“New Decade. New Rules.” That’s the tagline on the new teaser poster for SCREAM 4, which returning director Wes Craven will start shooting this June. Take a look at the one-sheet and read up on Craven’s thoughts on the sequel after the jump.

EW revealed the poster and spoke with Craven, who is coming back to the Dimension Films series along with Kevin Williamson (who penned the first two SCREAMs) and actors Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette. “Bob Weinstein [head of Dimension Films] felt that 10 years was enough of a wait,” says Craven, who helmed SCREAM 3 back in 2000. “He felt it was time to give the original three films their due, so he called Kevin, who started coming up with ideas. For some years, Kevin had the notion of the general course of the next three movies. I’m fascinated by what this movie is. I can’t think of another film that has not only a true trilogy, where you’re following a single central character over three pictures, but has the complexity to the story and other characters that also have continued along. And then 10 years later, to come back to those same characters and same actors, and continue that story in a way that’s totally organic. It’s kind of unprecedented.

“There have been 10 years of no Ghostface, but there has been the movie-within-a-movie STAB. We have fun with the idea of endless sequels, or ‘sequelitis’ as Kevin calls it in the script. Sid [Campbell] goes through these three horrendous things, and STAB was based on those horrible things. And then they’ve been taken by a studio and run into the ground in a series of sequels. She has been off by herself and living her own life, and she’s even written a book that has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. She’s kind of put her life back together in the course of these 10 years. But, certainly, there would be no SCREAM without Ghostface, so she has to confront him again, but now as a woman who has really come out of the darkness of her past.”

The SCREAM films are famous for their opening setpieces, in which a character or characters played by famous faces are killed off by Ghostface. “That’s a strong possibility,” Craven laughs of continuing that gimick. “Certainly, you will recognize what Bob calls the DNA of the film: a very complex murder mystery, a shocking action picture, wonderful humor based on character and lots of surprises, as well as a movie that kind of copies itself. It’s a pretty amazing script.

“This is a look at horror after 10 years of a lot of sequels rather than original films coming up year after year. One film is successful, and then they make 25 of them. I think it’s time for something new. I’ve [produced] remakes of my own films, too, with THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES, but we feel it’s time for something new and different, and that’s what this film is going to be. I’ve never felt like these are sequels. This is a film about the progress of, at this point, three core characters, and how all of these events have changed their lives, and how the events in their lives have been reflected in the movies around them, which they might like or might really not like at all. I think that makes it really different.”

And if SCREAM 4 is a hit, would Craven be up for rounding out another trilogy of SCREAM movies? “Yeah,” Craven concludes. “I’m signed on for the duration.”

 

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