Ghostface takes Manhattan
Scream VI is the first movie in the 27-year-old Scream franchise that strikes me as being very much "a generic Scream picture", which is already an achievement. Most slasher franchises have felt like "a generic _____ picture" by the time the end credits have started rolling in their first entry. That we have made it a quarter of a century and five sequels for Scream to finally arrive at the point where it simply doesn't seem to have any ideas but rolling through the series formula is honestly impressive, even if I have generally had limited use for any of the films that have preceded this one into the world.
Ironically, the main reason that Scream VI feels so pro forma, I think, is exactly the thing that was most specifically intended to make it feel fresh and new: in this film, the action leaves the fictional Woodsboro, CA setting of Scream, Scream 4, and the other Scream, the Hollywood, CA setting of Scream 3, and the "we're going to call it 'Ohio' but it's obviously California" setting of Scream 2, traveling all the way out to New York, as far from California as you can get without crossing national borders or oceans. The purpose was presumably to anchor the film in a new kind of environment that would fill different and unpredictable, but nothing of the sort has happened; it's just calling attention to how much the plot beats here feel the same that they did back on the West Coast, and how much the new setting is basically just a cheap costume. It certainly doesn't help matters that the New York of Scream VI is so blatantly a movie version of New York: other than B-roll, the film was shot in its entirety in and around Montreal, and it has that unmistakable "nondescript everycity" vibe that happens when Canadian cities pretend to be someplace else. This robs the film of any real sense of tangible place, which is a real disappointment; even the spectacularly awful Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was able to scrape up enough pennies to send a unit to Times Square to get some shots of Kane Hodder in his hockey mask. The only thing that Scream VI actually seems to care about, setting-wise, is that it can have a scene set on a subway car - and it is, to be sure, a pretty good scene.
In fact, there are quite a few good scenes here. Co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett already demonstrated in the 2022 Scream that they had, between them, a pretty terrific sensibility for what the slasher movie is and has been, but also what the slasher movie can be going forward. Scream VI isn't an unequivocal improvement on that movie's staging of slasher setpieces; if nothing else, the new film throttles back on blood effects, both digital and practical. But what it does repeat, to its considerable benefit, was the carefully managed artless brutality of the killings in Scream, the focus on the physicality of slasher movie death in which it ceases to be very "cool" and instead becomes uncomfortable and palpable and unrelenting. Scream VI does itself absolutely no favors in this respect by reach new levels of implausible absurdity in making sure it keeps as many characters alive as possible: there's a particularly rough and terrifying gore effect in which a character is slice from navel to sternum, which promptly becomes trivalised by the fact that this character ends up surviving for just minutes and minutes after this, and in the end that wound isn't even what kills her. On the other hand, the scene in which she does die is a fantastic thriller sequence that tweaks the Scream trope of "everybody else sees the killer and screams at the soon-to-be-victim, who can't do anything about it", involving a ladder across an alleyway and some very canny use of the limited vision enforced by the tiny windows in large apartment buildings.
That kind of scene is easily the best thing about Scream VI: it has some pretty fantastic thriller sequences, not just slasher sequences. This has, throughout, been the secret strength of the Scream pictures, but one that Scream 2022 wasn't leaning into nearly as hard as this. It starts early, too, with an extremely strong opening sequence: a college film professor played by Samara Weaving (of Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillet's Ready or Not) is tricked into a dark alley by one of her students, played by Tony Revolori, and killed. The student is himself killed by whomever is going to be wearing the Ghostface mask this time, for the crime of planning to kill his classmate, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) - "real" Ghostface is hoping to kill Tara him/herself, you see. It's all wonderfully staged, with the slow burn of drawing the teacher out playing on the viewer's knowledge of Scream tropes without actually establishing itself as a horror movie in any way whatsoever; it's suspenseful almost exclusively because we expect it to be suspenseful, playing around with the ongoing central theme of the Scream movies, that they're slasher films about the act of watching slasher films. And then it gets to do this again with Revolori, only in a mirror version, since we know him to be a killer. It's densely plotted and beautifully dark, definitely the best opening sequence in this series since Scream 2 and possibly since all the way back to the iconic opening of the first Scream itself.
So: mostly great suspense setpieces, though sadly the worst one is also the last one; this has a chaotic and weird climax that's trying to cover way too much thematic ground, both opening up and then closing off the possibilities for sequels, and there are simply too many people alive and running about by that point to build up proper momentum. But before that: mostly great setpieces. I think there is nothing else about Scream VI that is mostly great, or even especially good. The script, by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick (who are, like the directors, returning from the last film), isn't the worst one ever written for a Scream movie, not while the chaos of Scream 3 exists, but I think it is very definitely the laziest, using the hook of "these killers are trying to tie together the events of all five previous movies" as a thin excuse to re-run a whole bunch of plot elements in a way that feels less like homage and more like copying somebody else's homework. The series has, for good or bad, never been so formulaic as this, veering from predictable to "surprising" in very predictable ways, both at the large-scale level of how its mystery plays out (it is exactly copying the twist from one of the earlier films and not admitting that it's doing so), but also in the small-scale way of how every single scene does some very straightforward and mechanical "character work" in nudging along an arc that feels like it has already completely expressed itself by the end of the first full scene involving co-protagonists and sisters Tara and Sam (Melissa Barrera). Who, just to quickly recap, are now living in New York to escape the trauma of what happened in the first film, only to find that someone is hellbent on re-traumatising them, by which I mean murdering them. This first movie's plot is repeated in a scene so ungodly artless and plonking that I am 100% confident that the writers meant for it to be funny.
There's really not much here, and what little there is gets crushed to death by the actors, who are uniformly bad; in the entire film, Revolori might be the only person who comes particularly close to giving a performance that I'm fully onboard. This includes a very large number of people who have previously played these exact same characters: Ortega and Barrera, as well as Courtney Cox (making it a perfect six-for-six), Hayden Panettiere (whose character died in Scream 4, and whose survival is explained essentially as "What? I didn't die. What are you talking about?"), CGI de-aged Skeet Ulrich (I had forgotten this from the 2022 film, and still find it to be a sublimely misguided decision), and fellow "new from 2022" performers Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. And then there are some new people, too. Doesn't matter, really, the character relationships are all pretty run of the mill "friends plus roommates plus grief-stricken cop all running back and forth trying to find clues" stuff. And doesn't matter because, without exception, they're all bad: I feel worst saying that about Panettiere, who had retired from acting and had to re-learn the craft on the fly. But by the same token, Panettiere is giving the worst performance in the film, nudging out Barrera. Now, we cannot blame the actors for this alone: they have been provided some remarkably dogshit dialogue to speak, whether in the form of grossly tedious and over-elaborated exposition, or flat, mechanically sarcastic banter. I don't know how any actor would be able to cope with some of the things Ortega and Brown, in particular, are asked to say aloud. That's not even the worst thing the writers have done to Ortega, either: they don't seem to have any idea what Tara's personality is, only that she's a problem for Sam to solve. In a script where every single character has the one "thing" that defines them, Tara seems to mostly just be a collection of sullen attitudes in a vague teenager shape.
The rickety characterisations are an extremely big problem for Scream VI, because other than watching these characters talk, there's really just not much content. Given its ruinous length - 122 minutes, a ludicrous indulgence for a slasher movie - it's strange how little actually happens here; the relatively frequent drip of good setpieces obscures how thin the narrative is, basically consisting of "drag our feet to delay arriving at an abandoned movie theater set, turn around and leave it, and then eventually return". Uniquely among slasher franchises, the Screams have always felt like they had more going on than just "wander from location to location, get found there by the killer, die"; sometimes to their detriment, they're very packed, twisty mysteries. Scream VI is only mysterious in that it's taking a long time for the characters to actually look for clues. The result is a film with a curious relationship to momentum: when the story is actually moving forward, it's going so slowly that it seems to be dead, and only when it stops the story cold to throw a bravura setpiece our way does it actually become exciting and propulsive.
Reviews in this series.
Scream (Craven, 1996)
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)
Scream (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2022)
Scream VI (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Ironically, the main reason that Scream VI feels so pro forma, I think, is exactly the thing that was most specifically intended to make it feel fresh and new: in this film, the action leaves the fictional Woodsboro, CA setting of Scream, Scream 4, and the other Scream, the Hollywood, CA setting of Scream 3, and the "we're going to call it 'Ohio' but it's obviously California" setting of Scream 2, traveling all the way out to New York, as far from California as you can get without crossing national borders or oceans. The purpose was presumably to anchor the film in a new kind of environment that would fill different and unpredictable, but nothing of the sort has happened; it's just calling attention to how much the plot beats here feel the same that they did back on the West Coast, and how much the new setting is basically just a cheap costume. It certainly doesn't help matters that the New York of Scream VI is so blatantly a movie version of New York: other than B-roll, the film was shot in its entirety in and around Montreal, and it has that unmistakable "nondescript everycity" vibe that happens when Canadian cities pretend to be someplace else. This robs the film of any real sense of tangible place, which is a real disappointment; even the spectacularly awful Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was able to scrape up enough pennies to send a unit to Times Square to get some shots of Kane Hodder in his hockey mask. The only thing that Scream VI actually seems to care about, setting-wise, is that it can have a scene set on a subway car - and it is, to be sure, a pretty good scene.
In fact, there are quite a few good scenes here. Co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett already demonstrated in the 2022 Scream that they had, between them, a pretty terrific sensibility for what the slasher movie is and has been, but also what the slasher movie can be going forward. Scream VI isn't an unequivocal improvement on that movie's staging of slasher setpieces; if nothing else, the new film throttles back on blood effects, both digital and practical. But what it does repeat, to its considerable benefit, was the carefully managed artless brutality of the killings in Scream, the focus on the physicality of slasher movie death in which it ceases to be very "cool" and instead becomes uncomfortable and palpable and unrelenting. Scream VI does itself absolutely no favors in this respect by reach new levels of implausible absurdity in making sure it keeps as many characters alive as possible: there's a particularly rough and terrifying gore effect in which a character is slice from navel to sternum, which promptly becomes trivalised by the fact that this character ends up surviving for just minutes and minutes after this, and in the end that wound isn't even what kills her. On the other hand, the scene in which she does die is a fantastic thriller sequence that tweaks the Scream trope of "everybody else sees the killer and screams at the soon-to-be-victim, who can't do anything about it", involving a ladder across an alleyway and some very canny use of the limited vision enforced by the tiny windows in large apartment buildings.
That kind of scene is easily the best thing about Scream VI: it has some pretty fantastic thriller sequences, not just slasher sequences. This has, throughout, been the secret strength of the Scream pictures, but one that Scream 2022 wasn't leaning into nearly as hard as this. It starts early, too, with an extremely strong opening sequence: a college film professor played by Samara Weaving (of Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillet's Ready or Not) is tricked into a dark alley by one of her students, played by Tony Revolori, and killed. The student is himself killed by whomever is going to be wearing the Ghostface mask this time, for the crime of planning to kill his classmate, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) - "real" Ghostface is hoping to kill Tara him/herself, you see. It's all wonderfully staged, with the slow burn of drawing the teacher out playing on the viewer's knowledge of Scream tropes without actually establishing itself as a horror movie in any way whatsoever; it's suspenseful almost exclusively because we expect it to be suspenseful, playing around with the ongoing central theme of the Scream movies, that they're slasher films about the act of watching slasher films. And then it gets to do this again with Revolori, only in a mirror version, since we know him to be a killer. It's densely plotted and beautifully dark, definitely the best opening sequence in this series since Scream 2 and possibly since all the way back to the iconic opening of the first Scream itself.
So: mostly great suspense setpieces, though sadly the worst one is also the last one; this has a chaotic and weird climax that's trying to cover way too much thematic ground, both opening up and then closing off the possibilities for sequels, and there are simply too many people alive and running about by that point to build up proper momentum. But before that: mostly great setpieces. I think there is nothing else about Scream VI that is mostly great, or even especially good. The script, by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick (who are, like the directors, returning from the last film), isn't the worst one ever written for a Scream movie, not while the chaos of Scream 3 exists, but I think it is very definitely the laziest, using the hook of "these killers are trying to tie together the events of all five previous movies" as a thin excuse to re-run a whole bunch of plot elements in a way that feels less like homage and more like copying somebody else's homework. The series has, for good or bad, never been so formulaic as this, veering from predictable to "surprising" in very predictable ways, both at the large-scale level of how its mystery plays out (it is exactly copying the twist from one of the earlier films and not admitting that it's doing so), but also in the small-scale way of how every single scene does some very straightforward and mechanical "character work" in nudging along an arc that feels like it has already completely expressed itself by the end of the first full scene involving co-protagonists and sisters Tara and Sam (Melissa Barrera). Who, just to quickly recap, are now living in New York to escape the trauma of what happened in the first film, only to find that someone is hellbent on re-traumatising them, by which I mean murdering them. This first movie's plot is repeated in a scene so ungodly artless and plonking that I am 100% confident that the writers meant for it to be funny.
There's really not much here, and what little there is gets crushed to death by the actors, who are uniformly bad; in the entire film, Revolori might be the only person who comes particularly close to giving a performance that I'm fully onboard. This includes a very large number of people who have previously played these exact same characters: Ortega and Barrera, as well as Courtney Cox (making it a perfect six-for-six), Hayden Panettiere (whose character died in Scream 4, and whose survival is explained essentially as "What? I didn't die. What are you talking about?"), CGI de-aged Skeet Ulrich (I had forgotten this from the 2022 film, and still find it to be a sublimely misguided decision), and fellow "new from 2022" performers Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. And then there are some new people, too. Doesn't matter, really, the character relationships are all pretty run of the mill "friends plus roommates plus grief-stricken cop all running back and forth trying to find clues" stuff. And doesn't matter because, without exception, they're all bad: I feel worst saying that about Panettiere, who had retired from acting and had to re-learn the craft on the fly. But by the same token, Panettiere is giving the worst performance in the film, nudging out Barrera. Now, we cannot blame the actors for this alone: they have been provided some remarkably dogshit dialogue to speak, whether in the form of grossly tedious and over-elaborated exposition, or flat, mechanically sarcastic banter. I don't know how any actor would be able to cope with some of the things Ortega and Brown, in particular, are asked to say aloud. That's not even the worst thing the writers have done to Ortega, either: they don't seem to have any idea what Tara's personality is, only that she's a problem for Sam to solve. In a script where every single character has the one "thing" that defines them, Tara seems to mostly just be a collection of sullen attitudes in a vague teenager shape.
The rickety characterisations are an extremely big problem for Scream VI, because other than watching these characters talk, there's really just not much content. Given its ruinous length - 122 minutes, a ludicrous indulgence for a slasher movie - it's strange how little actually happens here; the relatively frequent drip of good setpieces obscures how thin the narrative is, basically consisting of "drag our feet to delay arriving at an abandoned movie theater set, turn around and leave it, and then eventually return". Uniquely among slasher franchises, the Screams have always felt like they had more going on than just "wander from location to location, get found there by the killer, die"; sometimes to their detriment, they're very packed, twisty mysteries. Scream VI is only mysterious in that it's taking a long time for the characters to actually look for clues. The result is a film with a curious relationship to momentum: when the story is actually moving forward, it's going so slowly that it seems to be dead, and only when it stops the story cold to throw a bravura setpiece our way does it actually become exciting and propulsive.
Reviews in this series.
Scream (Craven, 1996)
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)
Scream (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2022)
Scream VI (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: horror, mysteries, needless sequels, slashers, violence and gore
