Scream is coming to the small screen, after MTV have announced that they’re going to be bringing the slasher franchise to the world of TV next summer.
While MTV executives have said that they are going to re-invent the show, there’s no news yet as to how the new Scream would look. Being the helpful type over here at FemaleFirst, we thought we’d offer the MTV team some help. All we want is a credit if you pick up on our ideas.
The Scream movies have never been high art, even that scary for the most part. What they were though (particularly the first film in the series) were clever, witty dissections of the horror genre. While the quality of the movies didn’t keep up with the competition, we can think of at least two routes that the show could go that could make for a truly interesting programme.
There are two The first would be to follow the lead of American Horror Story, with over the top self-encapsulating seasons that each have a totally different set of characters and plot points that just share the same tone and name. Ryan Murphy’s campy, gory show has shown that this can be done with great aplomb, as both series of American Horror Story felt as fresh as each other.
That might be scuppered though the need for the show to adhere to network rules, but The Following has shown how much they can be bent now.
The perhaps more doable, exciting yet perhaps unrealistic proposal is for the show to do hour small stories that start and end within a single episode. No carry over characters, just perhaps an underlying theme to connect all the episodes together. The Twilight Zone was able to make tiny little vignettes work fantastically well, and with some creative writing, a series of smaller horror stories could make for cracking TV.
Horror is all about tension. How do you keep tension going from week to week? You just can’t, and this second solution removes all need to even try at doing that. It also lets you actually do what the Scream movies always have done and that’s rack up a rather large body count. If you’re trying to build up characters over the course of a series, then you can’t kill them off a second’s notice to start with. If you’ve only got these characters for an hour, feel free to slice and dice.
We’re going to have to wait until the middle of next year to see if the show can negotiate the knife’s edge of quality; a new, creative look is definitely going to be needed in bringing Ghostface to MTV. Just don’t get a tired and uninterested looking Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette back guys, that would just keep reminding us of just how great the 1996 original was.