Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment WriterSPOILER WARNING: This story discusses crucial plot developments — including a major death and who is behind the murders in the movie — in the 2022 horror film “Scream,” currently playing in theaters.When the filmmakers behind the new “Scream” — directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and executive producer Chad Villella, collectively known as Radio Silence — first read the script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, they loved how it applied this franchise’s self-aware sensibility to the state of franchise filmmaking itself.
Rather than tweak the “rules” of horror films or sequels, this new “Scream” slices into fans themselves and how rabid demand for resurrecting long dormant movie franchises has led to the rise of the legacy sequel, or “requel.” “It just hit a button with us,” Bettinelli-Olpin told Variety a week before the film’s debut. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is about something that’s very real and the way we watch movies now.'”As presented in the movie, a “requel” is anything in which the old cast of a beloved movie franchise — like “Scream” mainstays Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox) and Dewey (David Arquette) — return to help a set of new characters within the ongoing story: in this case, sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega), the center of a new spate of gruesome murders by Ghostface.By the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the deaths were an attempt to inspire a requel for “Stab” — the faux-horror-movie series within the “Scream” franchise based on the events of the “Scream” franchise.
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