Scream did phenomenally well, far out of proportion with its genre. If that doesn’t peg it as mainstream horror, I don’t know what does. Credit a wonderful convergence of elements, from Kevin Williamson’s knowing script that was just meta enough, and a likeable, recognizable cast, combined with Wes Craven’s informed horror direction, giving Scream that minor shock of exploitation it needs. And for a movie which reignited the slasher subgenre, it’s no wonder Scream had a sequel turnaround akin to the original Friday the 13th. That is, in under a year, Scream 2 was already made and in theaters.
Such a quick turnaround isn’t conducive to ideal moviemaking, so it helps Williamson had already planned out his sequels’ general direction before ever selling his original Scream script. You’ll hear this cited as proof “it was always conceived of as a trilogy,” or some such George Lucas nonsense, but it was really a way for Williamson to ensure Scream’s draw to investors with the promise of a franchise. And once that hoped-for ultra-success came true, sequelizing was simple.
Even so, Scream 2 has the added challenge of a small window, plus all the common disadvantages of sequels: replicating appropriate elements, repeating stories which do not naturally repeat, being generally subservient to a former muse. Scream 2 has one arguable advantage on its side: irony. “Sequels suck,” ignoring provided counterexamples (Aliens, T2, the non-Cameron House II), therefore our sequel sucks, but we know it sucks, so it’s good that it sucks, therefore it doesn’t suck. Or something. This is sort of the Scream 1 approach, which is not as useful now. Not to mention, expounding upon the Rules of the Horror Sequel (bigger body count, more elaborate deaths – not useful info to the victims, however) doesn’t yield a whole lot.
But luckily for Scream 2, it is a sequel, so it doesn’t just have generic horror cinema to comment upon. It has Scream! Indeed, Scream is a movie in Scream 2…actually, it’s not that simple. The movie is Stab. (Was Scary Movie not then available? Because that would’ve been a cleverer meta comment and would’ve preempted the Wayanses.) Stab is ostensibly a docudrama, in that it’s a dramatization of the real life (in Scream’s world, at least) Woodsboro murders. Only…Stab is really based on reporter Gale Weathers’ (Courtney Cox) book “The Woodsboro Murders,” and she’s evidently quite pleased to take liberties with the truth. So Stab isn’t that neatly a Scream parallel.
Stab is necessary, in order for Scream 2 to openly address criticisms of horror movies without seeming forced. It’s also a source of some overt comedy a Scream generally cannot sustain. So if you recall your obscure Scream dialogue, you’ll recall Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) ruing the likelihood that Tori Spelling might play her (for those of you no longer living in 1997, Tory Spelling was…oh to hell with it, just check here). With that knowledge, you’ll notice a joke when Spelling indeed plays Sidney in Stab. It’s apparently somehow funny for Luke Wilson to play Skeet Ulrich, in an overly-obvious example of consciously bad acting, but I don’t follow.
Stab provides some clearer fun as well, as what we mostly see of it (Casey’s opening murder, Drew Barrymore now replaced with Heather Graham) is a clear parody of excessive ‘90s horror. As guest directed by an uncredited Robert Rodriguez, it really plays like his whole career – that is, this same sort of over-the-top quasi-parody (think Machete, or Planet Terror, or anything that’s not Spy Kids).
But all this is just on the periphery – though it’s a lot of what distinguishes Scream 2 as one layer deeper into the meta than Scream. As I maintained with Scream, dwelling upon the post-modernism is misdirected, as there isn’t a whole lot to it. Scream 2’s introductory double murder gets the fullest benefit of the layering, as it occurs as a preview screening of Stab (with an audience ten times more enthusiastic than ones I’ve ever seen). The rest of the movie is mostly a serious thriller with reflexive characters, and distinct from a basic horror movie only in some specific ways.
But for now, this movie’s opening, the movie opening…Scream formula becomes apparent: Celebrities die first (here it’s Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett pre-Smith – though the rest of the cast is famous enough that’s just splitting hairs). Otherwise, this is nothing like Casey’s scene in the first. We follow a duo watching a horror movie in the theater, same as the scores of other rowdies. Whereas Casey knew she was in danger, here Phil Stevens and Maureen Evans do not. We get that viewer-benefit of seeing portents where they don’t, because indeed, if actual hints of doom looked like this, all of Stab’s moviegoers would be frightened. But they are not; they are murder crazed, which gives us a nice little dichotomy once Maureen dies in front of the screen, juxtaposed with the silly fake death (of a real death) of Heather Graham behind her. How do we relate to death in films? Is it right to enjoy it?
Ghostface, whomever that now is, has accomplished his ghastly, ghostly murders with the aid of innumerable Ghostface costumes the studio unwisely handed out. And here’s a problem unique to Scream movies, which most horror sequels don’t deal with: Ghostface is not a single identity, but a persona borrowed by multiple murderers, for multiple reasons. Though they all inexplicably retain the same modus operandi (an obsession with threatening phone calls, mostly)…that operandi now is less explicitly obsessed with general horror cinema, since the new killer is aping Stab/”real life” instead. Whatever iconography Ghostface retains is due to that costume alone, as there is no one figure to latch onto.
Oh, and however frightening the Ghostface mantel might be, there’s terror when a multitude of killers forever retains an obsession with Sidney Prescott. This means the killings are all somehow about her (and her forever-castigated dead seductress of a mother, Maureen – yeah, that’s two Maureens, quite intentionally), and not actually about the movies. This sort of plot-mandated motive equivocation does huge damage to any thematic relevance. If a Scream sequel posited copycat killers that were truly just random psychos influenced by Stab…well, it’s probably not the scenario horror defender Wes Craven would want to tell, but that’d be more terrifying than the Prescott soap opera.
This leaves “Scream 2 the murder mystery” as all we’ve yet to look at. ‘Bout time I mention plot, eh? Not that something called Scream 2 needs too much setup. A Ghostface killer or two (or three?) is murdering people. C’mon, it’s a horror sequel! What we need to know boils down to setting, survivors and suspects. And for anyone expecting a true horror sequel routine, where the former Final Girl is officially on the chopping block, the Screams are forever opposed to that (the jury’s still out on Scream 4, though once this is posted, I’ll likely have seen that).
Setting: Windsor College. A collegiate milieu inspires some horror namedropping, though Williamson is thankfully less enamored of that now. At least this time there’s some obscurity to the citations: House on Sorority Row, The Dorm that Dripped Blood, Splatter University, Graduation Day, Final Exam. Obviously slashers do well in higher education. Scream, with its focus upon relative verisimilitude, creates some problems when that setting/scenario actually proves incapable of engendering scares, but that’s not our concern yet.
Survivors: Gale Weathers, Dewey Riley (Mr. Courtney Cox, David Arquette) and Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy). It’s unusual for a horror sequel to see so many characters return; it’s unusual for a horror movie to have that many characters survive in the first place. (Watered down ‘90s horror!) Addressing them in turn…
Randy is our required movie obsessionist, provider of jokes and meta commentary. He was Scream’s poster boy, whose personal diatribes fans took as the gospel truth for how to read Scream. For Williamson, perhaps aware of where Scream came short as post-modernism, Randy is limiting – now when things like Stab and the media allow for some trickier games. That’s a fancy way of saying Randy, as amusing as he is, is nearing the end of his usefulness for the franchise. And in horror, you know what that means?
As for Dewey and Gale, they are in tandem the series’ surprise of the series. They enjoy a rapport you cannot plan, they evolve, grow fond of each other, and provide an outsider’s perspective into the murder mysteries. They are more interesting than Sidney. Gale is especially useful, as a media representative, as the media grows more essential to Scream 2’s thesis statement. That’s why it’s relatively mum on merely horror movies; Scream 2 aims to be a grand assessment of how the media (that catchall term) influences real life violence, and vice versa. And with Gale becoming more and more the focus of other reporters, those lines are getting blurred in a nice, metaphorical sense. Though, of course, Williamson must create dialogue to point that fact out, as nothing can be simple subtext.
The suspects: Now, among Scream 2’s challenges, here it encountered a biggie. The first Scream was engaging partly for its murder mystery, and so fans eagerly awaiting the sequel started debating the likely killer ahead of time. Never mind they didn’t yet know the characters. Preserving the twist became this gimmicky franchise’s raison d’être. And for a movie so interested in irony and how art and audience influence each other, isn’t it, well, ironic that Scream 2’s script leaked online during production? Oh yes, the Internet, that dreaded Beast of Babylon, wikileaked the hell out of Scream 2, and the dramatically appropriate killer. So with time running out before December 1997, Williamson hurriedly rewrote the ending (which nicely explains why it seems so awkward and rushed – it was!). New killers were devised (yes, plural, though that can’t be a twist the second time out), as non-killer characters become killers in the 11th hour.
Limiting ourselves only to Sidney’s immediate circle of chums, otherwise we’d be here forever…
Hallie (Elise Neal): Sidney’s roommate, and so transparently an attempt to recreate Rose McGowan’s spunk, it doesn’t really work. Without much time to prepare, the new characters largely seem less developed. Hence, it’s easier to identify the body count stuffers, and woe be to Hallie, for she is one of them.
Derek (Jerry O’Connell, whose every facial expression makes me want to slit his throat): Sidney’s boyfriend, which is another way of saying “El suspecto numero uno.” Why? Well, because Sidney’s boyfriend was the killer in Part One. So everyone’s unnecessarily suspicious of Derek this time around. Our only question is: Which game will Williamson play? Is another boyfriend killer so obvious that actually doing it isn’t obvious? How many turns around the obviousness horn does this go? Suspect or no? God, I feel like Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride!
Mickey (Timothy Olyphant): The other guy. The guy who serves apparently no purpose. The only reason Mickey even exists is so he can be the killer…unless he’s not the killer, and this is just another game.
Okay, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER, Mickey is the killer…one of them, anyway. The “gimmee” killer who is revealed first, so the mastermind can be a surprise.
So the pieces are mostly in place, and it takes so much effort setting up these pieces, something like 50% of Scream 2 consists of steadicam expository conversations held in Windsor’s interchangeable leafy quads. Visually, it’s pretty, but hard to gauge dramatic progress.
The remainder of the film is an effort to rustle up some scare sequences, and when the movie is usually in so genial a mood, it’s pretty damn hard to muster sudden terror. (Compare that to Halloween, which maintains a general undercurrent of dread throughout.) Besides, Windsor College is hardly a dangerous location – it certainly lacks the isolation of Part One’s Californian wine country. The opening movie theater sequence adequately shows the danger of crowds, but the rest of Scream 2 hasn’t a mass of Ghostface-clad yahoos to fall back upon.
For example, the killers target sorority girl Cici (Sara Michelle Gellar, whose Buffy usually so effectively countered such threats), for fairly gratuitous, bloodthirsty reasons. She’s alone in her sorority house, in classic Black Christmas format. And yet…since Ghostface prefers to torment his victims with phone calls first, Cici has plenty of opportunity to flee for safety – which is demonstrably a few houses away. She opts not to, but instead stays in this isolated house and eventually dies, in an egregious example of horror movie stupidity. Careful, guys, we’re edging into generic slasher territory here.
There are similar moments, as crowded parties suddenly empty, with conveniently just Sidney remaining. Everyone moves exactly as Ghostface prefers – to the point of placing their heads in the specific, precise right (or wrong) spots. Again, I’ve seen dozens of lesser slashers which revel in such foolishness. Seems odd in Scream 2, though, especially when it is otherwise intelligent, such as Sidney gaining police bodyguards early into the picture. Sure, that’s how we’d actually go about such events, but knife murder is hard to accomplish when two guys with guns stand in the way.
Eventually resolving issues like bodyguards and massive crowds and a lack of isolation, stupidity takes over. Especially at the climax, because this was filmed while the script was still warm. Ghostface is able to corner Sidney when needed, with the following qualifications all in place: A) That the entire campus and city be inexplicably abandoned for hours, with no one willing to respond to screams. B) That the police be equally disinterested, despite the rash of killings. C) That Sidney’s police escort car stop at this specific red light for a specific amount of time. D) That her driver turn his head exactly when it benefits Ghostface most to slit his throat. E) That the other cop, still armed with a pistol, completely refuse to shoot a pointblank Ghostface, and instead resign himself to unplanned impaling. F) That Sidney, when presented with the opportunity to unmask an unconscious Ghostface, will not. G) That, when seeking help on a crowded college campus, she head directly to the abandoned theater building where Ghostface has set his trap. H) That off screen teleportation become a reality.
That’s all the result of making a movie on no time at all. Scream 2 enjoys advantages as well, as a sequel, one of them being it is able to specifically respond to criticisms against Scream. Mickey’s motive is to go to trial and blame the movies, like any good media whore. In true Williamson style, there is nothing conclusive, no clear argument or awareness of hypocrisy. But at least media is present, whatever is being said about it. With scare sequences set in the film school, and around news vans, it’s exciting to see a cinematic killer stalking the very environs of movies themselves. As far as effortlessly making films the text, this visual is stronger than simply kids sitting at home watching TV.
In the end, I could explore what elements I think do and don’t work in Scream 2…the movie still has a Get Out of Jail Free card. It is ironic. When the final line is a tossed-off “I think it’ll make a hell of a movie,” everything you didn’t like is written off as inessential, mere entertainment. Whatever you do like, well, it’s fun while the movie unscrolls.
And for the record, the second killer was Billy’s mother.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scream (1996)
• No. 3 Scream 3 (2000)
• No. 4 Scream 4 (2011)
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