Is there a point at which a film is so self-reflectingly meta it circles back to being a film again? Asking for a friend. With all due respect to Inception, Scream 2 is the most self-aware film I’ve ever seen. But self-awareness is the signature of the Scream franchise now joined in 2022 by a meta film so into being part of ScreamWorld it didn’t bother giving itself a new name.
“No, no, I want the exact title Scream about a series of small town murders perpetrated by somebody in a Ghostface costume starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette…”
“Yeah, which one?”
Much as sequels are primarily nods to a lack of originality, I don’t often mind them. Oh, some I loathe – Twilight, Transformers, Saw all come to mind. But if you want to tell me another story about the adventures of Thor or Indiana Jones, I’m happy to play along. That said, I am a big fan original ideas. Most sequels do host original ideas; they are usually boxed within an existing landscape. That’s what makes them tolerable.
Scream went a different route. Scream gave us (some) new characters, but drew every.single.idea in the movie from the existing Scream world. I wouldn’t doubt it if the screenplay was written while watching the original Scream over and over again. After all, it begins the same (a threatening phone call to a young home alone coed), it follows the same basic plot (random townspeople knifed to death by a costumed assassin) and has the same basic ending (I choose not to share). This Scream also references the original Scream (called “Stab” by the people in the film — I wonder if they also refer to Edvard Munch‘s most famous work as “The Stab”) constantly, referring to it not so much as one might ask “who played Darth Vader” but more like the way an evangelical might quote bible verse.
In Scream fashion, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) is home alone and very much not full of stab wounds when she receives a call on the landline. The voice on the other end offers a horror quiz about the original Scream, of course, so the audience can play along. The quiz is short-answer and decidedly unfair so Ghostface can justify breaking in for some quick puncturing. I might 
have preferred a graded, long answer quiz with questions less trivial and more open to interpretation like: “How would the Scream franchise have been received in the 1940s?”, “How long will it take you to predict the action of this pretending-not-to-be-paint-by-numbers film?” and “What do you think Kevin Williamson is doing these days, anyway?”
With Tara in the hospital, her sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) returns back to her ever-bloody hometown along with her boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid), because who wouldn’t want to miss out on a good murder spree? Oh, and check it out, there’s a bunch of suspects in the form of Tara’s friend group and a pattern to the slaughter; the victims are all related to the original Stab-bings some decades ago – which leads to several follow-up questions including, “How can these folks be direct relations of people that died as teens?” and “Why didn’t every last one of you leave town and vow never to return?” Speaking of the latter, that’s how we eventually fold Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette into the plot.
It’s easy to be cynical about Scream; it’s a cynical film. It makes a point of telling us the rules for surviving horror films … and then goes off killing a bunch of folks anyway. The film constantly treads a line between clever and aggravating – like four separate anti-climatic teases of “What’s behind that door?” within a span of ten minutes. I’ll give it this much – the film always had my attention and January non-Oscar releases –especially of the horror genre- tend to be awful; Scream wasn’t. I’m not ready to shower it with love, like imdb has – you wrote the screenplay based on watching a screenplay. But it’s not a bad film, and certainly well above average for the genre.
Did we all really want to Scream more?
How is a fifth entry better than four?
Well, I got me a plan
To pre-empt killings, man …
Go undercover at the Spirit costume store
Rated R, 114 Minutes
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Writer: James Vanderbilt, Guy Busick
Genre: Stabby stabby
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Scream fans, you’ll go nuts
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who would rather see good detective work than go over the rules of horror again
