A Film Canon

The strongest installment in the Scream franchise since Scream 2, and the most original since the original, Scream 4 poses two questions - how to recover classical suspense in an age of digital simultaneity, and how to transform a joke into something horrifying; or, rather, to how recover classical suspense from the comic mode it's been assigned by the rise of digital, three-dimensional and torture porn horror. Although Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson playfully flirt with all three modes, their real innovation is to transform Ghostface so that he's both more of a fully-fledged character than in any of the previous films, and even more identified with his mouthpiece; a charismatic automaton, or bundle of technology, completely continuous with the Ghostface iPhone app that plays such a pivotal role. Correspondingly, Ghostface is, for the first time, a digital cinephile, raised on youtube recreations of Scream, and his spree is a testament to the insatiability of this new mode. In fact, his mission ultimately seems to be to restore the sense of time that makes suspense possible - unlike previous 'shriekquel' or 'screamake' Ghostfaces, he's not interested in reminding Sidney (Neve Campbell, as sassy as if Scream 3 never happened) that the past is still with her, but rather in reiterating it as past. As a result, the first two acts take place in an eerie zone where suspense proper is replaced by a disarming cinephilic frenzy, poised somewhere between techno-comedy and the sublime, fractallated self-referentiality of the opening sequence, while the third act restores classical suspense by way of one of Craven's most exquisite set pieces, bringing forth an astonishing conclusion in which digital fandom is identified as a symptom of 00s wound culture. It's by far the most Gothic film in the series, preoccupied above all with self-wounding, textured by a cool, chiming wind that seems to have travelled all the way from 1996, and opening up the temporal possibility of a Woodsboro years, decades hence;  "you remind me of me".