Scream 6 (2023 | USA | 123 minutes | Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett )
The original 1996 meta-horror classic Scream earned its genre Game Changer status honestly. If the alchemy of self-awareness, satire, and well-defined characterization established in Kevin Williamson’s script wasn’t entirely unprecedented, the spot-on execution felt revelatory. And horror auteur Wes Craven engineered things with the sure hand of a master, tapping into his brilliance as a generator of suspense as well as his dark wit.
The first movie’s rampant success, financially and critically, gave birth to a franchise. Over the course of the first three sequels, Craven and Williamson didn’t just popularize meta-satire in horror. They crafted a fascinating inverse of the slasher movie sub-genre. A gallery of well-drawn recurring characters took center stage from Scream to Scream, while the secret identity of the iconic Ghostface shifted with each successive movie. They also gave one of horror’s most misogynist subgenres a feminist kick in the pants that, in its own pulpy way, provided (and continues to provide) some pointed commentary on toxic masculinity.
Scream I through IV proved so successful over the decades that not even the passing of principal franchise architect Craven in 2015 could kill Ghostface. After multiple false starts and dead ends, the franchise resurfaced last year with the fifth Scream movie (aka just plain Scream, as befits the back-to-basics approach of any proper reboot). Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (a duo also known by the nom de film of Radio Silence) helmed this requel, with Williamson returning to co-write the script with James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.
Scream 2022 marked a solid if not spectacular return to the fictional Scream epicenter of Woodsboro, CA. It served up another engaging young ensemble augmented by several returning legacy characters, and Radio Silence most certainly established their suspense-maker street creds. But it felt a lot like an echo of Scream IV, sharing that movie’s sometimes ham-fisted critiques of internet culture and toxic modern fandom. It also leaned a bit too heavily into gravitas-laden seriousness, largely forsaking the lightness of touch and wit that peppered the first four Screams.
This admittedly long-winded introduction/primer now places us squarely in the here and now.
One year after Scream the requel, the same creative writer/director team returns with Scream VI. And the usual pitfalls of a continuing franchise—keeping things fresh while still giving the Fear Faithful enough of what worked so well in the past—cast a long shadow over this chapter of the franchise.
Happily (and long story short), Scream VI delivers and then some. The satiric snap of the first movie returns with a vengeance, the franchise’s new ensemble clicks in a major way, and Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett deliver the requisite slash, spurt, and suspense with stunning assurance.
Scream 6 joins the previous sequel’s surviving Core Four—conflicted final girl Sam (Melissa Barrera), her rebellious kid sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), hardcore horror geek Mindy (Jasmin Savoy-Brown), and Mindy’s stalwart twin brother Chad (Mason Gooding)—to New York as they navigate the usual pitfalls of college and life in a big city. But a knockout of a cold-ish open makes it clear that yet another iteration of Ghostface has followed them. The laundry list of Requel Rules and Tropes (amusingly laid out by Mindy in one funny monologue) are checked off. And the body count once more escalates.
More than any slasher movie franchise, the Scream movies thrive as much on classic whodunnit-style twists and surprises as they do on visceral slasher thrills, which makes a spoiler-free summary of this sixth Scream entry mandatory (if challenging as hell). Suffice it to say reporter/legacy character Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), returns, smelling yet another blood-soaked scoop. At least one perceived casualty of Scream 2022 resurfaces in unexpected fashion. And a sizable serving of new characters emerge as victims/suspects.
The sometimes grave earnestness of last year’s Scream recedes here, and it’s a welcome return to the gleeful rollercoaster exuberance that put the franchise on the map in the first place. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett still deliver the scares in spades, but the pitch here hits near operatic levels (one of the franchise’s most reliable linchpins, the batshit-nutty denouement, gets delivered with full-throttle gusto). One of the most formidable (and oft-unacknowledged) influences on the franchise, the Italian Giallo thriller, predates the Scream franchise’s penchant for the splashily absurd and gets explicitly name checked here (for a quick Cliffs Notes summary of the Giallo, get thee to our SunBreak roundtable for another Giallo-inspired modern horror gem, Knife + Heart).
Credit the script, and most especially the cast, for grounding things just enough to lend some real emotional stakes to the mayhem. Fans may (justifiably) mourn the absence of Neve Campbell’s indelible final girl Sidney Prescott, but the current ensemble holds their own. Barrera’s and Ortega’s sisterly dynamic feels well-trod and natural: There’s a core of emotional truth in Sam’s struggle with her own tainted bloodline, and Tara’s need to block out the past and vault into prototypical youthful rebellion. Savoy-Brown’s an acerbic, eminently worthy successor to Jamie Kennedy’s original franchise exposition machine Randy, and Gooding’s genuineness and affability go a long way to making his ostensible jock-archetype character way more affecting and charming than he has any right to be.
Make no mistake, though: Scream 6 is first and foremost a thrill-ride par excellence, and one of the franchise’s most unapologetically fun entries. Somehow Bettinelli-Olpin, Gillett, Williamson, and the rest of the creative team keep things so brisk, the characters so endearing, and the twists and turns so peerlessly executed, you’re bound to forgive the odd detours into implausibility and tropiness (to their credit, everyone here recognizes that those perceived liabilities are often part of the fun). The end result represents a reinvigoration of the franchise, and a return to the alchemy that made the original Scream such a surprising, playful, suspenseful classic. Sometimes, lightning—or more appropriately, a flashing knife blade—really can strike twice.
Scream 6 opens nationwide in theaters today, March 10.