Scream 4 - "These Days, Ya Gotta Have a Sequel!"

What fantastic Halloween news: Original Scream screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, has penned a fourth installment and original castmembers, David Arquette, Courtney Cox-Arquette, and Neve Campbell have signed-on! Legendary director, and the director of the entire franchise up to now, Wes Craven, has not signed-on yet, but is said to be in talks. The only bad news? Someone said Scream 4 is going to be in 3D...

Released in 1996, Scream literally reinvented the genre - literally. Simultaneously a serious, hardcore slasher-flick in its own right and a satire of the same, Scream overturned every staple (read: cliché) of the then some 10-years dead slasher-flick sub-genre and reset the field. It also singlehandedly launched, and cemented, about a dozen stars' places in film history. As Courtney Cox once discussed, it debuted fairly low on the charts, but kept going up - something almost unheard of in movies - and managed to go from "sleeper hit" to "generational touchstone."

SPOILERS

I came across this information because it's Halloween and Scream is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I was watching it but couldn't find the year it was made on the box. I knew it was 1996, because Craven's last genre-busting movie (A Nightmare on Elm Street) - which also set the slasher-flick sub-genre, already flailing and some five-six years past its prime, on its ear - was released in 1986, but I wanted to be certain because I was thinking of blogging about how... incredible it is when you realize just how old Scream is.

I know I'm old - I know this, man - and I know Scream was released a long time ago, but I was already a hardcore netizen at that time (in fact, my friends literally dragged me off my computer to watch it [it had already come out on video] - and they had to ply me with alcohol to do so!) and whenever Sidney "dials" 911 on her computer, I always remember saying, the first time I saw it, "You can't do that!" and having everyone tell me to "Shut up and watch the movie," etc. In the very next scene, Billy's cellphone falls to the ground - that's the first indication that he might be the killer! - that's a pivotal scene!

So, I'm sitting there, recalling that YIM still had that "Yahoo Instant Messenger cannot be used to contact 911 or emergency services" warning the last time I used it, which was maybe just over a year ago, if that, when it occurred to me that, when Scream was released, very few people (Americans, anyway) had cellphones - one of those, "Damn!" moments we old folks get so often, as in, "Damn, that's right... damn!" You'll get them; trust me. Anyway, 1996 = almost no one had cellphones... that was 13 years ago.

Damn! As in... day-um!

It's not just because I'm old and I remember when Scream first came out: It's because Scream is still that good! It's still fresh and "hip," even though it hinges on the fact that basically no one had Caller ID or cellphones 13 years ago.

And I know this because over the summer, when I lived in the trailer, my next door neighbors were all of maybe 22-23 and they watched it with me a few times, they enjoyed it so much. They would have been all of maybe 9-10 when it was released and when I first mentioned it, it was like what Friday the 13^th is to us geezers: "Oh yeah, I've seen that like 2309123789 times." But, just like the original Friday the 13^th (to a lot of my generation, anyway - not to dorky, slasher-flick junkies like myself), when it got started, they realized they hadn't seen it. They'd seen the inferior sequels and probably seen parts of the original here and there, especially cut-up on cable, but they'd never "experienced" Scream - never truly watched the movie - and they both fell completely in love with it.

Despite its dated technological references, Scream stands-up incredibly well.

But even though Williamson maintained it was always supposed to be a trilogy (no one believed it then, either - but this was before those Star Wars travesties!), the sequels did the Scream franchise no favors. They weren't just God-awful, but I only deigned to watch the third installment last year when IFC ran it... they certainly weren't good. I saw the second one somewhere along the way and was so turned-off by it, I never bothered with the third until I was so completely starved for entertainment that I gave-in. I was still pretty starved, afterward.

Still, Scream is a fantastic movie and we 30-somethings basically dated our way through the franchise, so Scream 4 is wonderful news... unless they cock it all up with crap like 3D. Or making the same movie a fourth time.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009