A new motion poster for the upcoming fifth installment of the Scream franchise has been unveiled ahead of the film’s release in January. Shared on Twitter by the film’s official account, the poster features the lead characters’ faces superimposed on a bloody knife, with the Ghostface killer behind them. The film's tagline, "It's always somone you know," is emblazoned in big red letters at the top, while ominous lines of dialogue are spoken by different characters in the background.
Set 25 years after the events of the first film, the new Scream brings back original stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette, alongside a roster of newcomers led by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid and others. It’s sort of like the passing of the baton situation that the Ghostbusters franchise also attempted recently.
The newcomers spoke to Collider about their excitement for the movie during a set visit. Barrera, who also appeared in In the Heights earlier this year, said that she couldn’t believe that she’d been cast in a Scream movie until it had been officially announced.
The original Scream film owed a huge debt of gratitude to Halloween. Directed by Wes Craven and released in 1996, the movie is often credited for reinvigorating the slasher genre with its tongue-in-cheek humor and meta-narrative. The series follows the harrowing events that unfold in Woodsboro, a town that is terrorized by a serial killer in a ghost mask. Scream 2 debuted just a year after the first film, and Scream 3 was released in 2000. It fared slightly worse, both critically and commercially.
Scream 4, stylized on screen as SCRE4M, functioned as a soft-reboot, and brought back original writer Kevin Williamson after a one-film absence. It was the lowest-grossing the bunch, and served as the film of Craven’s career before his death in 2015. An anthology TV spinoff ran for three seasons until 2019.
The new Scream, which is basically Scream 5, but is confusingly not called that, is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, co-creators of the horror filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence. They broke out with 2019’s splashy survival horror send-up Ready or Not.
CBR