Two girls, watching a slasher movie about a psycho in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask who calls girls at home and them stabs them to death, get a call from a psycho who shows up in a “Scream” mask and stabs them to death. But that was a scene from a movie, Stab 6, which two other girls are watching when their phone rings, a gravelly voice threatens them and — surprise! — one girl kills the other. And that turns out to be the climax of Stab 7, which two girls in Woodsboro, Ohio, are watching when a “real” monster, in the same Munch-y mask, intrudes and slices them up. Cue the title of our movie: Scre4m.
There may be a point in a horror-film series where self-referential becomes self-reverential, but Scream passed that long ago. Back in 1996, when director Wes Craven filmed Kevin Williamson’s all-knowing, mostly joking script, the innovation was that, for once, the people on screen were as aware of horror-movie clichés and twists as the people in the audience. With its masked murderer (nicknamed Ghostface) following such angels of serial death as Halloween’s Michael Myers and Friday the 13th’s Jason, as well as Craven’s own dreamweaver Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream series twisted the genre rules in a pop-modernist way that complimented the movies’ fans for their hipness even as it eviscerated their on-screen doppelgangers. The series dribbled out after three episodes, in 2000 — the same year as the first of four Final Destination scare-a-thons, and long before any of the seven Saw films, the four Resident Evils or the Hollywood tart-ups of Japan’s Ju-On (The Grudge) and The Ring cycles.
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