Sidney Prescott returns to Woodsboro, her hometown, fifteen years after the massacre that involved her. The woman is in town to promote her book "Out of the Darkness," but her appearance coincides inevitably with a new double murder. Jenny Randall and Marnie Cooper, two high school students, are slaughtered inside one of their homes by a killer masked as Ghostface. Linus, who in the meantime has become the sheriff of Woodsboro and married Gale Weathers, investigates the murder, and the traces lead right to Sidney. The latter is a guest of her aunt Kate and her niece Jill, who soon find themselves at the center of a nightmare. Another teenager dies in front of Jill, and as the anniversary of the Woodsboro murders approaches, the situation becomes increasingly dangerous.
"To make a good remake, you don't have to change the original!" With these words, spoken by one of the characters in "Scream 4," Craven takes revenge on those who have altered some of his masterpieces with recent remakes and on those who, some time ago, hypothesized a reboot to relaunch the "Scream" franchise. But no reboot or remake, thank goodness, and "Scream" celebrates its 15 years with a proper sequel... and what a sequel, guys! A return so clear, intelligent, and fun that at times it's hard to believe we're at number 4, moreover as belated as few.
With "Scream," Wes Craven resurrected horror from a dangerous state of stagnant torpor that was gripping it in the 1990s: he reinvents the slasher, relaunching it as if it were a whole new genre, and the lesson sets an example. Horror is saved, Craven has given history a masterpiece. With "Scream 2," the director of "Nightmare" continues the game started in the previous chapter, outlining the rules that sit behind serialization. The third chapter leans more towards comedy and reduces the violence, but presents a deep reflection on the decay of Hollywood and the confusion that can arise between reality and fiction, theorizing once again how cinema can imitate life that imitates cinema. The trilogy is concluded, an excellent trilogy that presents many points of originality and food for thought on cinema at the turn of the 21st century, as well as showing an internal coherence not always attributable to horror sagas.
With "Scream 4," the task was really daunting: to make a sequel that, ten years after the last film, would follow its rules and recreate its atmospheres, but at the same time "Scream 4" would have to be a film capable of capturing the attention of the younger generation, of those who perhaps encountered Ghostface only by chance on Google images. Disappointing a bit of everyone was easy, very easy, and yet the esteemed company Craven (direction) and Williamson (screenplay) managed to pull it off and in a period of recycled old stuff paradoxically give life to a fresh film and loaded with a very successful satirical vis.
Everything begins with a phone call, just like tradition, a suave voice (which in the original is Roger Jackson, in Italian always Carlo Valli) starts the game in the perspective of the massacre, but the savvy viewer knows where everything will end up, a surprise factor is needed that "doesn't make it too 1996" and so "Scream 4" in the long moments that precede the title plays with itself, therefore with the parallel series "Stab," and with the viewer, ridiculing just the mania of sequels. The prologue is explanatory of the ironic and over-the-top tone that permeates the entire product: it reflects on classic cinema as usual (who is the first film that provides the point of view of the killer? "Halloween"? "Psycho"?... not exactly!) but focuses especially on post-2000 horror, that is, the one born from a branch of "Scream." Serialization has found its apex in "Saw" and coincidentally it is "Saw IV" that ends up in the intellectualistic sights of one of the first victims. "Stab" like "Saw" (or vice versa?), seven films, one per year, and the kids are crazy about it, organizing annual marathons to review the saga in the vicinity of the new chapter. But if on one hand there is torture porn, on the other there is the remake, a voracious practice of which genre Hollywood has made abuse in recent years. "Scream 4" plays with the concept of remake and turns it into a satirical weapon that frees itself from mere quotation. If in "Scream 2" and especially in "Scream 3" we already found, perhaps unknowingly, a foreshadowing of all this in the staging of the celluloid clones of the characters, in "Scream 4" we have a lucid theorization on all this, on what the repetition of the already seen can cause to pop culture leading to the oblivion of the origins. Today, young people know Michael Myers often thinking that he was born with Rob Zombie's film, or they associate the character of Leatherface with the version produced by Michael Bay. The imitator tends to replace the original, to clone it to erase it definitively in the spectators' memory and in the knowledge of the new generations. "Scream 4" reflects on this data, does it with the usual irreverent irony, also pointing the finger at the media and their tendency to create myths. New technologies allow anyone to become the protagonist of a virtual microcosm, to be seen, noticed, attract attention. New media have trivialized and made accessible to everyone the famous Warholian 15 minutes thanks to blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; the internet is a precious ally but at the same time a castrating parent. The duo Craven/Williamson thus manages to capture snippets of cultural relevance in an intelligent and functional way, just as they did in 1996. "Scream 4" speaks of the new generations through the external eyes of those who have seen them forged on the ashes of the previous ones; this fourth chapter is a statement of the new in this first decade of the 21st century, with the only flaw perhaps (but I'm not sure it's a flaw) of filtering everything from a nostalgic perspective.
In the cast of familiar faces to fans are the eternal protagonists Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox, to whom are added Marley Shelton ("Sin City," "Planet Terror"), who plays Deputy Sheriff Hicks, Gale Weathers' putative rival, Emma Roberts ("Hotel Bau"), who is Jill, Sidney's cousin, Hayden Panettiere ("Heroes"), tough high school student passionate about horror cinema, Erik Knudsen ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"), who plays the new internet-integrated reporter, Rory Culkin ("Signs"), the shy founder of the high school film club, and Nico Tortorella ("Trespass"), who plays the exuberant ex-boyfriend of Jill. They are joined in small parts by Adam Brody ("Jennifer's Body") and Anthony Anderson ("Scary Movie 3"), in the roles of two rather inept policemen - in full Cravenian tradition - and in a cameo appear Anna Paquin of "True Blood" and Kristen Bell of "Veronica Mars."
New decade, new rules, reads the American tagline of the film, but the innovative strength of "Scream" remains unchanged, renewing itself intelligently in a fourth chapter that cannot fail to please the fans of Ghostface.
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