Fade Out re-examines the final films of late actors and directors. This edition: 2011’s Scream 4, the final film directed by Wes Craven (1939-2015).

Wes Craven was a horror filmmaker who didn’t aim to simply scare his audience. Instead, the former humanities professor turned horror icon wanted to get to the root of what it was that scared you, and both explore and exploit it. “You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid,” Craven said. “You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative. Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.” Craven’s films, even the lesser ones, never took their horror, or their characters such horror was inflicted on, lightly. He treated his characters with humanity — as real flesh and blood people, people who could be terrorized, and become victimized, not just by the supernatural but by the very facets of their lives. But they were also films about characters who could come out the other end still breathing. They weren’t horror films about victims: they were about survivors. His Nightmare on Elm Street had the ultimate survivor in Nancy, but the survivor type would also end up playing a big part in the diminishing Scream franchise.

In 1996, Craven’s career was given a much-needed boost with Scream. Filming Kevin Williamson’s clever, genre-defying script, Craven used his considerable skill to bring the slasher film back into the mainstream, turning it into something new and hip in the process. Scream subverted genre tropes, with a cast of potential murder victims who had an advantage other slasher bait didn’t: they were familiar with all the horror movies that had come before them, and they could use the well-worn rules and cliches to their advantage.

Scream spawned three sequels, none of which could quite capture the magic of the first. But the film that comes closest is the final sequel, Scream 4, which would also inadvertently be Craven’s final film. The director passed away August 30, 2015, and while he leaves behind a body of work that generations still to come will discover and cherish, Scream 4 doesn’t exactly pop out as a title many might be chomping at the bit for, even though it’s without a doubt the best of the franchise’s sequels. Scream 2 continued the story in the obvious manner: being a horror sequel, it focused on sending-up horror sequels Scream 3, well, I’m still not sure what that movie did, other than run out of steam. But both these films lacked the cleverness the first film had. Scream 4, however, comes closest in recapturing it.

2011’s Scream 4 was a film struggling to stay relevant. The self-referential slasher craze that Scream had given birth to in the late 90s and early 2000s was long over. Instead, horror films had morphed into ultra-violent, extra harsh experiments in watchability. Torture porn reigned for a while, before giving way to a remake craze that is only slowly petering out now (sort of). Scream 4 decided to react to the current horror landscape by embracing both ongoing aspects: it upped the violence, and attempted to be both a sequel and a remake rolled into one. Scream 4 had a bumpy road to the screen. Original Scream writer Kevin Williamson was busy making his own (and not very good) horror film Teaching Mrs. Tingle when it came time to make Scream 3. As a result, he couldn’t provide a script, and instead turned in a rough outline. Ehren Kruger was brought into write Scream 3, and while he did the best he could, the film just lacked the magic the franchise needed. Williamson was back for Scream 4, but contractual obligations with the TV show The Vampire Diaries prevented him from providing rewrites, and Kruger was summoned to punch some things up — even though Williamson is the only credited writer on the film. “I signed up to do a script by Kevin and unfortunately that didn’t go all the way through the shooting,” Craven said. “But it certainly is Kevin’s script and concept and characters and themes.”

The film finds Scream’s Final Girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returning to her hometown of Woodsboro for a book tour. She reunites with the two other main franchise survivors, Gale (Courtney Cox) and Dewey (David Arquette), but Sid is back for long before more horror unfolds. Sidney’s book is about her reclaiming her life, a life she’s spent so much of being chased around by lunatics with hunting knives. “You’re always going to be a victim,” her publicity agent (a delightful, sadly underused Alison Brie) tells her. And once back in town, that seems to be true as Sidney is forced to sit back and watch people suffer and die all because of her own twisted past. While Sidney and the other two original leads get prominent billing and screen-time, the film’s main focus is on a whole new set of young characters — the reboot cast, if you will. In a sense, Scream 4 is the unique type of reboot where the original characters keep trying to force their way back into the story. Sidney, the ultimate survivor, is still haunted by the fact that murder seems to follow her wherever she goes. Dewey and Gale barely get along anymore; Dewey is aggressively hit on by one of his deputies, and Gale is trying to reclaim her faded fame.

The reboot cast consists of Sidney’s younger cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her pack of friends who are finding themselves picked off one by one by a new Ghostface, the Halloween-costume sporting killer with a mask modeled on Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”. It’s here, with these new young characters, where Scream 4 reaches peak meta status. The first Scream had its cast referencing other horror films to try to survive their predicament. Here, the characters are referencing the horror film franchise that exists within the Scream franchise, the Stab films (“Stab 5 had time travel!” one character informs us). And the Stab films are based on the real-life events of the first three Scream movies. So here we have characters referencing fake films based on the universe they inhabit, which of course is a fake film universe. “How meta can you get!” Gale declares at one point, though she’s quick to point out she doesn’t understand what the term actually means.

Scream 4 will never be considered Craven’s masterpiece, but as a final film, it’s not something to be brushed aside either. If anything, Scream 4 returns a touch of dignity to the franchise, and washes the bad taste of Scream 3 out of your mouth. Scream 4 was a film that was fighting to still seem relevant in a horror landscape that had long since let its kind slink into the background. As always, Craven isn’t phoning it in — he works hard to make this the best possible sequel he can, adapting to the modern times he found himself working in. The biggest difference Scream 4 has from the other films is the way it handles its violence. The Scream franchise was never one to shy away from blood — after all, the first film opened with one character having his guts literally spilled while another was stabbed to death and then hung from a swing-set. But the violence in Scream 4 is nastier than any of the other films. While there’s a throwaway joke about torture porn in the opening of the film, Scream 4 doesn’t revel in its kills — these aren’t the mindless murders that joking teens thrill to see, like those in the Saw films. Instead, the murders here are brutal, and the victims linger, spitting blood and trying hard to cling to those last moments of life.

Craven stages several memorable, disturbing kills in the film, but the most remarkable one appears a half-hour in. Jill and her friend Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) are up in Jill’s room watching Shaun of the Dead while a cop car sits outside, guarding the house in light of a recent Ghostface-related murder of two of their friends. Olivia (Marielle Jaffe), Jill’s friend and next door neighbor, is chatting with the girls via speakerphone on her iPhone while getting changed in her room one house over. Craven frames Olivia padding around her empty bedroom in her bra, tricking the audience into a titillated state of relaxation. Suddenly, Jill and Kirby get a call from “Ghostface”, who taunts and threatens them, and suggests he’s in the closet. The tension builds as Kirby, disbelieving, advances on Jill’s closet and then throws open the doors to find…nothing. When Kirby calls Ghostface out on his bullshit, he playfully replies: “I never said I was in your closet.” The tension becomes almost unbearable as the characters, and we by extension, realize what’s happening: the killer is in Olivia’s closet, and he bursts out, brutally stabbing her with his huge hunting knife. There’s a struggle — there always is. These victims do not go gently into that good night. There’s a startling brutality to the attack, with Olivia being violently slammed into one object in her room after another. Eventually, she ends up on her own bed, and there’s a disturbing sexually violent overtone at play as Ghostface looms above then slams the knife down into her. Sidney, who is staying in Jill’s house, hears a commotion and rushes into Jill’s room. Looking through the bedroom window, Sydney, Jill and Kirby can see Olivia being brutally attacked. When Sidney first realizes what’s going on, she slowly backs up, and Craven cuts to a close-up on her weary, horrified face in a moment of hesitation. She looks as if she might just shut-down completely. But Sydney hasn’t been a survivor for this long by clamming up, and rushes across the street to help, while Ghostface smashes Olivia head-first through her own bedroom window, letting her limp, mangled body dangle for a moment before pulling her back in. By the time Sidney reaches the victim’s bedroom, she finds a literal bloodbath: every inch of the bedroom is drenched in blood, and Olivia lays on her bed, her guts puddled out beside her. Overcome with what she’s seeing, Sidney slumps down in the doorway. It’s a powerful scene that resonates, and it’s all the more impressive because Olivia is one of the characters in the film who isn’t very fleshed-out — we know almost nothing about her. But her death is so cruelly brutal, and Sidney’s defeated, weary reaction is so simple yet effective, that Craven is able to elicit a genuine emotional response.

As of now, the Scream film franchise is no more. Kevin Williamson said in interviews around the time of Scream 4’s release that he had ideas for a 5 and 6, but that they were “unlikely” to happen. There is, of course, MTV’s Scream-in-name-only TV series, which does fine in the ratings but not so fine with fans of the films. With Craven no longer around to helm the films and bring with them his expertise and a touch of class, more Scream films are both unwarranted and unnecessary. That never stopped Hollywood before, though. Sooner or later, someone in a meeting somewhere is going to lean back in a chair and pipe up: “Hey, why don’t we do another Scream?”

Craven was very vocal about how unhappy he was with the absolutely terrible Nightmare on Elm Street remake. The very nature of Scream 4 was a chance for Craven to both channel distaste for remakes into his own franchise, and successful halt any need for a remake of Scream. This comes through loud and clear in another stand-out sequence near the climax of Scream 4, one that recalls the famous opening kill of the original film. Hayden Panettiere as Kirby is locked into one of Ghostface’s annoying phone games, where she has to answer questions about scary movies correctly or someone — in this case, film nerd Charlie (Rory Culkin), taped to a chair outside — will get the knife. After a series of softball questions, Kirby screws one up and begs for one more chance. The killer decides to give her one, beginning a question about a horror remake. Before he can finish, Kirby cuts him off and runs through a massive list of seemingly every horror movie ever remade in the last decade — many of them remakes of Craven’s own films. Craven pulls in tight on her face as she runs down the list, her voice quivering, as Marco Beltrami’s string-based score slices into the scene as effectively as any blade can. The scene is tense and darkly amusing, having fun with the fact that most studio-based horror films have become bankrupt in their excessive rebooting and remaking of things that were better off the first time. It’s a statement hammered home into the final scene of the film, where Sidney is at last victorious over the killer, punctuating a gunshot with the pity line, “You forgot the first rule of remakes: don’t fuck with the original.” It’s advice others would do well to heed. When it came to creating horror, directors didn’t get much more original than Wes Craven.