At what point can we keep calling these Scream movies?
By Scream VI, Sidney Prescott has left us in her rearview mirror. Dewey is gone. We’ve abandoned Woodsboro. The strongest tie to the horror hit that started it all is Ghostface. Yet, they’ve even gone and messed with the mask, giving it the try-hard gritty patina snatched from David Gordon Green’s grubby but underwhelming Halloween resurrection.
Sure, this franchise still features movie nerds eagerly bickering over the finer points of the genre. But having posited a slew of rabid fans as killers in Screams 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, there’s little new terrain to tread. Yet we fans demand it, right? So lip service is paid in a convoluted cold open and the requisite Randy round-up of rules, inherited by his niece, Scream V fan favorite Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown).
But behind the iconic mask and the smug prattle, this franchise has lost its spirit. And what’s left behind are grisly kills without the frenzied fun.
What’s Scream VI about?
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Picking up a year after Scream (2022), this sixth installment finds survivors Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), Mindy (Brown), and Chad (Mason Gooding) — the self-proclaimed “core four” — all in New York City. While the latter three attend college, bouncing from frat parties to bad decisions (going to class is too Scream 2, perhaps), Sam…is also there.
With gritted teeth, she pronounces her determination to protect her little sister from any future slashers. But Sam’s life in NYC is of comically little interest to screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. She goes to therapy, has a sneaky hookup (She-Hulk‘s Josh Segarra), and presumably a job — but no apparent friends or hobbies outside her sister’s social circle… and her menacing ghost dad (Skeet Ulrich).
So, when Ghostface returns to wreak new havoc on the Carpenter sisters, there’s little sense of how their life has been disrupted. Visual storytelling has been forgotten in favor of a grating array of exposition dumps, too often between cops in boring office spaces. But there’s one place where directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett deliver on visuals, and it’s all in the slaughter sequences.
Scream VI is brutal.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
There’s an unrepentant malice in these kill scenes. It’s not enough that there be blood and stabbings in the opening. The body count is higher, and the close-ups of mutilated corpses are ghoulishly unflinching. But little of this is fun. Partially because the bonkers death by garage door is long behind us (RIP, Tatum), but more importantly, because of the expectations demanded of a slasher franchise this long-running. The goal is to shock first and foremost. In that pursuit, the filmmakers lose track of making this thriller stirring.
The big problem is there are too few characters to give a damn about.
Scream VI is stuffed with characters, legacy and new. And all are fair game to be the killer or killed. But so little effort is put into developing them that it’s virtually impossible to feel gutted when they are, well, gutted. The new batch of buddies are so thinly drawn that they’re sufficiently described as roommates and love interests, without much interest besides. This means their deaths feel like little more than a pit stop to the inevitable destination: a showdown between Sam Carpenter and Ghostface 6.0. But as she’s a mere shadow of Sidney Prescott, it’s hard to feel all that invested.
Sam Carpenter is a subpar horror heroine.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Where Sidney began as a familiar slasher archetype — the sweet babysitter who turns resilient, albeit traumatized, Final Girl — Sam stomped into the franchise with a chip on her shoulder and the worst backstory since the rightfully ignored Roman. (Remember Scream 3’s forgotten retcon?)
In her second adventure, Sam remains little more than a superficial Sidney stand-in with a wet stare and long dark hair. But audience allegiance doesn’t transfer, nor does Melissa Barrera’s screen presence compare to Neve Campbell. No matter how tearfully Sam might bellow about fate and family, a dynasty was built on that Sidney’s rage tears.
Between nostalgia and star power, it might have been impossible — or at least ill-advised— to continue the Scream franchise without Campbell. And yet! The directors stumbled into landing Jenna Ortega at the start of her incredible rise in 2022, in which she won increasing acclaim for her roles in Scream V, The Fallout, X, and finally for her riveting starring turn in Wednesday. And yet this sequel continues to treat Tara like a sidekick, when she could be its heart and soul.
Courteney Cox and Hayden Panettiere are welcomed returns to Scream.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
No matter how many dazzling new stars this franchise pitches into its grinder, the return of Gale and the dubious resurrection of Scream 4 standout Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) suggests the filmmakers have no faith that their audience is suitably invested in the new crop of heroes. Perhaps this is why the twins are stranded in schtick: Chad to flexing, and Mindy to spinning fan theories.
The character Scream fans are most bound to at this point is Gale Weathers. Thankfully, the respectable, emotionally mature Gale of Scream 5 is forgotten. Once more, the intrepid and arrogant journalist throws herself into the fray to rile the Final Girls, try to save the day, and maybe get another book deal. Be grateful that her blind ambition has come roaring back, because it’s that attribute that made her a fantastically flawed but ferocious rival to heroes and villains alike. Also returned is Gale’s loud fashion (though sadly not her painfully trendy hair cuts), which welcomes audiences back into the arms of the horror badass, who we love for being exactly the mouthy mess she is.
If only Kirby’s return was given such care. While Panettiere brings a growling gravitas to her hard-nosed survivor, the franchise doesn’t know quite what to do with her now. Will she be the Gale? The Dewey? The Randy? Her story steps her through auditions for each sacred Scream position before seeming to shrug in resignation. We got her back, the movie seems to snark — what more do we expect?
The backdrop of New York City is likewise careless. Perhaps because most of these characters are recent transplants, the geography of the city is irrelevant, and its look as authentic as a Times Square Iron Man. The ways of bodegas and subways are utterly ignored in sequences that go on too long to maintain their suspense. Even New York doesn’t feel like itself, painted cynically as a place where incredible violence can happen without anyone raising an eyebrow. Sure, that’d be scary. But in a world where everyone has a cell phone and security cameras are everywhere — which the film does point out — it is wildly impractical to believe that Ghostface could vanish in the blink of an eye as he might in Woodsboro.
In the end, Wes Craven’s first film feels woefully far away from where Scream VI lands fans. Character has been sacrificed in favor of frenzied pacing, which murders the whodunit fun this franchise has long promised. Crudely constructed, it’s not just that the murder mystery is less than mind-blowing. It’s that the grim spectacle of watching a new crop of teens die has lost its novelty in the face of relentless sequels. The focus has become the gore, and what has died is the heart that makes horror hit you like a knife in the chest.
Scream VI opens March 10 in theaters.
