This killer is obsessed with completing the trilogy of killing sprees.
As Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courtney Cox), Dewey (David Arquette) and the cast of Stab 3 scramble to avoid becoming part of the saga’s body count, secrets are revealed which will recast everything they know in a new light…
While Scream 2 was influenced by the success of the previous film, Scream 3 came to be in a very different environment
Released in the wake of a series of copycat crimes and the Columbine school shootings, Scream 3 marked a pivot.
It was also the first film without one of its key players - Kevin Williamson had to step out due to multiple commitments and the film ended up being written by Ehren Kruger.
If you like scares, Scream 3 is a decline from the last movie, but it has its own compensations in its sense of thematic closure and some genuinely funny elements.
According to Kruger, director Wes Craven had a hand in shaping the script, and one can see that in the film’s greater focus on visualising thematic concepts over plot logic.
This is the first entry where I questioned Ghostface’s reappearances, particularly during Sidney’s journey down faux-memory lane in the studio.
What the movie lacks in suspense is more of a sense of nightmare, of repressed memory and psychology.
The movie is more of an overt parody of Hollywood.
There are celebrity cameos, like b-movie maestro Roger Corman as an executive worried about how the murders willa affect the movie’s production
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The seedy underbelly referenced in Milton’s parties cannot help but feel like a subtle dig at the Weinsteins who produced the Craven-era Scream instalments.
While it is not as consistently tense as the previous entries, it features one fantastic sequence - Sidney chases the actress playing her in Stab 3 through a stage door onto the set of her family home.
The scene turns into a chase as Sidney is pursued by Ghostface through the familiar environments of the previous films. This scene renders the third film’s focus on resolution and returning to the beginning is made explicit.
The film is concerned with doubling, juxtaposing the earlier representations of these characters with their present versions.
Neve Campbell’s limited availability meant reduced screen time for Sidney Prescott. In its favour, it means more focus on the evolving relationship between Dewey and Gale.
This shift in emphasis leads to some more unexpected gold in the dynamic between Cox’s Gale and Parker Posey’s Jennifer Jolie, the actress who plays her in the Stab movies.
Their pairing is a comic highlight of the film, as a more mature, self-reflective Gale faces the earlier version of herself - revolted at Julie’s self-absorption, seeing herself in Julie’s distorted image.
Dewey’s relationship with Jennifer allows him to voice his continuing frustration with Gale. In one surreal scene, Dewey and the actor playing him, Tom Prince, argue with Gale about the way he was portrayed in one of her stories.
Weirdly, the one thing that is not doubled is the killer.
It makes some sense that a filmmaker is the villain overseeing the whole story, but of all the film’s various attempts to conclude the series and its themes, this is the one that jars.
It has the consequence of making the whole story feel far smaller and contrived. And Scott Foley makes for an underwhelming antagonist.
Because of the ever-changing script, with pages delivered on the day they were shot (or reshot), Scream 3 does have a strange underlying sense of chaos and mutability. While it is not traditionally scary, the indecisiveness of its prodcution gives the film a simmering sense of paranoia as the film teases various characters as potential killers, the bounds of reality are broken by Sidney’s visions of her mother, and even the killer’s use of a voice changer.
It is a flawed movie, and lacks Kevin Williamson’s stamp, but there is a lot to like and dig into about Scream 3.
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