Some screams are on the rocks, others on Blu-ray

Woodsboro locks its doors.

Wes Craven: Two words that by their associative powers alone, can conjure inimitable phantasmagoric visions from which you cannot avert your eyes, but in the dead of sleepless night, so desperately wish you had. Whether it’s the snicker-snack of finger-knives or an Edvard Munchian bogeyman that threatens our dreams, it’s high-time that we got ourselves educated on the hand that wields them…

It’s post production and that means time for P.R. sidestepping and euphemistic reflection upon the filming process that was…

With the fourth installment in Wes Craven’s Scream saga due next year, it seemed that this franchise – like its protagonist, Sidney Prescott – would not be one easily killed off. And now it appears that its life has been prolonged even more, with the director openly admitting that screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, launched this latest film with a second trilogy in mind.

A sleepy rural village, inexplicable teenage deaths and some spooky link to a serial killer long dead – get ready for Wes Craven’s latest horror! What’s that? That’s the exact plot of The Nightmare On Elm Street, also by Wes Craven? Oh stop being such a kill-joy! My Soul To Take breaks new ground for many reasons… erm… it’s in 3D?

Hallowe’en is upon us! Sort of. I’d like to say that’s the reason I decided upon a rewatch of Wes Craven’s Scream, but really I’d been wanting to for a while. I don’t even care about Hallowe’en. Though the film itself is overtly educational in the rules of surviving a horror, there are so many other subtleties to be garnered from this hormone-riddled nineties bloodbath.

Is there any name better known than that of Wes Craven? It’s pretty hard to forget the man responsible for unleashing the fiendish Freddy Krueger and effectively making sleep an impossibility. The man takes his place as a legend of the slasher flick genre, every era spawning another attempt to scare the bejeesus out of people. A directing career that started in the XXX industry (not surprisingly really seeing as sex and violence usually go hand in hand) led to such horror classics as the The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and most recently the Scream franchise. With his popularity never waning, Shout! Factory has taken it upon themselves to scrounge up one of his earlier works and release it for the first time as a Collector’s Edition on both Blu-ray and DVD.

Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson bring together a cast of new and returning faces for one more stab at the post-modern Scream franchise. With an abundance of recent horror history ripe for the picking, they succeed beautifully in rebooting the formula while staying true to the mission statement that started it all.

In 1994 Wes Craven reclaimed the original slasher nightmare and helmed the final instalment in the franchised vision of terror – Nightmare on Elm Street. The outcome of Craven’s combined writing and directing efforts in this film – Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – was a vivid horrorscape of the unimaginable and an exercise in intelligent, disturbing inventiveness. 17 years later and My Soul To Take has summoned the cinematic corpse-monger back to the business of blood – but it’s a far cry from the slick-witted slice ‘n dicer – and this time the result may be more bed-time story than Nightmare…