Ghost­face has a new game for a new gen­er­a­tion in the Scream trailer

Much like its inde­struc­tible pro­tag­o­nist Sid­ney Prescott, the Scream fran­chise has proven all but unkil­l­able. No mat­ter that it’s been 11 years since the meta­tex­tu­al mis­chief of Scream 4, no mat­ter that pub­lic inter­est seems to have waned and no one’s real­ly ask­ing for this – Ghost­face does not need to be asked for. He just shows up, again and again, no mat­ter how many times we might think we’ve ban­ished him once and for all.

The trail­er for this new install­ment, sim­ply titled Scream in a hint at its ​“relaunch” sta­tus despite fit­ting into the chronol­o­gy as a direct sequel to the last film, has now appeared online with a venge­ful streak run­ning strong as ever. Ghost­face has returned to ter­ror­ize über-Final Girl Sid­ney (Neve Camp­bell), doo­fus cop Dewey (David Arquette), tren­chant news­woman Gale (Courteney Cox), and a hand­ful of telegenic teens, but the nature of his game is unclear beyond that much.

Each of the Scream films has demon­strat­ed an aware­ness about its place in the hor­ror genre, from the slash­er ref­er­en­tial­i­ty of the orig­i­nal to the self-dep­re­ca­tion about cash-in sequels dur­ing the fol­low-ups. There’s no trace of the reflex­ive frame­work in the new spot for the lat­est, which could do plen­ty along those lines with the cur­rent reboot craze into which it tidi­ly fits.

Per­haps the film is just play­ing its cards close to the vest, or per­haps it’s due to this being the first film in the series not direct­ed by orig­i­nal cre­ator Wes Craven, who passed away in 2015. The new cre­ative team inspires a mix of excite­ment and appre­hen­sion; direc­tors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bet­tinel­li-Opin made 2019’s stronger-than-aver­age blood­bath Ready or Not (same goes for co-writer Guy Busick), though note­wor­thy cred­its from the oth­er co-screen­writer James Van­der­bilt include the wide­ly loathed Spi­der-Man pic­tures with Andrew Garfield, the wide­ly loathed White House Down, and the not-seen-enough-to-be-wide­ly-loathed Adam San­dler net­flick Mur­der Mystery.

Things could go either way, which leaves a sort of sus­pense all too apro­pos for the project at hand. Scream has been one of the most con­sis­tent­ly inven­tive and cre­ative of the nev­er-end­ing hor­ror series to come out of the ​’90s, a streak it’ll hope­ful­ly keep up in this fresh iteration.

Scream comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and the US on 14 Jan­u­ary, 2022.