Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) was home alone when she received a phone call from a creepy man who wanted to engage her in a trivia quiz about horror movies. Ghostface soon revealed himself and attacked her with a knife. She somehow survived the attack and was hospitalized.

Tara's estranged older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) returned home to Woodsboro to be with her. After suffering from an attack by Ghostface herself, Sam revealed to Tara the truth about her real father which caused their family to break up.

This is a sequel (the fifth) and reboot (or as a character in the film called it, a "requel") of Wes Craven's '90s slasher horror classic about a woman Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her encounters with Ghostface, a serial killer wearing a rubber Halloween mask depicting the face of a screaming ghost (inspired by Munch's painting "The Scream") who was going around killing people in Woodsboro, California. Sidney would always count on local policeman Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and tabloid reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) for help.

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This new film basically followed the formula of the original 1996 film. The opening sequence with Tara on the phone was very similar to the memorable guest performance of Drew Barrymore in the first film as Casey Becker, who was also on a phone with a man playing horror film trivia games while threatening violence. Casey's boyfriend was killed outside her house when she got a question wrong. Ghostface appeared and chased Casey with a knife, ending in her grisly fate, being gutted and hung up on a tree.

Like in previous "Scream" films, there was always a character who was very self-aware that their dire situation was similar to being a classic slasher horror movie, and that they should obey a list of "rules" in order to stay alive. Those who have sex, do drugs or say "I'll be right back" will never make it out alive. In the original film, these rules were enumerated by Randy Meeks. In this latest sequel, the honor goes to Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy-Brown), the niece of Randy, daughter of his sister Martha (Heather Matarazzo).

Like "Spider-Man" and "The Matrix" just before it, "Scream" (2022) also gets a lot of points for the nostalgia factor as it brought back tropes and characters (played by the same actors) from the original film. I am not a fan of slasher films, so I did not follow beyond the first film, but that was enough for me to appreciate the efforts of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett to excite the franchise's loyal fans.

The crazy stabbing scenes were quite over-the-top as expected, so it was crazier to see those victims actually surviving those stabs.

This review was originally published in the author's blog, "Fred Said."