primal-scream

The Scream by Edvard Munch: you, everytime you haven't done the homework and the teacher calls on you for "a brief summary of last night's assigned readings."

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Scream if you love all things meta! Last Sunday I saw Scream 4, the new installment in Wes Craven's slasher series. The film is no doubt a lot of fun—I even jumped a few times. But is that enough? Or is Scream 4 so interested in being hip and self-reflexive that it forgot to actually make its audience shriek? more The first Scream proved a master combination of satire and truly terrifying horror. Craven simultaneously winked at us and disturbed us with how his characters applied the rules they had learned from Freddy and Jason to the very horror film they were living. In the opening scene of the first film, Drew Barrymore heats up popcorn and gets ready to watch a scary movie. Suddenly she gets a phone call from a mysterious caller. "What's your favorite scary movie?" asks the caller. With this, and with what follows, the audience is asked its own set of questions. How much can someone really learn from scary movies? And what if that someone suddenly snaps? This new installment plays with a similar theme, but in a pretty obvious effort to be cool with the new Facebook generation. The characters are texting and live webblogging. Hell, even Ghostface is filming and webcasting his own murders. The problem is that much of the dialogue sounds like someone older is trying to make hackneyed commentary about today's youth (indeed veteran Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, although still very clever, is 46). Sure, we love twittering, posting statuses about everything from how we feel to what we ate for breakfast, but I'm sure Williamson could think of something a little bit more original than that. We're a little bit more complex than just fame-hungry kids attached to our iPhones, right? This isn't to say that Scream 4 was totally unoriginal. The opening sequence both ridicules the state of horror today ("torture porn") and jokes at its own involvement with horror movie clichés. Since the first Scream's first scene, with the infamous killing of the film's biggest star, Barrymore, the franchise has been offing young starlets before the opening credits. Scream 4 rips this convention apart in the scariest and funniest sequence of the movie, using not just one, but several young Hollywood ingénues as initial victims. The end nods to the original, and features a surprising and ballsy twist. So you probably won't have nightmares for weeks, but Scream 4 is definitely a bloody good time at the movies.