A mostly subdued helping of horror

Here's a horror movie with an intriguing pedigree: The Blackcoat's Daughter was directed by Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, an actor who's still most remembered for his indelible performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. In addition, the film's music was written by Elvis Perkins, Osgood's brother and another of Anthony Perkins' children. Pedigree aside, Perkins' film stands as its own helping of quietly engineered horror. Blackcoat's Daughter focuses on two girls (Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton) who remain at their private Catholic school during a break in which the other students have headed home. Shipka's character is the weirder of the two, a girl with a spooky affect and a look of eerie determination. (You may recognize Shipka as the girl who played Don Draper's often sullen daughter on Mad Men.) Boynton's Rose seems more normal, although she's grappling with a difficult issue: She's pregnant. Later, we meed Joan (Emma Roberts), a young woman who escapes from a mental institution and is given a ride by a married couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who are heading toward the school. The movie's brooding score and its somber, snow-covered images leave little doubt that something awful will happen before the film concludes. It takes time for the inevitable violence to arrive, but that's part of what makes the film effective. No sense over-praising Perkins' debut accomplishment, but this small hunk of horror shows more than enough promise to make us look forward to his next outing.

New 'Scream,' same as the old 'Scream'

Wes Craven revisits the Scream franchise, but gives us little to shout about.

Scream 4 offers little that we haven't seen before as it jauntily follows in the self-conscious, bloody footprints of its three predecessors.

Directed by horror maven Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson -- the duo that has overseen all the Scream movies -- this fourth edition builds toward a variety of moments that have been engineered to create whoops and hollers in any crowd that's already primed to have a good time and doesn't care if that good time is not entirely distinguishable from the experiences it associates with the previous films.

Scream 4 loads the screen with characters as it mingles appearances by original cast members (Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette) with new arrivals (Rory Culkin. Emma Roberts and Hayden Panettiere).

This edition finds Sidney returning to Woodsboro to hype Out of the Darkness, a book she's written about how she survived her horrific experiences.

Ghostface, the series' resident killer, also returns, evidently inspired by Sidney's reappearance. Ghostface, of course, slaughters many teens, high-school students being the most expendable ingredient in most horror movies.

As fans of the series know, Ghostface is a phone freak; this being 2011, he uses lots of cell phone minutes. He always tries to call his victims before he strikes, speaking in a gravely menacing voice supplied by Roger Jackson, an actor whose name I mention as a courtesy to those who plan on entering trivia contests over the weekend.

Roberts plays Sidney's cousin, the teen-ager around whom the other kids gather for self-referential dialog, as well as for the typical events that pass for plot in horror movies that do little more than alternate jokes and stabbings.

The finale will score in some quarters, but by then I was pretty sick of the whole thing. Even with a little updating, Scream 4 feels old hat, a helping of horror that too often left me bored and bummed.

And when the script tries to get meaningful – serving up blather about the emptiness of fame and celebrity – my eyes rolled. Even in a small, ironically intended doses, social significance is the last thing I want from a Scream movie.