Can MTV’s ‘Scream’ Revitalize An Old Story For A Younger Generation? [Video]
It’s just shy of 20 years since Wes Craven’s Scream first terrified teenagers in movie theaters around the country with the tale of a masked serial killer hunting the high school students in Woodsboro, California. Now, MTV is bringing Scream’s Ghostface back with a new mask, a new M.O., and a new town, but with the same basic theme.
To promote this redesigned concept, MTV just released a second trailer for their upcoming television adaptation of the Scream franchise, along with a revised plot summary.
“What starts as a YouTube video going viral, soon leads to problems for the teenagers of Lakewood and serves as the catalyst for a murder that opens up a window to the town’s troubled past. Everyone has secrets. Everyone tells lies. Everyone is fair game.”
MTV has taken the basic plot of the Scream films and updated pretty much everything to make it more appealing to younger generations. Apparently, even the town name was too generic for the MTV Scream adaptation, because the Woodsboro name was abandoned along with Ghostface’s traditional mask. Could there be a method to MTV’s madness? After all, pretty much every area has a suburb named Lakewood, doesn’t it?
The original mask from the Scream films, which was based on the painting also titled “Scream” by artist Edvard Munch, won’t be making it into the television adaptation, as mentioned above. Against Wes Craven’s advice, MTV has updated the Ghostface mask for their Scream adaptation, but that isn’t the only change fans of the films will see, or hear.
It seems that Ghostface will not speak in the new rebooted Scream series. Instead, the killer will use text messaging and video surveillance to intimidate his victims… and this is where MTV’s facade of originality begins to lose its luster.
By the time Scream debuts, fans will already have been exposed to similar concepts ad nauseam. In fact, MTV’s target audience is already familiar with similar M.O.’s from the character of “A” in ABC’s Pretty Little Liars. That villain has been using text messages and videos to terrorize a group of teenage girls for five years now.
While Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens won’t premiere for another two months, fans are already familiar with the similar themes of a masked killer hunting campus co-eds through teasers and posters released for that series.
MTV’s Scream definitely has its work cut out if its going to rise above the competition. The trailer seems fresh and edgy, but it also presents a theme that may too easily fall in with the rest as mediocre horror-lite fare. There is the potential for Scream to rise above, but to do that, Scream is going to have to create some extremely compelling characters and some truly scream-worthy scares.
Scream will premiere on June 30 on MTV.
[Featured image courtesy of MTV/Scream]
