Scream VI

‘Who gives a f*** about the movies?’is the cheeky opening gambit of the traditional Ghostface killa in the latest in the Scream franchise; that’s been a reasonable question of late, but like Creed III, this is a treading water sequel that heads off for fresh pastures due to series mainstay Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) being written out due to inability to agree a financially lucrative contract. Thus, affordable option and legacy character Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox) appears here to tell us that Sidney is hiding out somewhere beyond the scope of Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s film, keeping the powder dry for a potential return while clearing the field for the new generation of young people featured in the fifth Scream story to take centre stage.

So back to a world where most of the characters have names based on the late Hitchcock-era, starting with film professor Laura Crane (Samara Weaving); we’ve moved from the small California town of Woodsbro to Manhattan, where Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and her half-sister Tara (Jenny Ortega) are hoping to put the Billy Loomis killings behind them, but, as is correctly pointed out, ‘It’s a big city, it’s Halloween, and everybody’s wearing masks…’ making it east for whoever is donning the Ghostface mask to hunt them and the remaining survivors down in the usual cathartic display of graphic violence and in-jokes for those who pore over the detail of horror.

‘There are certain rules of the franchise …they only survive by subverting expectations…’ is part of our usual pep talk about the rules that the writers feel they’re playing with, and Scream VI does have some fresh angles to peddle. If Friday the 13^th Part VIII Jason Takes Manhattan didn’t do much with it’s New York City setting, Scream VI doesn’t make the same mistake; it’s a big, glossy, fancy-dan production. The opening scene puts a twist on the iconic Drew Barrymore opener with an inverted ‘tormenting the tormentor’ angle, and it makes sense to shuffle off the oldies and return to a world of frat parties and c**kblocking room-mates. New readers can start here, since we get Coles Notes to Sam’s backstory in a therapy exposition dump early on, but returning audience will find roughly the same mixture of smarty-pants snark and gore as before.

Scream IV’s attempted reboot still stands as the only failure in the franchise to date, but Scream VI doesn’t so much reinvent the narrative as cobble it together for another go round, just like any other sequel. What’s improved here, enough to draw a crowd, is enhanced action (an early fight in a bodega is impressively physical) while cine-literate; one character is dismissed with the line ‘obsessed with Argento’ without much more needing to be said. You could make a Scream film every year and catch a new generation of teenagers keen to test themselves on the sharp edges; it’s a rite of passage for American youth, and the rest of us by proxy, and Scream VI’s commercially-forced recalculations are just enough to make another go-round palatable for passing rubberneckers.