Written by William Brooks
Ghostface arrives in The Big Apple, but Scream VI is rotten to the core.
Image via IMDb
If you refer back to my now world-famous review of the previous instalment, you’ll know that I regard the Scream series with about as much warmth as I would afford a wasp colony taking refuge in my snack cupboard. Nevertheless, Scream V (2022) sold like copies of an unreleased Harry Potter book set during Hermione’s bicurious phase, and so horror’s most insufferable franchise is back once again to have its udders milked until they resemble little black stalactites.
Picking up one year after the latest batch of Woodsboro killings, survivors Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), and Chad (Mason Gooding) — the self-proclaimed “core four” — have all moved to New York City together. Ostensibly, Sam is supposed to be our main character, but while the others all attend College and make plans for the future, she lives an absurdly bereft life that was apparently of zero interest to screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. She has no friends, no job, no hobbies, no personality and absolutely no motivation beyond protecting her sister from prospective copycat killers and chatting with her ghost dad, Billy (Skeet Ulrich, whose unaltered 50-year-old face means that people in hell age in real time, apparently). It’s almost a mercy for her when Ghostface 6.0 does eventually show up so she actually has a reason to exist again.
Meanwhile, Kirby Reed (Hayden Panetierre) returns, now an FBI agent, and of course Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) needs a payday, too. Only Sidney Prescott is absent, presumably because Neve Campbell couldn’t get her shift at Costco covered. Regardless, the legacy cast are utterly perfunctory here, especially since they have literally no involvement in the new mystery — a mystery that’s easily solved by anyone paying attention in the first 15 minutes, by the way. They seem to only be here in order to prompt Mindy to embark the traditional Scream embarrassing movie geek diatribe, this time centred on the vulnerability of “legacy” characters. Why do these movies always insist on having all their characters talk about movies with the insipid forced quasi-satire of the average snarky Letterboxd user? Please shut up and fuck off, ideally both, in either order.
This time however things really are pitifully tired, offering not a single novel or surprising moment beyond the opening five minutes. Instead, Scream VI dives deeper into boring self-mythologising, ludicrous soap opera procedural plotting, and a fully irritating continued insistence that this has anything to do with the horror genre or meta text, and all of it is served up by characters nobody could possibly care about. The lack of passion and conviction shines through the thin veneer of homage, and given the laziness of the parody and/or critique, it’s actually a blessing that any discussion of actual horror cliché is limited to a handful of scenes. Because that’s what the genre is in relation to Scream now: mere window-dressing atop yet another rehash of the exact same toxic fandom and stagnant IP discourse dredged up from the last film, which might be things that matter to the bores over at r/movies, but the foundations of a frightening horror film they are not.
The only USP left is NYC, and even that isn’t utilised properly. At least when Jason took Manhattan in his eighth outing, Friday fans were treated to a genuine twist on the rural franchise’s formula. Granted, it was executed ludicrously and made for utterly baffling viewing, but there was the occasional moment of on-location filmography and a heaping dosage of iconography to provide some measure of aesthetic pleasure, as well as the simple joy of watching Mr. Voorhees uppercut a boxer’s head clean off his shoulders and into a dumpster. The film was truly a go-big or go-home moment, which made it hard not to respect the ambition while laughing at the result.
Scream VI can’t really compare to that. Sure, there’s a clever series of murders which take place across two adjacent apartment buildings and uses the spatial geography of cramped New York housing brilliantly. And an extended, suspenseful scene on the subway is utterly gripping during the film’s third act. But the reason why few of the environments feel like New York is because, like Jason Takes Manhattan, pretty much all of it was filmed in Montreal, and directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are to visual storytelling what Salt N’ Shake are to the world of crisps: bland, unstylish, and totally lacking in imagination.
There’s a certain amount of shamelessness inherent to the modern-day iteration of the Scream franchise — having lost the one person who gave it any sort of soul or perspective, it continues to sleepwalk towards creative oblivion, guided only by the indelible appetites of studio higher-ups seeking a repeat of the unexpected windfall of yesteryear. It seems to me that Craven’s status within the horror world held two benefits that Radio Silence — newbie filmmakers with only one good-ish feature under their belt — just don’t have. He had the power to make fun of a genre whose modern inception he’d established and also the goodwill for folks in the industry to know that he wasn’t after them unless they sat in, say, the producer’s chair. But nowadays, no single personality or trend in the horror scene is large enough for someone to take jabs at and feel justified in doing so, less they risk alienation in the ever-inflammatory court of public opinion. Hence, the Scream bubble formed and sealed so that nothing potentially dangerous to the bottom line could encroach on its parameters. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the only thing left for Scream to parody is Scream films themselves.