and/or friends/acquaintances that could confirm her whereabouts at the time of the first Ghostface attack? Because it would be impossible to frame her without giving her an accomplice, and there’s no mention of getting her one.

Richie and Amber aren’t the only shots the movie takes at demanding fans. After explaining that the current killing spree is a requel of Stab (part sequel, part remake) and giving out the new set of rules, Mindy also explains how those silly Stab fans couldn’t handle the latest (coincidentally also numberless) sequel trying to do something different and had the nerve to gasp! make YouTube videos expressing their opinions because these silly horror movies are actually very important for them. The horror! If Just Scream really wanted to talk about bad fans, it should’ve mentioned the actors and the filmmakers being harassed and receiving death threats. Mindy’s speech comes across as incredibly condescending and the whole thing sounds more like someone who made a shitty movie and can’t take the criticism. Oh, but does this means the newbies don’t like horror movies? Why of course not. They do like horror, as long as it’s elevated horror. And what, pray tell, constitutes elevated horror? Tara explains to Ghostface during the obligatory Do You Like Scary Movies phone call that it has a deeper meaning than just give the audience gory deaths. Her examples? The Babadook, Hereditary, It Follows, and The Witch. Mindy also mentions elevated horror, and Tara’s parting line to the defeated Ghostfaces is to repeat that she likes The Babadook better than those silly slashers. While we don’t like the idea of pitting Elevated Horror against just plain Horror, it would’ve been fine if it were a character thing, but with Tara’s line the movie seemed to be pushing this comparison beyond that. Also, what’s the criteria to decide whether a movie counts as elevated horror? Horror movies having deeper meanings is nothing new and yet all the references to it here are about contemporary movies, which makes it look as if there was some evolution in the genre and only now does horror mean more. Interestingly, these movies, in addition to being small indie movies, all have a certain look in common - small cast, limited sets, and a way of filming violence that makes even the most gory scene appear somewhat muted - so this feels as much about aesthetic as about themes. Are brightly bloody horror movies barred from being elevated? Does that exclude Carrie? What about The Exorcist or The Final Girls? Would they count? And we’re not quite sure why The Witch would be an Elevated Horror. Is it because there’s no masked killer going around killing people? Because not all horror movies are slashers, and if elevated horror is supposed to be about more than gory deaths, does this mean Stigmata would be considered one? That’s just weird.

VERDICT

The original Scream poked fun at slasher movie tropes while being a pretty good slasher movie itself. It also felt like a movie made by people who actually liked the genre. Scream (2022) feels very much the opposite. It also goes too far with the meta element, which is a problem because, while the other movies took aim at horror movie tropes and remakes, this one goes after the fans in a big way. Any movie, especially one that’s part of a successful franchise, that complains about bad reviews, better be great, and Scream (2022) isn’t great. None of this - setting, characters, killings - feels original. The acting is average to mediocre, including the lead, and so is the writing. That this was the sequel that spawned a new series of movies - or at least one more sequel - is just baffling.