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In this column and the next one, I will examine the second installments of two of the seminal (and unexpectedly popular) horror franchises of the last 15 years. Though I count both of these series as personal favorites, I wasn't quite prepared for my divergent reactions that resulted in revisiting them. Time can be a cruel, cruel mistress, particularly for one like me who is only now beginning to take second looks at a lot of films, both ones I loved and ones that may have only gotten a meh from me at the time. But more on that in a moment...

Scream 2 (1997)
I remember catching Scream opening day in December of 1996 mid-afternoon in a near empty mall theater with no idea of the looming pop culture significance of what I was about to experience. I recall being shocked by the mixture of humor and brutal violence in the opening sequence featuring Drew Barrymore, a mini-movie of sorts with a macabre, chilling tone that still stands as the high-water mark of anything in the series. I had grown up on slasher films in the ‘80s (by default, since my mother would allow me to rent those but not the Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds, et al series. For those I had to rely on the sleep overs of my childhood best friend). Though my tastes don't run to horror as much as they used to, the 12-year-old in me still enjoys that kind of terror and moments of swift violence. Scream was like an homage to and a reboot of the genre.

As much as I enjoyed the hip humor and the famous faces in small roles (Henry Winkler, welcome back, next stops The Waterboy and Arrested Development!), it was the audaciousness of the conceit that truly rocked my ya-yas. Here was a film bold enough to mock all the cliches of its genre without simply being a parody. Director Wes Craven had experience with balancing horror with humor (everything from A Nightmare on Elm Street to his under-rated The People Under the Stairs) and could smoothly unfold screenwriter Kevin Williamson's transitions from brutal knifings to self aware discussions of why no one in the horror genre should ever say "I'll be right back."

Well-received for a horror film, Scream also performed unlike most horror films before or since at the box office. After opening with a so-so $6 million its first weekend (a figure that for most any film nowadays, let alone a horror film, would mean it would be dropping to the second-run theaters in a month's time, max), Scream played through the holidays and into the first quarter of 1997 and eventually cracked $100 million, meaning its final gross was over 15 times its opening weekend. Along with (on a much larger scale) Titanic, Scream is one of the last examples of a longevity and repeat business that wide releases in this decade simply don't experience.

A sequel was all but guaranteed and as Williamson had anticipated Scream to be a trilogy and had already mapped out where the story would go ahead of time, the possibility was there for this to be a series that retained its quality and wasn't simply cobbled together quickly to cash in on unexpected success. I enjoyed Scream, it is true, but I was as giddy as a schoolgirl anticipating a sequel that would attempt to both mock the nature of all sequels and succeed in quality where most of its ilk had failed..

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