It’s always someone you know. But also someone you just met.

Scream, the fourth sequel to the original film of the same name, could be called Scream 5, as it was known during production, but the studio wanted to emphasize that this sequel is nonetheless a new movie. (Thankfully they spared us by not calling it 5cream or something worse.) This is fitting for a movie franchise that must reinvent itself with every iteration while still directly referencing all of the tropes inherent in slasher movies in general and Scream movies in particular.

The 2022 version of Scream starts the way most of the movies in the franchise do, with a teenage girl, home alone, receiving a taunting phone call from a strange man, that leads to a fatal home invasion by someone wearing a Ghostface mask and black costume. The first trope inversion occurs here, as this girl, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) not only survives the first attack but is one of the main characters in the movie.

Tara’s attack prompts her friends to reach out to her estranged sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), to come home to take care of her. (Both of the girls’ parents remain absent the whole film, par for the course in Scream movies.) Sam and her boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid), rush to Tara’s side, only to be rejected because Tara is still smarting from Sam’s absence in her life.

Sam has her own secrets though, ones that tie this new character back to the franchise’s legacy characters, which will be a recurring theme throughout this movie. Sam is on anti-psychotic drugs, the only symptom of her psychosis being recurring hallucinations of her deceased father, who just so happens to be Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), one of the Ghostface from the first movie.

Tara’s friend group, it turns out, is mostly comprised of relatives of the original characters. Martha Meeks (Heather Matarazzo) returns as Randy’s sister Martha, and her kids Chad and Mindy (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown) pay homage to their movie-trope loving uncle in a hilarious way. Deputy (now Sherrif) Judy (Marley Shelton) has a son, Wes (Dylan Minnette). Rounding out the possible victims or killers are Amber (Mikey Madison), Liv (Sonia Ben Ammar), and Vince (Kyle Gallner).

As per usual, the attacks become fatal, and Sam and Richie reach out to former sheriff Dewey Riley (a very weary-looking David Arquette), who very reluctantly agrees to help. He in turn contacts his former wife Gale Weathers (Courtenay Cox) and the OG victim Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), telling them to stay away, which of course is exactly what they don’t do. As the victim list gets longer and longer, the survivors band together to try to figure out which one among them is the killer.

All Scream movies are slasher movies about slasher movies: Gale Weathers’ books about the murders become the basis of a hit movie-in-movie franchise called Stab, which the Scream characters use as a template for solving their slasher mystery. This requires at least one know-it-all character to give a detailed list of the relevant meta-tropes in a snake-swallowing-its-own-tail fashion that if you think about it, basically shines a spotlight on the killer(s).

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet took over the directing from the late Wes Craven, who directed the first four movies, and they and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick make sure to give credit where credit is due to their horror ancestors: it’s no accident that there’s a character named Wes or a family with the surname Carpenter. Original writer Kevin Williamson gets a nod when one character watches a bit of his WB drama Dawson’s Creek, and the house where one of the original killers Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) lived is a prominent part of the final act of the movie.

Some things are different, though: the killings in Scream seem more vicious than in previous movies, which makes one wonder about the killers’ motives. No killers survive from movie to movie; each new Scream must invent a new killer or two and give them a plausible reason to start a bloody campaign of terror amongst their friends. That motive usually involves getting Sidney to come out of hiding, but this time around the motive given at the climax seems a little too thin to be plausible. And this time, one of the legacy characters does not survive, which seems unforgivable but may just be something the actor in question requested so they could end their run on the series.

Despite those minor quibbles, Scream is a worthy sequel, or requel, as one character calls it, that both reinvigorates the franchise leaving room for it to expand, while also honoring its legacy.