Do you like scary movies?

The familiar friends of Scream 5

It's hard to go on social media and not feel despair these days such is the weight of the plight of Ukrainians and the dearth of hope. So forgive me this indulgent trip to simpler times. I just watched the newest movie in the Scream franchise today on a long-haul flight and returned to a time in my memory bank when Rose McGowan was most famous for being trapped and killed trying to escape an electric garage door through a cat flap, and Nick Cave's creepy “Red Right Hand” was a young classic: “Take a little walk to the edge of town, go across the tracks where the viaduct looms/Like a bird of doom as it shifts and cracks, where secrets lie in the border fires in the humming wires…”

I could document every single detail of the original Scream. And still, every time the ghostface killer appears from behind a slammed door or in front of an empty street, I flinch from joyful panic. More importantly: I laugh. The slasher genre was revived in the '90s by the sicko humor of Wes Craven (RIP) and Kevin Williamson, who together built an homage to cinema that twisted classic tropes and made respectful mincemeat of the old guard. Scream was as educational to me on cinema as Beastie Boys were on the history of music. When I bought “Paul's Boutique” by the latter, I studied every single one of the 105 songs sampled and fell down the rabbit hole into funk, reggae and definitive hip-hop records. With Scream, I plugged the gaps of horror in my repertoire; from Alien to Hitchcock; Halloween to Carrie, I took a crash course in shocks and frights, but none of the oldies gave me as much satisfaction as the staple of my generation. Scream was a renaissance, introducing new young Hollywood, killing off Drew Barrymore in the opening segment, producing a cutting edge soundtrack, crowning Skeet Ulrich as the hot psycho boyfriend to beat, and launching a script born to be quoted by anyone who cared about pop culture. “Bam! Bitch went down!”, “My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”, “HANG UP ON ME ONE MORE TIME AND I'LL GUT YOU LIKE A FISH”, etc.

I actually saw Scream 2 before I saw Scream. I was about 11 or 12-years-old, at a birthday sleepover at my friend Julie's house. There were a load of popular girls there, some I knew, most I didn't. They were girls you didn't get shy in front of. Other than The Exorcist, I don't think I'd ever seen a horror movie before. Sure, my Dad had reared me on Holocaust/Nazi films and those scared the living daylights out of me. (Cut to me imagining SS troops standing at the edge of my bed at night as a four-year-old.) When it comes to real horror though, I'd never experienced the rush of that blood-splattered rollercoaster until Julie's house. In the opening scene Jada Pinkett Smith goes to the movies with her boyfriend to see Stab! - the retelling of the murders that took place in the original Scream; a genius self-knowing movie-within-the-sequel-of-a-movie sub-plot. Pinkett Smith's boyfriend takes a restroom break, and incurs the wrath of the killer when a knife slices through the cubicle door as he pushes his ear to hear the strange sounds coming from his neighbor. I didn't use a public restroom for a year after that, and I was terrified of the school toilets.

But I was hooked. I went backwards to watch the original, and it became one of my go-to feelgood films. Yeah I'm that person. More than anything I fell in love with the continuity of the franchise. The soap opera of forever victim/hero Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), bulldog journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and hapless sheriff Deputy Dewey (David Arquette), and their never-ending Scooby Doo style investigation into who was committing the next batch of systemic, over-the-top, majestically thought-out murders in the weird town of Woodsboro on this particular outing. I hate-watched Scream 3; I respected Scream 4's attempts to go #millennial with an entire YouTube/social media aspect to the killings; I even watched the TV spin-off series, in desperation.

But this – the fifth movie in the franchise – was the most I've got out of a revival since I started my relationship with this unhinged splatter-fest. Why? Because it respects that sometimes you have to give the fans what they want, and in this case, those who enjoyed the original movies want a movie that gifts you with that glee that you can only ride the first time you see your favorite films. You can't get that back. It's the first lick, the initial bite. You can't unsee what you've already seen, no matter how much you love watching it. Scream 5 is almost a re-do, but not quite, throwing you off a beat by three seconds, lending you a familiar red herring, and playing it with another red herring, never giving you the security that any one of the trifecta of Cox, Arquette or Campbell will make it to the end alive, returning to old haunts that look the same but that house new scares and jumps and inappropriate chuckles.

More than 25 years into the franchise, the latest catalyst for a brand new serial killer is the discovery of the illegitimate daughter of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich's original killer). The circus comes back to town around a group of high schoolers, echoing the antics of 1996, as they make many of the same mistakes as our first cast members, despite attempting to honor the gutted-up and immortalized former legends of their town, including the film geek know-it-all Randy, whose body was slashed up like a knots-and-crosses board in a university quad in broad daylight in Scream 2. All the usual in-jokes come to play; the local police who prove themselves beyond useless, Gale Weathers whocan't resist another crack at the story, Dewey's bold-faced tries at catching the killer despite his severed spine induced limp and his ever-ageing agility, and Sidney “how is she still alive?” Prescott's defiantly earnest moral obligation to kill another killer because only she knows how. As the body count builds and the action climaxes in a bloodbath houseparty, we pull out and realize that the final showdown happens in the same spooky country house from Scream, with the same wooden staircase and the same claustrophobic kitchen, as Billy Loomis's ghost paints the room red via his latest inspired psycho/s (no spoilers).

I loved it. I needed it. I craved it. I don't know why we attach ourselves to certain stories like old friends, but there's some security in a successful reimagining of where those friends might be now. When you fall for a film, which we often do, the frustration can be contained in the same element as the ecstasy; that it is stuck in a moment; that it breathes only to the extent that it was written to. Scream 5 doesn't equal Scream. How could it ever? But it reminded me that something can always be added to the narrative you found yourself familiarly attached to. There's always the potential to bargain for a new day with a blast from the past. And in this specific case, no matter how much time has passed, remember never to promise that you'll “be right back”…………………