With one of his horror icons about to be unleashed in rebooted form on an all-too-suspecting audience in the form of Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven is going back to his other well as Scream 4 is set to shoot this Spring.

Craven was recently announced as returning to the franchise, which followed his 1994 take on the horror genre, New Nightmare, and benefited from a great script from Kevin Williamson, who is also returning to write the fourth installment.

Variety are reporting that Dimension Films have given the fourth film (and perhaps the first of a new trilogy?) the go ahead to shoot this Spring with a release date of April 12th, 2011. I was surprised to be reminded that Scream 3 came out in 2000, and the notion of revisiting the character ten years on is a nice one, although ground already trodden in the aforementioned New Nightmares.

That Scream 3 writer (the appropriately named) Ehren Kruger won’t be returning is probably good news, instead he’ll be swinging robot balls about in Transformers 3, and the chance to reunite the creative team and cast of the original films is a tantilising prospect. Just as long as they keep the ideas fresh, and hopefully have more to say than a dull retread of infinitely reflexive genre parody than Scream 3.