Back and still screaming in 'Scream 4'

The self-reflexive horror-comedy "Scream" premiered in 1996, the same year Garry Shandling hosted a show about a show, "The Larry Sanders Show," and David Foster Wallace published "Infinite Jest," a novel with its own footnotes. Meta was hip, and "Scream," about a series of murders that cheekily followed the rules of the horror genre, helped put the prefix in the popular lexicon.

"Scream" became what it must: a franchise about a horror franchise (the fictional "Stab") that petered out when creator-screenwriter Kevin Williamson departed from 2000's "Scream 3." Williamson has re-teamed with director Wes Craven for "Scream 4" after an 11-year hiatus, which presents a challenge. Now, nearly everything has acquired an additional layer of context, from reality television to social networking to the concept of fame (see: Lady Gaga's career). It's no surprise that in "Scream 4" the characters use words like app, text and, of course, meta.

Some things haven't changed: The killer still wears a Ghostface mask, and the main actors comfortably reinhabit their old roles. Neve Campbell is the beleaguered Sidney Prescott, who has written a memoir of survival; Courteney Cox plays the still-intrepid journalist Gale Weathers; David Arquette, as an amiable small-town sheriff, is again the film's secret heart. Among the very fine and mostly short-lived young cast are Emma Roberts as Sidney's estranged cousin, Hayden Panettiere as her frisky friend and Rory Culkin as the genre-savvy film geek.

The film is smart, funny and genuinely scary, even if it can't shatter conventions as the original did. It's impressive enough that "Scream 4" manages to feel relevant in a post-"Scream" world.