Scream VS Scream

And now, for some more Scream! Watching Scream (2022) made us gain a new appreciation for Scream 4, and we thought it might be interesting to compare and contrast the 2 attempts to revive the Scream franchise. Warning: SPOILERS.

Let’s begin with a short description of both movies:

— In Scream 4, another Ghostface killing spree begins when Sidney arrives in Woodsboro as part of her book tour. This time, the main targets are her cousin Jill and her group of friends, though Ghostface finds time to mess with Sidney, too. Dewey, who’s now the sheriff, leads the police investigation, while Gale decides that this may be the cure for her writer’s block and enlists some of Jill’s friends to help her catch the killer first.

— In Scream (2022), Ghostface targets Sam’s younger sister, Tara, their friends, due to Sam’s secret connection to Billy Loomis. Desperate, Sam asks for Dewey’s help. Meanwhile, Gale returns to Woodsboro to cover this new killing spree, and so does Sidney, to stop Ghostface once again.

While we very much didn’t like Scream (2022), its opening sequence, where Ghostface first messes with Tara by showing why giving control of your locks to an app is a very bad idea, and then attacks her is better than Scream 4’s 2 Stab fakeouts before getting to the real first killings. Each set of killings is good on its own, but it’s annoying. Both Screams introduce a new cast of characters that will interact with the returning trio of Sidney, Gale, and Dewey. However, they go about it in very different ways. Like we wrote in our review of Scream (2022), that movie mostly sidelines the 3 veterans and even goes so far as kill Dewey, while at the same time failing to make the newbies compelling, or at the very least, identifiable characters. This extends to the new lead, Sam, who’s a charisma vacuum. The attempts at giving her an edge by making her Billy’s troubled secret daughter just didn’t work for us. Part of it was the acting, but even on paper the whole thing feels forced, and it doesn’t even come into play in the one situation when it should - Sam’s interactions with Sidney. Sidney is the one character that you’d expect to have something to say about Sam’s connection and fears of becoming like him, but she never gets to properly react to it. Scream 4 does a much better job at integrating both casts, and even the tertiary characters, like Sidney’s publicist Rebecca or the cop duo of Perkins and Hoss, have their little moments. Robbie the YouTuber may not be particularly deep, but he stands out more than Chad, Wes, and Liv. The audience gets to see the old friends interacting with each other and with the newbies, and also the newbies interacting among themselves. There’s also plenty of humour, most of it courtesy of Gale, though we did find her demands that Dewey included her in his investigation a little annoying. It is an official police investigation, after all. She got better when she started her own. Overall, Scream 4 offers a good balance between scares and laughs. Scream (2022) does have its humorous moments, but it all feels so tired and generic, and much of it is mixed in with the complaints about fans. Not only that, the movie takes the humour out of the usually funny Dewey and Gale, and makes them miserable.

Scream 4 was a lot smarter at picking its targets: the universally reviled Hollywood remake trend and the vacuous fame of reality TV and social media stars. It’s easier to cheer with Sidney’s line about not messing with the original, than with Tara’s confusing declaration that she likes The Babadook better than Scream’s in-story counterpart. Surprisingly, Scream 4 manages to be nicer to remakes than Scream (2022) is to disgruntled fans, who, like it or not, are entitled to their opinions. Also, given that there are plenty of truly awful big budget movies out there, the idea that some fans might be able to do a better job than some Hollywood writers isn’t really that far fetched. Were the writers hoping that some preemptive mocking of their own movie would help smooth the inevitable criticism when it was released? Because it just sounded petty and condescending. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Scream (2022) decided to add an idiotic conflict between elevated horror - the aforementioned The Babadook, among others - and plain horror - the Stab movies, and by extension Scream itself. It would’ve been fine if the movie made fun of both sets of fans, but not only does it reserve the ridicule for plain horror fans, but also takes sides with Tara’s parting line to the defeated killers. There’s probably an interview, or more, out there where the people behind this movie explain why they thought dissing the fans and the genre was a good idea, but we don’t care enough to go find it.

Are the killings/attacks in Scream 4 groundbreaking? No, but they’re pretty effective, and feel more purposeful than the ones in Scream (2022). Scream 4 also gives the audience some proper red herrings, like Jill’s cheating ex-boyfriend Trevor, and Dewey’s deputy, Hicks, who, unlike Vince, gets to stick around (almost) till the end, and weren’t brutally stabbed like Tara (come on, did anyone really think she could’ve been in on it?). Both sets of killers have some surprising misses: Tara, Mindy, and Chad should’ve died with all the stabbings they suffered, and considering how important Sidney’s death was to Jill’s plan, it’s hard to believe she wouldn’t have made sure she was dead. This last one is easier to accept because, well, of course Sidney wasn’t going to die, but there’s no excuse for the others. Since Tara was spared on purpose, Ghostface shouldn’t have been so brutal, and if the filmmakers didn’t want to kill the twins, they should’ve suffered less obviously lethal wounds. The amount of character interactions in both movies is quite different. Unlike Tara and her friends, Jill and her friends spend enough time together for the inevitable betrayals to actually mean something. Amber’s reveal, which includes shooting someone on the head, doesn’t have near as much of an impact as Charlie stabbing Kirby after the audience had seen them get closer and her fearing for his life as Ghostface made her answer his horror movie quiz. And neither does Richie’s surprise stabbing of Sam. Yes, it was a nice jump scare, but that was it. Sam realizing that the guy she’d been with for half a year deceived her doesn’t come close to Sidney finding out that her cousin is a psycho and murdered her own mother, Sidney’s aunt. No, they didn’t know each other that well, but the fact that they’re family gives it a greater meaning than Sam/Richie, especially since up until then, Sidney had clearly been seeing her younger self in Jill.

But it’s not just about being proficient with a knife or how much time the killers spend with their victims before killing them - it’s also about the characters themselves. Charlie ends up being a patsy for his accomplice, but as a killer he brings to mind all those angry teens who go on killing sprees in American high schools. So, he’s both pathetic and scary. Richie and Amber got stuck at pathetic. One crazy killer can work, but two? Maybe Scream (2022) was going for a slasher version of the Joker and Harley Quinn, but the moment Richie and Amber start explaining themselves, they become ridiculous. On top of that, the reveal doesn’t fit with Mindy’s exposition on the Stab fandom or with obsessed fandoms in general. No way in hell would any super fan want to kill the original characters of their beloved franchise. The only way for the targeting of the trio to make sense would be if they blamed Sidney for ruining the franchise when she sued the producers to stop them from using her story. Jill’s motivation is as crazy as Richie and Amber’s - to get famous by being a victim. She wants to be the new Sidney with her own evil boyfriend and dead mother. However, while her motivation is shallow, that shallowness is chilling. Jill’s monologue was both absurd and scary - she’s nuts and unstoppable. Seeing her going around the house injuring herself could’ve been unintentionally funny, but instead, she looked psychotic. Richie and Amber are no match for Jill and Charlie.

Apart from the opening sequence, Scream 4 beats Scream (2022) in every possible way - writing, acting, characters -, which makes the fact that it was the latter that spawned a Sidney-free sequel pretty baffling. An earlier version of the script for Scream 4 had the movie end with Jill in the ambulance surrounded by reporters. That sounds better than the OTT final fight in the hospital that ends with her death. Since Dewey mentions Sidney possibly not remembering what happened, she didn’t even have to die for Jill to get away with it. This could’ve set the stage for a new batch of Scream movies or a spin-off. We would’ve loved seeing Jill move to Los Angeles chasing her dream of being famous and then having to deal with another Ghostface. Unfortunately, we got aggressively bland Sam instead.