DO you like scary movies?”
That’s the question posed constantly and ominously by characters in the “Scream” series. Meanwhile the films themselves have winkingly asked the same question of audiences. The inaugural “Scream” (1996) was a watershed in its genre: a scary movie about scary movies, featuring masked murderers who buried their blades not just within trembling flesh but also within strata of quotation marks. When the movie’s hyper-verbal, seen-it-all teenagers weren’t busy stabbing or being stabbed, they were parroting “Psycho” dialogue, debating “Friday the 13th” trivia and reciting survival maxims (Look behind you! Do your best not to be a chesty blonde! Never say, “I’ll be right back!”) they’d gleaned watching countless other horror films.
The movie was a phenomenon. “At test screenings people were coming up saying, ‘Can you play it again?’ ” said Bob Weinstein, founder and chairman of Dimension, which made the film. “Scream” earned over $160 million worldwide and quickly spawned two blockbuster sequels, each one ramping up the splatter and the self-referentiality. In “Scream 2” (1997), characters discussed the merits of sequels, and both it and “Scream 3” (2000) featured a film within the film: an adaptation of the “real life” events of the first movie, entitled “Stab,” which birthed its own sequels and merchandise. If all the blood loss didn’t make the “Scream” heroes dizzy, the snake-eats-tail plotting should have.
On April 15 the franchise returns to theaters with “Scream 4.” In the intervening 11 years the horror landscape has changed. After the parade of recent remakes and reboots (“My Bloody Valentine 3D,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Freddy vs. Jason,” and on and on), undead titles might soon outnumber undead villains. Since “Scream” rejuvenated the slasher genre and inspired a wave of self-aware horror, (“The Faculty,” “Insidious”), all-out parodies have even emerged (“Scary Movie” and its three sequels). And with the rise of the so-called torture porn subgenre, graphic gore and complicated deaths have become almost de rigueur (“Saw,” “Hostel,” “Final Destination”), making the notion of a psychopath armed with nothing more than a nasally voice and a knife seem almost quaint. The achievement of the original “Scream” was not just its meta-layers, but also the way those meta-layers worked to enrich the thrills. By the ’90s it had become ritual among horror audiences to catalog and call out clichés — a way to interact with a film, but also to release tension and shake a narrative’s frightful grips. Here was a movie that explicitly invoked the clichés, folding them back into the horror and wielding our own jadedness against us.
“The genre had gotten stale. The conventions were so glaring,” Kevin Williamson, the creator and principal screenwriter of “Scream,” recalled in a phone interview. “If you approach a window, rest assured a cat is going to jump through it. If someone opens a medicine cabinet, know that when they close it, someone will be standing behind them. I wanted to poke fun at that, and I wanted a scary movie — to have my cake and eat it too.”
Mr. Williamson said that Mr. Weinstein had expressed an interest in revisiting “Scream” for “the last 10 years,” but that Mr. Williamson, who had intended “Scream” as a trilogy, and who was busy establishing himself as a go-to
chronicler of articulate, frequently bloodstained teendom (he wrote “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” created “Dawson’s Creek” and, most recently, helped to develop “The Vampire Diaries”), was unenthusiastic. Then, a few years ago, on vacation, Mr. Williamson began imagining another “Scream,” almost as a lark. “I started playing ideas out,” he said, “and one thing led to another.”
With Mr. Williamson’s proposal in hand, Mr. Weinstein approached Wes Craven, who directed the original trilogy, about signing on again. Mr. Craven, who made his name in the ’70s and ’80s with “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Nightmare on Elm Street,” had repeatedly rejected offers to direct the first “Scream.” “There’s been times where I’ve felt like, ugh, there’s some sort of bad karma in doing violent film after violent film,” Mr. Craven recalled. When it came to joining “Scream 4” he was cautious, but “committed once I saw the script.” (A fifth and sixth movie are in the offing, provided “Scream 4” performs well.)
The bids for contemporary relevance in “Scream 4” take different forms. Mr. Williamson incorporated details like video-blogging and social networking, both as plot points and as thematic soil to be tilled. And in the opening sequence the self-reflexive high jinks hit an unprecedented, nearly unhinged pitch.
But Mr. Weinstein was also certain that “Scream” boasts an appeal resistant to passing trends. He convinced the series’s three main stars, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, to return, explaining that “the thing that separates ‘Scream’ from other horror franchises is that people have fallen in love with those characters.”
Ms. Campbell said that, after the third “Scream,” “I swore up and down that would be the last. But when I considered it now, I realized there might be a good nostalgia factor.”
