Filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who were behind the 2019 breakout horror-comedy hit Ready or Not, have next geared up for a new installment in Wes Craven’s Scream franchise. During their upcoming film’s Virtual Production Press Day, Bettinelli-Olpin revealed that the one current filmmaker whose work had a marked influence on Scream 5 is Jordan Peele, of Get Out and Us fame.
“We’ve talked about Jordan Peele‘s body of work a lot, because what he’s doing is the closest thing to something that we hope to do, and that we love in terms of, tonally, where it’s fun, and it’s about something, and it’s exciting, and it’s not just one thing. We talked about the visual style of Us a lot when we were talking about this, because it captured something very honest and organic while also feeling like a big, fun movie, and to be able to do those two things simultaneously and have an indie vibe that’s also a big, fun, popcorn movie… That’s what, to us, Wes Craven mastered with Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, where he’s able to walk that line, and that’s the newest thing in that lineage for us.”
The upcoming Scream movie is not a reboot but will serve as a continuation of the story from Craven’s original 1996 feature Scream and its sequels. The movie has much of the lead cast from the previous movies reprising their roles, along with a host of newcomers. According to Gillett, the new Scream will serve up some commentary on the existing state of the horror movie genre today, which is at a very different place now than when the original Scream was released twenty-four years ago.
“I think one of the things we can say is that when [writer] Kevin [Williamson] and Wes created the first Scream, horror movies were kind of a fringe genre in a lot of ways. It wasn’t a wildly mainstream style of storytelling. And now, in 2020, and for the better part of the last decade, horror films have really been on the rise. And so there’s certainly a bit of that conversation in this story, but to what Matt had said, one of the amazing things that I think is just naturally packed into the DNA of what a Scream movie is, is added. It’s about what’s happening right now. There is a large conversation within this film that addresses the conversations that we’re all having in our lives about entertainment and media and the genre specifically.”
The previous Scream movies are well known for the meta-narrative that runs through their stories regarding the state of the slasher-horror genre. It will be interesting to see how the new movie will honor that tradition by commenting on the modern horror movie landscape.
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Scream features Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Jack Quaid, Marley Shelton, Dylan Minnette, Mason Gooding, Mikey Madison, Melissa Barrera, and Jenna Ortega. The film is scheduled to arrive in theaters on January 14, 2022. This news first appeared at ComicBook.com.