When it arrived in theaters at Christmas of 1996, the original Scream may have looked like just another gory horror film but it also proved to have a genuinely inspired idea behind it—it was a slasher film featuring characters who had themselves seen Halloween, Friday the 13th and their various sequels and ripoffs, were intimately familiar with the rules and tropes of the subgenre and attempted to use that knowledge in order to stay alive once the bloodshed began in earnest. Granted, it wasn’t the first film to attempt such an approach—Fred Walton’s April Fool’s Day did a pretty good job of it (and pissed off a lot of fans back in 1986 who went into it expecting the usual gorefest) and there was an amusing low-budget item called There’s Nothing Out There (1990) that is worth tracking down—but thanks to the genuinely witty and clever screenplay by Kevin Williamson, the smart and efficient direction from genre vet Wes Craven and the presence of a game and likable cast led by the plucky and resourceful Neve Campbell, it pulled off the considerable trick of working as both a knowing and often inspired satire of the slasher genre and as a genuinely suspenseful and gripping horror film that was deemed an instant classic from both the hardcore buffs and viewers who may not have even been born when Psycho II came out learned the hard way that just because a famous person has their name above the title and appears on the poster, it does not necessarily mean that they will make it beyond the first scene.
Of course, if Scream wanted to truly present a truly radical subversion of horror film expectations, it would have just ended with that first film and not go down the sequel route of so many of its predecessors. However, it made so much money that follow-ups were inevitable, each of which would also blend together scares with knowing meta-commentary on the genre as a whole—Scream 2 (1997) took on unnecessary sequels, Scream 3 (2000) went after equally unnecessary threequels and Scream 4 (2011) commented on the ultra-violent torture porn sub-genre that had replaced meta-horror in the years since the previous installment came out. None of these films came close to matching the original in terms of wit, innovation or thrills—Scream 2 was perfectly fine, Scream 3 was pretty forgettable and Scream 4 was kind of bad (despite a nifty opening segment)—but in the capable hands of Craven and with the always-engaging Campbell at the forefront (though even she began to seem a bit bored as they went on), they were at least competently made and even contained a genuine jolt or two every so often.
With Craven’s passing in 2015 and Williamson’s apparent estrangement from the series following reported clashes with real-life boogeymen Harvey and Bob Weinstein during the production of Scream 4, it probably would have been a wise move to simply let the franchise come to its long-overdue end while it still had a certain amount of cachet to its name. However, one of the few things even more ruthless and terrifying than Ghostface is a studio hell-bent on maximizing the IP value of its core assets and so, after a decade of big-screen dormancy (there was a TV spinoff that ran for a couple of years in the interim), Scream arrived in 2022 under the direction of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo collectively known as Radio Silence who made a splash a couple of years earlier with the reasonably entertaining horror-comedy Ready or Not, and with the presence of saga survivors Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette to pass the torch on to a new generation of potential victims.
Despite the appearances of the veterans and the fun presence of future star Jenna Ortega as one of the leads, it proved to be the worst of the lot. This was an overly contrived and deeply idiotic rehash in which the old characters proved to be largely superfluous, the new characters were instantly forgettable, the attempts to connect them to the earlier films were dubious at best—the characters all had some relation to characters from previous installments with central character Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) being haunted by memories of her real father, OG co-killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich)—the meta-commentary (this time focused on the rules of sequel/reboot hybrids, dubbed requels here) felt especially forced and the denouement was complete horseshit—the killer(s) were easy enough to figure out but their motivation was so idiotic that you almost wanted to hurl things at the screen out of sheer annoyance.
Nevertheless, despite being as unique as its title, the film made a lot of money and so, a little over a year later and with Ortega now one of the hottest new stars around, Scream VI has arrived and the good news is that it is better than its deeply dire predecessor. The bad news is that it isn’t that much better as all the things that didn’t work the last time around—generally uninteresting characters, the increasingly tedious self-awareness conceit, the lack of anything in the way of actual suspense—are still fumbled here and the new elements added to the pot, such as a shift in locale to New York a la Jason Takes Manhattan (though the film was actually shot entirely in Canada, a la nearly all of Jason Takes Manhattan), an increase in the already high levels of gore and the return of another legacy character, fail to add much of anything in the way of value.
So as not to give away any of the twists in the screenplay conjured up by writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, I will keep my discussion of the plot to an absolute minimum. Suffice it to say, the story picks up several months after the events of Scream as the survivors of the latest Woodsboro Massacre—Sam (Barrera), half-sister Tara (Ortega) and the Meeks-Martin twins, motormouth movie geek Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and hunky Chad (Mason Gooding)—have gotten out of town and relocated to New York, with the latter three going to study at the NYU-ish Blackmore College and Sam around to be wildly overprotective of Tara while wrestling with her own demons regarding both her parentage and the anguish sparked by an Internet rumor suggesting that she was actually responsible for the last wave of killings and framed the ones who actually did it (which actually makes more sense than their incredibly half-assed motivation). Suffice it to say, Ghostface arrives to take a hack out of the Big Apple and the so-called “Core Four”—their name, not mine—find themselves surrounded with a new set of tropes and rules to be keenly aware of (not that it does them much good) and a whole new set of potential suspects/victims.
This time around, that group includes Ethan (Jack Champion), who is Chad’s nerdy virgin roommate, Quinn (Lianna Liberato), who is Sam and Tara’s sexuality vigorous roommate, Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), the cop assigned to the case who also happens to be Quinn’s dad, potential Mindy love interest Anika (Devyn Nekoda), a film studies professor (Samara Weaving) and fellow student Jason (Tony Revolori). Coming back for more is newswoman Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who pissed off Sam and Tara by breaking her promise not to write a book about the last slaughter, and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), who evidently survived the events of Scream 4 and is now an FBI agent with an understandably keen interest in Ghostface killings. That is pretty much all I am going to say, except to note that some of them seem too obviously odd to be believable suspects, others seem too good to be true and not all of them make it to the end credits.
There are, to be sure, a couple of moments where the film comes close to actually working. The opening sequence, for example, is reasonably clever, even if it strains the bonds of plausibility (though not for the first time here). There are two stalking sequences that make effective use of the new locale—one finds Sam and Tara being chased into a bodega by Ghostface, who abandons their knife in order to go after them with the pump-action shotgun that they relieved from the unlucky owner and the other in which the characters find themselves on crowded subway cars filled with people in Halloween costumes, including numerous Ghostface. I also still liked Ortega, who is always fun to watch, even though she doesn’t have a lot to do here that takes advantage of her sparky presence.
Which leaves—well, pretty much everything else. The meta-movie angle by this point has become tedious and the scene in which the “rules” are explained is particularly dreadful here, especially since the rules cited (everything is bigger, all expectations are subverted and the legacy characters, having already passed on the torch, are now eminently expendable) are not exactly borne out by the story. The new generation of characters continue to pale in comparison and interest to those in the original film and as a result, the question of whether they live or die or turn out to be the killer inspires little more than shrugs. For reasons that elude me, instead of dumping one of the previous film’s dopier elements—Sam being haunted by the spirit of her psycho father and the possibility that she might follow in his footsteps—the film leans into it even more without ever actually trying to deal with it. As for the big reveal, while it is not quite as asinine as the last time around, it is still deeply idiotic and wildly implausible even by slasher movie denouement standards—it almost feels as if Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett shot a fake ending in order to throw off Internet spoiler sites and then accidentally included it instead of the actual conclusion.
You will notice that at no point in my description of Scream VI did I make mention of Sidney Prescott, the one-time center of the franchise. As you may recall, just as the film was going into production last year, Campbell, who played the character from the beginning and became an icon of contemporary horror as a result, announced that she would not be returning to the fold because the producers apparently made a financial offer that she found to be insultingly low. This move earned Campbell a lot of respect but obviously put the filmmakers in the bind—even though the focus was now on the newer, younger characters, Campbell’s absence would need to be addressed somehow. Hell,maybe the whole salary dispute would prove to be nothing more than a ruse and she would show up after all, either as victim, killer or erstwhile survivor. I won’t say exactly how the film handles Sidney’s absence except to note that it is both fleeting and wildly unsatisfying, a move that is both a failure as drama and a show of deep disrespect to both the character and the actress who played her for so long and who helped make the franchise what it would become.
Make no mistake, Scream VI is pretty awful but the combination of the popularity of the last film, the ascendancy of Jenna Ortega and a renewed interest in horror films in general pretty much guarantee that it will be another big hit at the box office and continue to inspire follow-ups until they are no longer financially viable. If the franchise as a whole still has a better batting average than most of its horror brethren, that says more about the lasting love and impact of the original film than it does about this dire new iteration. I suppose that there is always the chance that the series might someday right itself and come up with a story as worthy and inspired as the first film—one that actually worked as a straight-up horror thriller while at the same time offering commentary on the genre that is truly funny and inspired. Alas, it seems that it is more likely that the company that continues to make Ghostface masks, despite being linked to multiple mass murders, would finally shut down production on them before that happens.