What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie? by Carina...

What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?
by Carina Santos

Scream 2 (1997)
D: Wes Craven
C: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Jamie Kennedy, Liev Schreiber, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jerry O’Connell

Scream 2 is the sequel to the widely popular Scream. Now in college, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is set on escaping her past. However, her survival of the Woodsboro murders has been turned into material for a horror franchise called Stab (where she is hilariously portrayed by Tori Spelling). Stab seems to have inspired a new incarnation of the mass murderer “Ghostface,” and Sidney is once again in the middle of things. Dewey Riley (David Arquette) leaves Woodsboro in the hopes of protecting Sidney. Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), once reporter and now best-selling author of “The Woodsboro Murders,” upon which Stab is based, tries once again to get to the bottom of things.

Scream 2 opens with a sneak preview of Stab, where Jada Pinkett plays Maureen, a girl reluctant to see “a dumb ass white movie about some dumb ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up.” Before we know it, the adaptation of the Woodsboro murders is being played before a sea of Ghostfaces, as masks were given out by the cinema. This sequence encapsulates the magic of Scream: it’s all fun and games until someone gets gutted. Unfortunately, Scream 2 doesn’t really have much more of these up its sleeve.

Jamie Kennedy reprises his role as Randy Meeks, the resident film geek who also survived the Woodsboro murders. Randy’s obsessive outlining of sequel conventions (and ticking these off as they happen in real life) was another reminder of what Scream was, apart from the gore—self-aware, a little absurd, and frightfully funny. Scream, while letting the audience in on everything, still remained a murder mystery. Scream 2 teases but rarely delivers.

Full of generic horror tropes, where each conventional plot twist is debunked only to introduce yet another typical horror movie move, Scream 2 plays a game of “Guess how many people can die in 120 minutes” instead of focusing on “Whodunnit?” Even Scooby-Doo knows this is the way to go, to get a truly memorable reaction.

In the end, there are more red herrings than real clues, and there is never really any actual provlem solving. What we get is an uneven storyline, a mile-high body count, and a handful of good scares here and there.

It does make for great material for media studies enthusiasts and horror fans, though.

A gem of a scene that I personally enjoyed is when Cici Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar) meets the masked murderer. Who knew Gellar, who at the time of Scream 2’s release was playing Buffy Summers, could play the victim, too? This is partly why I love the Scream franchise: it’s so good at blurring the lines between what we are familiar with as real (SMG as The Chosen One) and what we perceive to be fiction (Cici Cooper, hapless victim).

Perhaps it was the pressure of following a stunning horror movie that made Scream 2 lackluster when held up next to its older brother. While the movie wasn’t bad itself—it is a pretty good scary movie—the script and story shouldn’t have been sacrificed for a few cheap scares and twists. I don’t think it did so badly, though, as there are two more Scream sequels to come.

Ultimately, Scream 2 is successful in many ways, being part of a franchise that is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s pop culture consciousness. It just isn’t as good a story as the first one.