Scream (2022) is a blast. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the early reviews lauding it as the best franchise entry since the 1996 original, but I’ll admit I had my doubts going in, probably due to a series of weak trailers that failed to capture this film’s freshness and originality. It turns out that the trailers were cut to reveal as little as possible; they spoil one major kill, but otherwise leave viewers largely in the dark. 

And you will want to be in the dark going into Scream, so I will do my best to avoid almost every spoiler, except for one: Jenna Ortega’s character, Tara, survives the opening scene and goes on to become the film’s new scream queen, like Neve Campbell and Emma Roberts before her. What initially feels like a cop-out a la the MTV Scream series, which notoriously shied away from killing off most of its leads to allow them to allow them to appear in future installments is actually a brilliant subversion of the formula in place since the original. This Scream has a light focus on franchise-building, with its meta, exposition-machine characters drawing comparisons to 2018’s Halloween and even the Star Wars sequels. 

Yet it still works perfectly as a standalone sequel. If you walk into the theater having only seen the first film, Scream makes perfect sense, though longtime fans will be rewarded with a handful of blink-and-you-miss-it Easter eggs alongside some very unsubtle homages. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who previously co-directed 2019’s Ready or Not, find the perfect balance for new and returning cast members. Unlike in Scream 4, Sidney, Dewey, and Gale take a backseat to a new set of high schooler victims. 

This time around, the high schoolers are Gen Z kids with fairly realistic Gen Z opinions on the changing landscape of horror: they prefer Hereditary and Babadook to slashers and reboots, all while fighting to survive a slasher reboot. The in-universe parody franchise “Stab” fails to enthrall most of these characters, despite being front and center in Scream 3 and 4. Thus, Ghostface is forced to reinvent himself here: his kills are more vicious than ever before; he plays with the themes of trauma and inherited mental illness that modern prestige horror favors over jump scares; he essentially creates his own meta “elevated horror” within the boundaries of a film that is unmistakably Scream. 

My one point of criticism: by the time we get to the final setpiece, a showdown at the Macher house that started it all, it’s blatantly obvious that this whole thing was shot on a soundstage rather than the Santa Rosa suburbs that we know to be the fictional Woodsboro. I’d argue that Woodsboro is a more iconic location than Elm Street or Haddonfield, so it’s a shame to see it represented here by a series of haunted house sets. 

One might wonder if this was an unfortunate consequence of COVID filming restrictions; however, Scream was shot in 2019, and shelved until it could have its time in the theaters. (As the omicron variant runs rampant, it’s hard to recommend anyone goes out to a movie theater… but wow, this moviegoing experience rivaled Spider-Man: No Way Home. We had a great crowd.)

Still, this film’s visual flaws will be far less obvious when it makes it onto streaming platforms, with TVs at home easily smoothing out the rough edges. The performances, particularly those of Mikey Madison, Jack Quaid, and the aforementioned Jenna Ortega, steal the show. I won’t spoil who the killer is—my friend Nick with whom I saw the film figured it out around the start of the third act, but I’ll admit I kept guessing and second-guessing—though I doubt anybody is going to leave disappointed. It’s a better reveal than Scream 3, 4, and arguably 2, partially because Scream at its core is a whodunit, and the series excels when it gives viewers the pieces of the puzzle instead of throwing us a killer out of nowhere and expecting their motive to make up for a cluster of plot holes. 

Scream is exactly what it needed to be in order to either reboot the franchise or give it a stronger, more full-circle ending than what we got in Scream 4. It’s almost a given at this point that Ghostface will be back, either in two years or ten, but until then, I am more than satisfied with this—to borrow a term used by this film’s characters—“requel.”