By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you’re a horror fan, you know it’s usually just a matter of time before your favorite franchise goes off the rails and becomes a parody of itself. Some franchises escape this fate by going out on a high note while a tiny handful stay relevant by coming back to life with all the vigorous intensity of a slasher villain in the third act climax. One such example is Scream, the 2022 “requel” that brought the acclaimed Wes Craven franchise back to life and can now be streamed on Netflix.
Scream On Netflix Is Really Scream 5
Before you watch this fifth Scream film on Netflix, though, you may want to watch the earlier entries because this one is even more meta than usual. A whole quarter of a century after the original film, a new Ghostface attack lures the victim’s sister back to Woodsboro for a new round of mysteries, murder, and mayhem. A new crop of fresh faces is joined by some returning favorites, but this generational team-up may not be enough to stop the smartest killer this terror-stricken town has ever seen.
If you watched the original Scream in theaters (way before Netflix invented the streaming game), you’ll be happy to know this film brings in some very familiar actors to reprise their former roles, including Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. Newcomers to this killer franchise include Melissa Barrera (best known to horror fans for Abigail and Your Monster) and Jack Quaid (best known to genre fans for The Boys and Lower Decks). While her part in this movie is relatively small, Scream (2022) also stars Jenna Ortega, who is best known to just about everyone as the modern scream queen who danced into our hearts in Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff Wednesday.
Certain returning horror franchises fail to make an impression when they return, and after the good-but-not-great Scream 4, some in the fandom worried that the 2022 film would have to eventually build up a cult following on Netflix. No cult was needed, though: against a budget of $25 million, this savvy “requel” (one character’s cute portmanteau of “reboot” and “sequel”) slashed its way to $138.9 million at the box office. This was enough for a Scream 6 to get the green light, and while uneven, that film was a much better showcase for our younger stars because it was the first entry in the franchise that didn’t star series lead Neve Campbell.
In addition to impressing at the box office, Scream (2022) even managed to impress the critics: on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has a critical rating of 76 percent. Generally speaking, critics noted that the movie had to work visibly harder to retain the extremely meta humor of earlier films in the franchise but that it succeeded more often than it failed. Those successes are even more impressive when you consider that this is the first film in the franchise not directed by the late, great horror master Wes Craven.
While I’m of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a truly bad Scream film, it’s worth pointing out that this movie might genuinely be the best in the franchise since the original It doesn’t have the desperate-to-be surprising tryhard aura of Scream 2 or Scream 3 or the phoney-and-phoned-in desperation of Scream 4. For the first time since 1996, the franchise feels full of possibility and mystery, all without sacrificing its gory kills or its bloody sense of humor.
Will you find Scream as bloody entertaining as the critics did when you stream it on Netflix, or will it be bad enough to make you root for your own Ghostface visitation? The only way to find out is to memorize all the horror movie rules and then watch it for yourself. It might not become your new favorite scary movie, but this ambitious comeback film is enough to make you fall in love with the slasher genre all over again.
Leave a Reply