Wilmywood Gets Its Requel
Paramount
When Sidney Prescott answers the phone for the first time, she doesn’t hear the sinister tease of Ghostface: “Hello, Sidney.” Instead, Dewey Riley (David Arquette), the former Woodsboro police officer, is calling to tell her that Ghostface is back, stay away. Sidney (Neve Campbell) is out running, hair pulled back. We have the sense she’s escaped town and gotten her life together. The sky sunny, the river behind her clear, in Scream she might be in California, but she’s being filmed in North Carolina, in my city, running on my route. We might’ve been able to high five when we passed each other.
Wilmington, North Carolina has been a major East Coast filming hub since 1984 when Firestarter showed Hollywood this versatile southern city: beaches, swamps, a charming coastal downtown, college campuses. EUE Screen Gems opened their studios here in 1985, and soon the city’s film industry boomed. We got A Walk to Remember. We got Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill. We got Iron Man 3 and then the one-two punch of HB2—North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill—and a rollback of tax incentives by a Republican state government, and most everyone left for Atlanta.
Recently, though, filmmakers have been returning. Netflix’s Florida Man parked a trailer outside my apartment so all day my dog went crazy barking at production assistants on cigarette breaks by my door. The other day, Michael Shannon and Steve Zahn both came by the coffee shop where I grade student work forever, and I was so zoned in, it took a friend telling me that they’d come by to have any clue they’d been there. I submitted creepy headshots to be an extra in Halloween Kills (they didn’t call).
All this to say, it feels weirdly, personally fitting that Scream (2022) was filmed in town amidst Wilmington’s second wind. I’ve been so compelled by the city’s film legacy, and now a movie about horror movies was being filmed outside my house.
I went to see Scream with my friend Abby at a theater in a ghost town shopping plaza in a part of Wilmington unknown to us. String lights thread between pubs and restaurants, and music pipes from unseen speakers, nobody out to take it all in. Before the movie, Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox appear on screen to thank the audience for seeing the film as it was meant to be seen: in the theater. Suddenly, it all felt a bit political.
Wes Craven’s Scream franchise is meta-horror, offering commentary on how people watch movies. I watched the original in my friend Bri’s basement. I obviously knew the movie was funny, reflecting back viewer expectations as the characters discussed the rules of slasher films—don’t have sex, don’t go off alone—but still when I went to bed I couldn’t shake the image of Ghostface running through a house in his billowing black cloak.
If the original offers a meta-commentary on original slasher rules—Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare on Elm Street—the fifth installment in the Scream franchise finds new entry into the state of slashers and horror today.
The film was distractingly filmed in Wilmington. The theater mostly empty, Abby and I laughed every time we recognized somewhere in town. There’s my dog walking route. There’s my running path. There’s the site of my first gay date, my street, my house one second away from being in a chase scene. I can remember the day they filmed. From my desk by the window, I watched a PA walk up and down my street to hold back foot traffic every time the cameras rolled. All day, sirens blared as they filmed a chase scene, back and forth and back and forth. They must’ve had a hard time getting the shot.
Wilmington is Woodsboro, approximately our present day—no COVID to speak of though they filmed in 2020—and Ghostface is back, stalking and slashing people related to the victims of the first Scream movie (and within the world of Scream, there are Stab movies, which cast another mirror back at the voyeur). A big friend group (read: lots of potential kills for this new Ghostface) comes together after their friend Tara is attacked in her home in a 2022 update of the first film’s opening—Tara’s house has smart locks, and the killer can FaceTime her video of her best friend Amber, a hostage if she gets any of the killer’s horror movie trivia questions wrong.
This film carves a space for itself by examining the rules of the contemporary “re-quel.” Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a horror nerd who early on establishes the rules. Slasher films can’t just reboot the franchise—look at the 2010 remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, the ghost of the original haunts the potential of the redo. And the endless chain of sequels gets boring too. So, instead, filmmakers have gotten original. They’ve invented the “re-quel.” They’ve dropped the sequel’s number from the title and returned to the original in a slightly altered form.
Halloween (2018) famously did this—imagining a back-to-basics story for our slasher baddie with a mix of new and “legacy” characters. Jamie Lee Curtis has long gray hair and practices at the shooting range. In Scream, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and Neve Campbell return to reprise their original roles and, as Mindy notes, we worry if any of these legacy characters, these unkillable ones so far into the franchise, will meet their demise.
Like the original film, this Scream asks us to consider the state of slashers today. What do we look for in our favorite franchises years out from their genesis? The film reprises famous killing scenes from Psycho and I Know What You Did Last Summer and takes the audience back to bloody horror basics. This Ghostface killer does battle with the limitations and challenges of the re-quel in a world of elevated horror.
One of the ways the original Scream broke the rules was that the characters watch scary movies. When Tara answers the phone at the beginning of this film, she says that The Babadook is her favorite scary movie, offering musings on how it’s a complex meditation on motherhood and grief. The dialogue sounds a bit forced, perhaps to good effect because this Ghostface killer asserts that there’s value and fun to the original slice of slashers. It violently claims a space for the slasher among audiences today.
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In that chase scene, I’d thought they’d needed a million tries to get it right. But in theaters, when Abby and I held our breath to see how far they’d go down our street, if either of our apartments would be on screen, they just used the same segment, manipulating the camera angle to conceal landmarks and houses we’d just seen. Some of the magic was lost. Of course they couldn’t close down a huge section of town to unroll a chase scene for miles. Instead, they had to be economical, folding up our street to create an illusion. If you know what you’re looking at, you can only see around the illusion, its component parts. You know what it really is. You’ve pulled a fast one on them. You might be part of the movie magic too.
