I think it looks like a Scream movie but updated slightly which it should be.
But this is my main problem with it: it doesn't. It doesn't look like a Scream movie, it doesn't sound like a Scream movie. It's literally edited like a trailer for a movie where retired superhero Dewey Riley rounds up his retired superhero friends to form a Slasher Avengers to take down their greatest foe one last time.
Ghostface is barely in the trailer, and when he is, it's personality 404. The few lines we hear are run of the mill and could be straight out of a fan fiction, there's no sense that he's enjoying toying with his victims like he usually does, there's none of his usual flair to his physicality.
There's this general feeling that 3 and 4 went too comedic and that should be reined in, but really it's not that they became more comedic, it's that the comedy became more cartoonish. Scream 1996 is fucking hilarious, there's a joke every couple of minutes. It doesn't stop it being a brutal and horrifying film. The comedy is inherently entwined in Scream's DNA, it just needs to have that cutting wit that it does in the best instalments.
None of that is in this trailer.
And worst of all for me is the music. This trailer confirms for me what I already feared—that when you take away Beltrami's score, it just doesn't feel like Scream anymore. It just doesn't.
When you go back and watch the Scream 4 trailer for comparison—A phone rings, those two haunting notes from Sidney's lament, "what's your favourite scary movie?" and then the booming bass of the score and the cute plinky-plonk percussion over a shot of Woodsboro High. Ten seconds of screen time and it's Scream, through and through.
I'm hoping a lot of this is just bad editing on the part of the trailer team. I mean, come on, it's basically a parody of itself. I don't begrudge the overuse of that sliding bass note trailers rely on these days, it's a good way to transition between a fast-paced segment and a relaxed segment, but Jesus Christ, this trailer uses it seven times in the first fifty seconds?
There is
nothing more indicative of a bad horror movie than throwing sounds on the soundtrack to scare the audience. It shows a completely lack of confidence in the actual movie. But again, hopefully this is the editors of the trailer thinking they know better and the actual film will be better.
There's also just... Not a lot given away from the trailer. Nothing to hook you. I'm not even sure who it's aimed at? If it's aimed at existing fans, they've fucked up. Key moments like Sid entering Stu's house are underused and flash by with no time to absorb or contribute to the emotion of the trailer in any way, there's no attempt to even explain why Sid or Gale are in the movie to pull us into the story.
If they're aiming at new viewers instead, well that's an even bigger failure, what the fuck do we know about the new cast from this trailer? Nothing. What do we know about any of the story? Nothing.
Again, just to compare to the Scream 4 trailer, from the first minute of that trailer alone we know that the film is returning to Woodsboro high, we know it's the anniversary of the massacre, we know Sid has returned and why, we know enough of the killer's motives to know there's a personal link to Sid, we know the kids don't take the massacre seriously anymore after 15 years of Stab, and that that's a tool Ghostface will be using to his advantage.
That's a literal fuck ton of information conveyed in 60 seconds, but from the entirety of the Scream 2022 trailer I know... Nothing??? Literally nothing. If I didn't recognise Stu's house, I wouldn't even know it's in Woodsboro.
Literally all we know is there are attacks happening and it's a copycat of the original. Again...
I've just realised that's not what the trailer says at all and the attacks are on relatives of the original killers? Rather than a copycat thing. Which is original, I'll give them that. Maybe if the trailer was better I'd have remembered that key piece of information after my 20th watch ddd
...Well that became a rant.
