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Face it: Horror movie sequels suck.

Which is the shrewd running gag of Scream deux. While the original was a send-up of slasher conventions, Scream 2--starring most of the survivors of Scream--is a takeoff on the follow-up efforts of Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, and friends. "The entire horror genre was destroyed by sequels," one character grumps near the beginning of Scream 2. "It becomes about money and no one's interested in quality." Adds another, "How can Freddy and Jason possibly be scary after they've all been diluted through five or six sequels?"

Good point. In most cases, pumping out a horror sequel less than 12 months after the release of the original is a recipe for bloody disaster. But as any chain-saw-bearing ghoul will tell you, Scream, with its sly self-referential style (remember the line from the original, summing up horror movies? "Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act, who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It's insulting") is nothing like other horror franchises.

"Scream crosses every boundary," boasts Miramax cochairman Bob Weinstein, who two years ago bought Kevin Williamson's original spec script along with a five-page outline for Scream 2 and Scream 3. "It's not just scary, it's not just fun, it's not just clever, it's not just a whodunit. It's all that and it's something more. Like The Crying Game or Pulp Fiction, the Scream saga's a whole new approach to movies. It kills off all the old formulas."

The Scream secret is to pack 110 minutes with sexual tension, hip pop-culture references, and lots and lots and lots of blood. After all, this isn't Captain Kangaroo. "I was in the movie and I still can't watch Scream all the way through," says Courteney Cox, 33, who returns as TV reporter/viper Gale Weathers. "I think that's what made it such a success." The timing was right, too. "There just hadn't been any good scary movies in a long time until these came along," says Campbell.

Still, the original Scream wasn't an instant hit. Released via Miramax's Dimension Films division, it earned just $6.3 million its opening weekend. But word-of-mouth power kept it rolling: It pulled in $9 million on week 2 and was topping $10 million by week 3. "Normally it's four weekends and you're gone," Weinstein says. "But this one stuck around for 26 weeks in wide release. It was almost frightening."

Which, of course, was Craven's intention. "We went off to Christmas vacation last year thinking Beavis and Butt-head had kicked our butts," the director says. "We come back and Scream is all people are talking about."

Perhaps the scariest thing of all about the original movie was that Williamson, 32, wrote the script in three days. He locked himself in a Palm Springs hotel room and hammered out a story he'd been thinking about for a while.

"I got the idea two and a half years ago from watching a Barbara Walters special on the Gainesville murders," he says. "I was broke, house-sitting for a friend to pay him back for money he'd lent me for groceries, and I was scaring the hell out of myself. I thought I heard a noise. I walked the house with a butcher knife and a phone and called a friend while I searched the place. We got into this huge discussion, testing each other on horror movies. And that's how Scream was born."


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