There’s a certain amount of shamelessness inherent to the modern-day iteration of the Scream franchise — having lost the person who gave it any sort of soul or perspective, it continues to lug along toward oblivion, egged on by the dreams of suits stunned by its returns last January. Scream V served as an announcement that it wasn’t your daddy’s Scream (and if you think hard about it, a person born on the day Wes Craven’s original dropped would now be nearing their 30s), what with its obnoxious near-constant references to the modern horror landscape that, ultimately, were just window-dressing atop a rehash of the whole Last Jedi discourse and its application of the same blueprint that all legacyquels are drawn from. Killing off the fan-favorite old cast member, establishing a bloodright justification for your new leads, and rehashing the same old plot points with just enough of a twist to make people assume that they’re watching something that’s a loving tribute rather than a messy derivative.
An unsaid hope behind many legacyquels is that they’ll lead to new and exciting territory for the story at the core of this money-making enterprise. Most of them try and fail to do so, locked up in an eternal battle with their predecessors and the audience, who want the same things but brand new again. Some franchises change tones (Halloween merging Hill/McBride comedy with a Carpenter tribute), others explicitly critique the roots of the franchise (Last Jedi), and others just give the people what they want (Top Gun: Maverick). Scream VI just thinks it needs a change of scenery.
No, we’re not going back to LA, like in Scream III — this time, Ghostface is headed to New York City. Now, before you start thinking that the anonymous slasher just happened to get drafted by the Mets or Yankees or that he’s going to make his off-Broadway debut in a Urinetown revival, he’s up there to continue stalking the foursome left over after the last round of murders because if he didn’t, well, there wouldn’t be much of a movie here, would there? In case you need a refresher, here’s who’s left: There’s Tara (Jenna Ortega), now a college student; Chad (Mason Gooding), jock, his twin Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), a horror geek who is just as annoying as Seth Green was, and Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara’s half-sister. Those other 23 chromosomes came from Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich, whose unaltered appearance as an apparition here means that people in hell age in real time, apparently), and there’s a nasty little conspiracy theory that’s formed online suggesting that the pair of killers that Sam slayed in self-defense were her victims. Anyhow, people around Sam start dying again thanks to our boy Ghostface, and, luckily enough, the sisters happen to live with the daughter of an NYPD detective (Dermot Mulroney). That doesn’t mean much when the killer seems to be around every corner, no matter what you’ve done to be safe. So it’s up to our two remaining characters from the Craven era — Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), intrepid reporter with a heart of gold and a taste for riches, though who knows which one she’ll indulge, and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), now an FBI agent looking to end the Ghostface killings once and for all — to help out and keep the “core four” safe.
What’s both fascinating and disappointing about how this franchise has evolved under the direction of Matt Bettinelli and Tyler Gillet is just how generic it has become. It’s easy to mistake this reductionism as a kind of stability. After all, the structure is there, so that they can go through the motions and reward the right pleasure centers in the horror fan brain, and at least the pair aren’t doing what others might have by turning the series into a Scary Movie riff with brand-name iconography like the National Lampoon intended to do with Jaws 3 (with the awesome title of Jaws 3, People 0). But it’s almost wholly passionless, and given the laziness of the parody and/or critique found in V, it’s almost kind of a blessing that any discussion of horror cliche is limited to a handful of scenes.
But before I dive into why this might be, here is a quick word on that generic atmosphere. A lot of Friday the 13th fans hold Jason Takes Manhattan in a kind of special regard, because it’s by far the most outright ridiculous film in the franchise, and it’s in a neck-and-neck three-way race between Jason Goes to Hell and A New Beginning for the single worst installment in the series. At least Jason Goes to Hell has a rockin’ intro, with the FBI attacking Mr. Voorhees at home, and A New Beginning is a pretty solid entry marred by a dumb twist. Manhattan is baffling from start to finish, which is why it’s so beloved. It’s a genuine twist on the rural franchise’s formula, executed wonderfully ludicrously, that it’s hard for even the most serious-minded Friday nerd to complain about. Everyone knows it’s baffling and goofy, so we find things to appreciate about it. There’s the occasional moment of on-location filmography and a heaping dosage of NYC iconography to provide some measure of aesthetic pleasure, and an ill-considered addition to the franchise’s supernatural mythos on the other. It’s a go-big or go-home moment, and it’s hard not to respect the ambition while laughing at the result.
Scream VI can’t really compare to that. Sure, there’s a scene on the subway — and you can tell Paramount didn’t want to piss off the tourism Industry like they did with Jason Takes Manhattan’s marketing campaign, hence why that‘s the scene highlighted in all the trailers — but few of the environments feel like New York. The mythos is wholly self-contained, once again. Instead of potentially broadening the scope of the franchise through a number of methods (I’m dancing around spoilers here, because I’m embargoed from talking about them), the film finds the easiest ways to ensure that Woodboro’s vendetta-filled culture is capable of crossing state lines. About the only fun the pair have with the format comes in the opening scenes, with the phone call intro being twisted about in fun ways. However, unlike Craven and to the film’s ultimate detriment, the performers there act circles around the rest of the ensemble. There is also a solid joke about kitchen knives, which at least got a genuine laugh out of me. That’s not an excellent batting average, but it’s better than the last one. But even the simple pleasures are just kind of stale, with the kills being dull compared to their competitors (what I wouldn’t give for the Halloween crew to bring their gory nihilism to this), and most of the suspense evaporating into a fine mist when confronted by the fact that the lead characters are cardboard cutouts inserted in lieu of well-rounded writing.
As I wrote last time around, Nü-Scream suffers from a lack of perspective thanks to Craven’s absence, and his master stoke in turning this one-off film into a franchise was by taking the satire straight to Hollywood. The Scream sequels are even more overt media criticism than the first is, and I’d argue that’s why they were able to endure. But one would think that in an era where the genre has never been more popular, if not in receipts, then in esteem, why Radio Silence can’t find a way to satirize their peers. It could be that Craven’s status within the horror world held two benefits that they — newbie filmmakers hustled to the franchise after their debut feature — 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. To put it clearly: they will likely still sit tables away from Ari Aster and the elevated horror ilk at Fangoria’s Chainsaw Awards, but no one personality in the scene is large enough for someone to take jabs at and feel justified in doing so, less they risk alienation. Moreover, they were hired to be brand shepherds, to lead the flock into the 2020s, and, like a teenager handed the keys to the family car, there are expectations as to the condition that it should return in. Hence, the Nü-Scream bubble formed, sealed, and tight so that nothing potentially dangerous to the bottom line could get in.
It’ll take other films — hopefully none within any existing franchise — to puncture it. Until then, we’ll just have to wonder what vacation destination Ghostface will take next. Scream VII: Ghostface Goes Hawaiian, coming 2024.