Scream 2022 Review

In my eyes, the Scream franchise is one of the most consistent of all slasher franchises. While it doesn’t have the numbers to stand up against behemoth franchises like A Nightmare On Elm Street or Halloween, it more than makes up for that with nearly every installment being of some level of quality. While the best is still the 1996 original, only 2000’s Scream 3 has been disappointing, with Scream 2 and Scream 4 holding up strong in the world of horror sequels.

One of the franchise’s secrets to success, in my opinion, is its restraint - not in terms of the content of actual films itself, but in terms of how often it actually releases sequels. 11 years passed between Scream 3 and Scream 4, and Scream 4 was all the more fresh for it. In a franchise that lives and breathes on its ability to comment on contemporary horror trends and tropes, giving the scene time to shift and evolve before putting out another sequel works incredibly well. Another 11 years passed between Scream 4 and the most recent installment, this year’s Scream, and it looks like lightning has struck once again, with the new installment being every bit as entertaining and relevant as any other entry in the series was within their own time and place.

Many people have been calling Scream the best film since the original. I’m not entirely sure I agree, but that could easily be because I’ve had time to develop nostalgia for Scream 2 and Scream 4, whereas this one only just came out. But there are a lot of new tricks this one pulls that are unique to the exciting last decade in horror, and so it’s definitely a worthy successor that continues to carry the franchise flag.

Whereas Scream 2 targeted sequels and Scream 4 targeted the mid-2000’s trend of constantly rebooting classics, Scream takes aim at the more recent and somewhat convoluted trend of the “requel.” Perhaps most famously exemplified by 2018’s Halloween, a requel is a back-to-basics approach to a franchise that features the return of legacy characters and old, “classic” plotlines (a sequel), but also introduces a much larger, newer cast in addition while typically ignoring everything that happened in the franchisel since the original (a remake). These are often titled the same as their originals, and thus Scream is titled appropriately, despite my distaste for this trend.

True to its form, Scream features an all new cast and is the first film in the series to focus primarily around a new character other than Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). At the same time, however, Sidney Prescott, as well as franchise favorites Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) return to Woodsboro to confront the new killer. The new protagonist is Samantha Carpenter (Melissa Barerra), a girl with a fraught connection to her family in the town of Woodsboro due to a secret involving the history of killings in the town. She is drawn back home after her sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), is attacked by a new Ghostface killer, and is embroiled in an all new game with an all new cast of suspects.

I’m not entirely sold on Samantha as the new protagonist just yet - she’s not bad, I just think that even in her own movie she’s badly overshadowed by the fully realized survivor pair of Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers, whose chemistry the franchise has distilled down to a pitch perfect science. Prescott is probably my absolute favorite final girl from any slasher franchise, possibly even outdoing A Nightmare On Elm Street’s Heather Langenkamp, and her shadow does nobody any favors. The supporting cast is quite good in this one, though, with Tara, her girlfriend Amber Freeman (Mikey Madison) and the wonderful Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) as stand outs. Larger casts of characters have always been a strength of the best Scream films, particularly the original and Scream 4, and they play really well to the franchise’s core identity as a self-aware gory whodunnit where anybody could be the killer.

Scream has all the hallmarks of a good Scream sequel - gory kills, new killers that ape the originals but have slightly distinct personalities based on whatever highly postmodern motives they have, and a new set of rules for a new generation. There are some messier hallmarks - is anyone else really tired of Dewey and Gale’s constant on-again off-again relationship drama? - but overall Scream (2022) hits far more than it misses, and has some genuinely good scares and some genuinely gnarly kills. The ultimate commentary it lands on isn’t quite as cutting and prescient as that of Scream 4, but it is a good and timely indictment of toxic fan culture nonetheless that I feel has really needed to be made for a while now.

Ultimately, I’m not sure this is quite as good as the last Scream sequel, but it’s another strong output regardless, and a good slasher whodunnit for anyone who’s interested in that. It’s one of the more fresh examples of a pulp horror film I’ve seen in a bit and it’s one that will sit fondly alongside the rest of the series as some of my personal favorite slasher flicks.