Philippe Bosse/Paramount Pictures
Say what you will about Scream, the 2022 reboot of everyone’s favorite 90’s/00’s meta-slasher – he fully understood the pop culture osphere he came into and commented on, i.e. the era of endless nostalgic retreads and ” reques”. ” That original cycle was about making horror films that bet on how much we, the viewers, knew about the rules of classic horror films; Any attempt to pump fresh blood into the intellectual property inherently had to enter a whole different world in terms of shared cinematic universes, film Twitter discourse, Easter eggs, etc. The skulls of teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake proved even more loyal to the brand than we would have thought. This was, after all, a franchise well ahead of toxic fandom.
And yet… as anyone familiar with multi-movie series will tell you, even after tweaking genre tropes and making fresh starts from old endings, the most accomplished IP rescuers still risk exhausting their reception. Scream VI – oh so we’re rocking Roman numerals now, aren’t we? – builds on the goodwill of last year’s reset. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are back; ditto screenwriters Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt. Melissa Barrera reprises the ‘last girl’ role as Sam Carpenter, and the now celebrity Jenna Ortega returns as her equally traumatized sister, Tara. Familiar new faces, in the form of Mason Gooding and the invaluable Jasmine Savoy Brown as Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin, creep in alongside older faces – Courtney Cox’s Gayle Weathers, of course, but also Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby Reed (!) from Scream 4 – and ghost faces .
Instead of Woodsboro, California, the Carpenters & Co. are now in New York City, where Tara goes to Blackmore University and apparently specializes in numbing her mental pain. As for Sam, she’s the target of online conspiracy theories that assume she orchestrated all of these murders and lives up to her Loomis parentage. (Her father was Billy Loomis, aka the guy who committed all those murders that inspired the Stab movies in the ’90s.) But the fact that she moved to the East Coast along with the Meeks-Martin siblings are, it doesn’t prevent a series of murders from happening in their vicinity. And guess what kind of mask the killer or maybe killers are wearing? Sixth verse, same as the first.
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You don’t have to be a die-hard fan to catch a cold when — during a fake prologue featuring a film studies professor, a blind date, and what unexpectedly turns out to be a triple homicide — Roger L. Jackson’s voice coos first the eternal Question: “What’s your favorite scary movie?” over someone’s phone. This sinister baritone is firmly entrenched in the Horror Sonics Hall of Fame, right next to Friday the 13th’s tch-tch-tch-haw-haw-haw, Godzilla’s roar and every John Carpenter score of all time. But you might have to be a true scream-Stan to enjoy the constant internal callbacks the film keeps throwing at you, whether on behalf of gossip reactions from hardcore fans or affectionately for the fact that the series now is old enough to warrant his own profound inside jokes. And there’s a legitimate concern that the characters’ ribs might be so sore from endlessly poking each other that they don’t feel a Ghostface-wielding serrated blade being shoved into them. (Spoilers: don’t worry, some do.)
It is exactly the same equilibrium that Bettinelli-Olpin, Gillett et al. with Scream ’22, except they’ve already played their cards in terms of what they’re going for besides old-fashioned jump scares. Jasmine Savoy Brown’s speech about getting caught up in a rerun was an exhibition that doubled as an eloquent state-of-the-genre film nation, or maybe vice versa. This time, as the bodies begin to pile up and the breadcrumb trail traces back to every past Scream entry, she comes up with a new thesis: They’re now involved in a franchise. That means everyone is a suspect, everyone is expendable now no matter how popular you are, and it’s less about the names above the title and more about the title. Forget just looking for cheap nostalgia bait – this post-brand resurrection chapter aims to stab square in the face of the whole concept of endless horror movie franchising and cheap fan milking.
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Ghostface, your favorite franchise psycho killer, in Scream VI. Philip Bosse
It sounds like a level up in terms of goals, right? Except for the film saying nothing new about it, and given that it’s been a little over a year since Scream expertly skewered the Mary Sue Nation, the overly protective fandom hives, and the corporate exploitation of easily recognizable scary-movie canon fodder , this tongue-in-cheek thesis is less of a deathblow and more of déjà vu. All that’s left are what-can-we-do-in-New-York set pieces (there’s a good cat-and-mouse sequence between Ghostface and the Carpenters in a bodega, and an even better stalking scene in a crowded subway) and which reveals what credulity is strained even for a scream film. Which definitely says something.
At some point, the superstar of tabloid journalist Cox discovers a hidden warehouse in which the killer or killers have built a kind of shrine of the Stab series. There’s the knife that almost gutted Panettiere’s fan favorite – who’s now an FBI agent! You go Kirby! – and there are sketches of original recipe Scream victims, and over there are boxes with all the old Ghostface masks and cloaks. All of these artifacts turn the place into a cross between a museum and a murder headquarters, and without giving too much away, this is a key location in terms of the film’s climax. But it’s also a neat little analogy for Scream VI itself. This sequel-to-the-requel has all the trappings of the series you know and love, has it all arranged for us to admire and don’t know what you supposed to do with it other than put it under glass or strike a few poses with well-worn props. For some people, that plus a few jump scares is enough. But the sixth time isn’t the appeal here. And it’s certainly a lot, a lot less fun and clever than it thinks it is.