The inaugural “Scream” (1996) was a watershed in its genre: a scary movie about scary movies. When the film’s hyper-verbal, seen-it-all teens weren’t busy stabbing or being stabbed, they were parroting “Psycho” dialogue, debating “Friday the 13th” trivia and reciting survival maxims ( Do your best not to be a chesty blonde! Never say, “I’ll be right back!”) they’d gleaned watching countless other horror films.

The movie was a phenomenon. “At test screenings people were coming up saying, ‘Can you play it again?’ ” said Bob Weinstein, founder and chairman of Dimension, which made the film. “Scream” earned over $160 million worldwide and spawned two blockbuster sequels.

This month the franchise returns with “Scream 4.” Since “Scream” rejuvenated the slasher genre and inspired a wave of self-aware horror (“The Faculty,” “Insidious”), all-out parodies have emerged (“Scary Movie” and its three sequels). And with the so-called torture porn subgenre, graphic gore and complicated deaths have become almost de rigueur (“Saw,” “Hostel,” “Final Destination”). The achievement of the original “Scream” was not just its meta-layers, but also the way those layers enriched the thrills. By the ‘90s it had become ritual among horror audiences to call out cliches - a way to interact , but also to release tension. Here was a movie that explicitly invoked the cliches, wielding our own jadedness against us.

“The genre had gotten stale. The conventions were so glaring,” Kevin Williamson, the creator and principal screenwriter of “Scream,” recalled in an interview. “I wanted to poke fun at that, and I wanted a scary movie.”

A few years ago, Mr. Williamson (who wrote “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” created “Dawson’s Creek” and, most recently, helped to develop “The Vampire Diaries”) began imagining another “Scream.” With Mr. Williamson’s proposal, Mr. Weinstein approached Wes Craven, who directed the original trilogy. Mr. Craven, who made his name with “Nightmare on Elm Street,” had rejected offers to direct the first “Scream.”
“There’s been times where I’ve felt like, ugh, there’s some sort of bad karma in doing violent film after violent film,” he recalled. He was cautious about “Scream 4,” but “committed once I saw the script.” (A fifth and sixth movie are planned, if “Scream 4” performs well.)

In a bid for contemporary relevance, “Scream 4” incorporates details like video-blogging and social networking.

But Mr. Weinstein was also certain that “Scream’s” appeal resists passing trends. He convinced the series’s three main stars, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, to return, saying “people have fallen in love with those characters.”

Ms. Campbell said that, after the third “Scream,” “I swore up and down that would be the last.” But, she said, “I realized there might be a good nostalgia factor.”

Comparing “Scream” to “Saw” and “Final Destination,” Mr. Weinstein said: “People are so tired of gore. I’m sure those movies delivered to their audiences, but they delivered the one thing. ‘Scream’ gives people a full plate: scares, thrills, characters, humor.”

The original trilogy, which Mr. Williamson wrote after “Natural Born Killers” following what he called “all this controversy about violence and cinema,” dramatized issues of artistic culpability.

“Scream 4” grapples with “profound moral and psychological questions about a generation that knows itself via tweeting and texting, not face to face,” Mr. Craven said. “You know, I’d get this creepy feeling walking around the set, seeing everyone’s head turned down toward a screen.”

Naturally he couldn’t resist a movie reference: “It’s like, ‘It’s the pod people!’ ”

“Scream 4” adds a new generation of young actors like Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere and Rory Culkin. Ms. Roberts, who was 5 in 1996, remembered “kind of always knowing about ‘Scream.’ ” She said: “I like that it’s a random person who just snaps, and that Wes always brings it down to reality. Like, when the phone rings in this one, it’s the iPhone ring everyone has. He takes things in your real life and makes them scary.”


By JONAH WEINER