“New decade.  New rules.”  This tagline for “Scream 4,” the fourth in a series of movies each of which is entitled “Scream,” is profoundly inaccurate, and I think the movie’s director, Wes Craven, and writer, Kevin Williamson, would be the first to say so. I hope so, at least, for the cyclical rituals of the “Scream” films that preclude the possibility of real game-changing are also, for better or for worse, what hold these films together.  The “Scream” movies aren’t just trying to be both comedy and horror at the same time, they’re trying to be both avant-garde and comfort food at the same time. Each film follows a formula while playfully reminding you that they are following a formula, which self-consciously creates its own formulaic patterns. This pattern parodies slasher-movie sequels that run their killers through set after set of bland victims, but it also satisfies the logic of these movies’ rather rigorously coherent story-world, where the fourth wall is pointed at and bumped against but always carefully kept in place. “Scream 4,” as you might guess, is nothing special or ambitious, but it runs through the formula slickly and cleverly enough, with some really ghoulish moments amid the silliness.

There is certainly nothing here as powerfully disturbing as the opening of “Scream 2,” where the crowd at the premiere of “Stab,” a movie-within-the-movie based on the events of the first “Scream,” is cheering on the bloodshed and occasional skin-showing onscreen, many of them wearing the iconic ghost-face costume, while a real killer, dressed the same way, murders two people in the theater. The scene feels like genuinely outraged, accusatory satire; a crowd of people enjoying simulated bloodshed are confronted with the reality of what they’re cheering—and we are there, uncomfortably, for the purpose of enjoying the whole thing. This last fact is what makes the satire especially interesting, but it puts the movie in a tough spot. These movies are, after all, horror movies; to condemn the audience for relishing onscreen violence with any consistency would be obvious hypocrisy. After this opening, the movie launches into the usual plot, with sadistic killings and red herrings galore, and manages to completely forget about that queasy opening by the sunny closing scene, where one of the survivors happily tells reporters, “It’ll make a hell of a movie!”  “Scream 4” echoes that opening scene during a “Stab-a-thon” party where teenagers cheer on the series of “Stab” movies that have followed in the wake of the previous three movies’ murders, with another real-life attack coinciding with killing onscreen, but this comes amid a pile-on of sarcastic “look how meta this is” jokes, which begin with a hilarious opening parody of the previous movies’ openings.

The movie can get bogged down in this meta-fixation at times. There’s a scene in “Scream 3” where the killer faxes pages of a “script” of horrible things that are about to happen to some people trapped in a house; here, a big deal is made of webcams, and it is suggested that the killer may be actually “making the movie” by filming the real deaths.  This could be creepy or trenchant; here, it’s just a jaded and obligatory one-upping device. As satire, the movie’s hands are tied, and our familiarity with the formula blunts any element of surprise. The killer’s identity is, as usual, concealed by a multiplicity of red herrings and revealed in a scene with a grandstanding monologue about his/her motives, both of which get a little tiresome. Still, the final scenes are a pretty sweet payoff, and they give these movies’ fundamental, sour cynicism a chance to go really grotesque. The opening scene of “Scream 2” stands out for its searing sadness and moral horror, but the grisly glee of the final moments here is more honest.