Scream VI

“How are you still alive?” someone says, near the end of Scream VI, to someone who certainly seemed to be Ghostface fodder. The question would almost be funny, if it weren’t so frustrating, because we’re not sure why anyone in the movie is still alive, nor why some others are dead. One person takes a deep slash to the arm and is seen, not much later, using the arm as though it were untouched. Sometimes these discrepancies between those who should be dead but somehow aren’t, and those who suffer similar or even lesser damage but expire anyway, are due to changes made during editing, preview screenings, or even filming; sometimes, though, it’s just lazy screenwriting, and that explanation fits Scream VI best.

“Fuck this franchise,” someone else says — yes, these movies are as meta as ever — and that quote shows more relevance with each new sequel. The Scream franchise is three years shy of its 30th anniversary at this point, but that’s to be expected in the horror genre; hell, Halloween was 40 years old the last time it got rebooted. But the particular whodunit emphasis of this series means that each new entry has to up the ante and devise ever more convoluted motives for the killer(s), and by now the reveals have become rote, boring. Well, we know the killer can’t be Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the sole hangover from the 1996 original film. Nor, probably, is it the sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), especially since Ortega has a Wednesday fanbase now, and Paramount isn’t going to lose any factor they have left to put butts in seats.

Other than that, the masked Ghostface could be anyone, taunting our protagonists over the phone in that same insinuating growl through a voice modulator (though actually voiced, since day one in this series, by Roger L. Jackson). And when I say anyone, I generally mean anyone new to the series. That narrows it down nicely. The movie also brings back Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), Ghostface survivor turned driven FBI agent. Why? To jazz the longtime fans, which now means those who were around in 2011 to see Kirby’s last Scream appearance. The one thing I freely enjoyed here is Gale Weathers’ baffled reaction to Kirby, whom she remembers as the high-school kid she was in 2011, being in the FBI now: “You’re, like, a zygote.” I get it, Gale. 2011 was five minutes ago for us Gen-Xers but 12 long years ago for the young’uns. 

Is the merciless passage of time the only thing the Scream films have to scare us with now? Certainly the murder scenes are no more interesting or impactful. It’s just stab, stab, stab, though the killer does grab a shotgun at one point; hey, it’s New York City. Horror films of late have benefited from the MPAA’s lax attitude towards gory violence, probably at least since The Passion of the Christ and surely since 2008’s Rambo. What once would have obliged a slasher flick to go out unrated, or with a self-applied X, or later with an NC-17, now coasts by with an R rating. So in Scream VI, people take a few more knife thrusts than you expect, or we’ll glimpse a bit of intestines peeking out. It was said after Columbine that movie violence would get more restricted as a result (indeed, Scream 3 in 2000 was a casualty of that), but these days Americans don’t care if kids are shot in school, so the movies are back to being bloodthirsty.

Anyway, the older sister Sam is the daughter of OG killer Billy Loomis (a de-aged Skeet Ulrich keeps turning up in Sam’s hallucinations), but at this point it’s clear she’s not going to take after him. The series, under the tutelage of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has decided to be about putting the past behind us and embracing the future, which is very noble and “live, laugh, love” and all that, but looks awkward draped over what started, in Wes Craven’s and Kevin Williamson’s able hands, as a gory, nasty thriller. Well, the nastiness is gone and the gore feels thin and inconsequential. In the first two Scream movies, the self-referencing felt sharp and added to the fright and the fun. Now it just feels tossed in there because it’s a Scream film. Like the directors’ previous Scream film last year, it doesn’t sting us or stay with us. It’s just pausing on its way to becoming content on Paramount+, where it will submerse into the back catalog and seldom be heard from again. 

Explore posts in the same categories: horror, sequel