Most long-running horror franchises tend to spawn so many sequels, remakes and reboots that a revolving door of cast and crew members is required, but Scream has been something of an outlier in that the four installments so far have largely retained the key players from the very beginning.
Horror maestro Wes Craven directed stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette four times between 1996 and 2011, with original writer Kevin Williamson scripting every entry with the exception of the third, but even then he remained on board as a producer. And though Craven may have passed away in 2015, the upcoming Scream 5 still retains parts of the original core team.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett will be replacing Craven behind the camera, and have brought in their Ready or Not co-writer Gary Busick to tackle the screenplay alongside Zodiac‘s James Vanderbilt, while Williamson is retaining his influence behind the scenes thanks to a producing credit.
Of course, Neve Campbell hasn’t been officially announced yet to complete the set of stars, but it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time before that happens, and in a new interview, David Arquette explained why the Scream brand remains so popular even a quarter of a century after the first installment.
“Wes Craven is just a master at what he did, with Kevin Williamson writing an incredible script to set up the whole series. It’s just it worked on a level of humor and horror and just was really fun for audiences to watch. We’re now, this is going to be five films into it, so there’s a certain understanding of these different characters and the storylines and it’s just a fun character to play.”
Ready or Not showed that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are more than capable of putting a fresh spin on familiar horror tropes, and they’ll no doubt be looking to capture the smarts and subversiveness of Scream, which is still lauded as a modern classic of the genre. The fourth entry was a major disappointment from both a critical and commercial perspective, but if Scream 5 manages to avoid the pitfalls that have blighted many nostalgia-driven sequels in recent years, then the long-running slasher series could be set for a major resurgence when Ghostface returns to our screens next year.
