Not Quite The Godfather Part 2, But...

Rating: 9/10 (7 April 2006)

'Scream 2' is one of those films that seems to have suffered most from the backlash against the knowing, self-referential horror films of the late nineties. Not only is it the sequel to the film that started the whole movement ('Wes Craven's New Nightmare' notwithstanding), but it carries the postmodernist game-playing to a new level. Horror purists loathed it for being populist and 'ironic', critics hated slasher movies on principle, and the larger audience were suffering from in-joke fatigue by the time they saw it. So unfortunately, nobody notices that not only is it a better film than the one it succeeds, it's probably the best horror film of the period.
The opening sequence is particularly striking. Everything that made the original's celebrated opening sequence so iconic is either subverted or built upon. So again, a young woman and her boyfriend are stalked and murdered, but this time it plays out in a crowded cinema (showing a tacky reinterpretation of the original, just to reinforce the connection). Where the horror used to be in isolation, it is now found in alienation - the nightmare of dying in front of hundreds of people and nobody lifting a finger to help you is particularly potent. The iconography of ghost-face is played upon here too, not only in the film-within-a-film but the masks members of the audience wear. Given that the film seems to be a refutation of the old 'violent movies cause violence' argument (Sarah Michelle Gellar's character acts as the voice of sanity, Timothy Olyphant's character parodies what Wes Craven clearly considers the voice of insanity), it's striking that in this opening sequence the audience is seen as partly culpable for the murder. The moment when a bleeding Jada Pinkett-Smith cries out on stage, framed by the projection of ghost-face's mask (and bleached out by the white light, an interesting visual cue back to the debate over black characters in horror films that opens the film), and the baying audience subside in uneasy realisation, is one of the most indelible images in a horror film I've ever seen, and a slap in the face for the (real) audience, who have come to the cinema in order to see people get sliced up, after all. It takes a brave movie to implicate its viewers before the film has really got going, and certainly underlines the fact that this is neither a dumb slasher flick or a cheap cash-in on the success of the original.
The potency of the death of this character we have only spent a few minutes in the company of illustrates something else about 'Scream 2' (and 'Scream', for that matter) - that, despite the repeated use of the word by lazy magazine and newspaper critics who ought to know better, they are not 'ironic'. No wonder Kevin Williams turned the definition of the word into a running joke in his later script 'Teaching Mrs Tingle'; he must have been sick of the misallocation of the word in almost every review he read. It implies a style that contrasts the apparent and actual meaning of situations and dialogue. Irony in this sense undercuts what we are being shown and what the characters experience, usually turning it into bathos. There is no irony in the deaths of the characters in 'Scream 2', unlike 'Final Destination 2', for instance, where characters being sliced into pieces by a flying wire fence or crushed by a falling pane of glass are both moments of horror and moments of humour. In contrast, when Hallie buys it so soon after surviving the film's most excruciating suspense sequence, it's horrific because she's a likable, funny character who doesn't deserve to die. The audience responds to the characters on an emotional level, mainly because of Williams's unfairly uncelebrated skill at creating three-dimensional characters in just a handful of scenes (compare with 'Scream 3', scripted by Ehren Kruger, where only Parker Posey's self-obsessed film star stands out), but also because of the skills of an above average cast (particularly Courtney Cox-Arquette, Jamie Kennedy and Liev Schreiber - although frankly Laurie Metcalf calmly pockets the entire movie in a single scene. Compare also Neve Campbell's likable, determined Sidney with Jennifer Love Hewitt's Julie Jameson in the 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' films - a drip written (initially by Williams, irritatingly) and acted with half the skill, who constantly needs rescuing by her boyfriend as though she were the heroine of a Victorian melodrama). These are not the corpses-in-waiting of most slasher films, but funny, rounded individuals with their own foibles who die senselessly and horribly. The humour (and it is a very, very funny movie) is not at the expense of the horror, or the characters enduring it.
It's also worth noting the real skill with which Craven orchestrates the suspense, the excellent use of music (particularly some borrowed from the 'Broken Arrow' score), Tori Spelling's gameness (although she gives away the plot twist of 'Stab' in that interview!), and Portia di Rossi's remarkable eyebrows. This movie needs serious re-assessment. Personally, I think it's richer than your average horror-snob's favourite.