Ever since the original “Scream” film was released in 1996, the series has adhered to slasher movie conventions while making postmodern jokes about them
film in the “Scream” series has a counter-intuitive title: “Scream”. That may be unhelpful to cinema-goers who are discussing the film, and to journalists who are writing about it, but it’s not unprecedented. The sequel to “Halloween” , released in 2018, was called “Halloween”. Last year’s sequel to “Candyman” was called “Candyman”.
The current “Scream” addresses the phenomenon of “requels” or “legacy sequels”: that is, films which are essentially remakes of decades-old genre classics, but which feature some actors in the same roles as they had in those classics. This is not just a horror phenomenon. Both “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” put young heroes in old scenarios , so they were, in effect, remakes. But they brought back various familiar faces from “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters”, too.