Horror franchises never truly die; like their notorious killers they only lie dormant to await a time when they can strike unsuspectedly again.
On that note, Scream 5, the latest installment of the metafictional slasher series, has now had a fan-made trailer released to give us some idea of what we might expect from the continuing travails of Sidney Prescott. And you can check it out for yourself up above.
Little in the way of specifics have been released about the film, only that it concerns Sidney returning to Woodsboro, whereupon another spate of murders begins, echoing the past series of Ghostface slayings of which she was the epicenter. To be honest, such basics could have been guessed with little in the way of initiation, and in keeping with this, the trailer doesn’t offer up much in regards to plot.
Instead, it seamlessly splices together footage and dialogue from the previous films and the narratively unrelated TV show, the lack of context in most shots rendering them serviceable as possibly coming from the new movie, while other moments specifically evoke resurfacing memories of the earlier installments, a common stylistic choice when a long-running saga is revived after a lengthy break.
The film will see the return of series mainstays Neve Campbell as Sidney, David Arquette as Dewey and Courtney Cox as Gale, along with Marley Shelton as Judy, Dewey’s deputy sheriff who was introduced in Scream 4 and one of the few new characters to survive the bloodbath, and Roger L. Jackson, who provides the iconic voice of Ghostface heard as the killer taunts potential victims over the phone.
It will be some time before we see an official trailer, of course, as filming on Scream 5 has only been underway for a fortnight after world conditions delayed its planned commencement from May. It’ll be interesting to see how the franchise’s blackly humorous and self-referential tone will be updated for an increasingly jaded audience, though, and until then, creative works like this will keep us going.
