Scream VI Maintains the Franchise’s Stellar Legacy

There are no bad Scream films.

Okay, Scream 3 isn’t great, but its flaws at least mirror the movies it’s parodying. Retrofitting a deeply contrived “Everything that happened before has all led to this” bumper on the franchise and cramming in an out-of-left-field family subplot for cheap catharsis is pretty on point for a film that calls out third entries Return of the Jedi, The Godfather Part 3, and late horror sequels in general.

Basically, there are no bad Scream films.

Ghostface Killer in Scream VI. Paramount Pictures

Which is pretty unbelievable given that this series is in its fourth decade, only one actor remains from the original cast, its brand of openly self-aware parody spawned some of the worst movies in history, and the slasher franchises it originally parodied faded from the mainstream decades ago. These should be cynical and deeply misguided monuments to greed and a lack of originality in popular filmmaking.

Instead, they’ve become one of my favorite film traditions, these joyful, deeply weird paeans to active film viewing—genre films in particular. I don’t even love Wes Craven’s “straight” slashers like The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which always felt like the shadows of better films by Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter. I loathed Ready or Not, the carnival of droll affectations that served as an audition for directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who took over the Scream series after Craven’s death. Doesn’t matter, apparently. The game of Scream is too good. It brings out the best in everyone who plays it.

What is that game? Well, first you have Ghostface Killer, an iconic mask and cloak that front this series as prominently as Michael Myers for Halloween and Jason for Friday the 13th. A different character populates the costume every film, allowing for the series’ Scooby-esque monster-of-the-week whodunit format. The killers’ motives vary, but their essential goal is always the same: each string of murders is the next entry in a true-life serial killer movie franchise (adapted into the Stab films, Scream‘s franchise-within-a-franchise), and each killer must therefore follow the rules that similar Hollywood films tend to follow.

Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), and Chad (Mason Gooding), the “Core Four.” Paramount Pictures

For instance, the first is just a true horror movie homage, so don’t walk off all by yourself, don’t have sex, and so on. This is followed up with a horror sequel (expect the death of at least one main cast member), a trilogy finale (artificially heightened stakes), a remake (same story as the original but with updated stars and pop music), and a legasequel (or requel, like The Force Awakens and Creed, combining legacy characters with a younger, hotter main cast). Now, with the sixth entry, we have a “requel sequel,” which really just means a franchise—the moment the name of the series becomes more important than any of the characters, rendering everyone disposable.

This is the first Scream film not to feature the series’ Luke Skywalker, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). The primary role is now firmly in the hands of Melissa Barrera‘s Sam and Jenna Ortega‘s Tara, two sisters wrestling with the trauma of their past experiences with Ghostface. That said, nobody is safe, as pointed out by Mindy (Yellowjackets‘ Jasmin Savoy Brown), who has taken over the cinephile sage role from Jamie Kennedy‘s Randy. Mindy has seen a lot of horror movies and can predict with some accuracy what will happen next. According to her, the franchise status means anyone can be killed, even Courteney Cox‘s Gale Weathers, now officially the only actor to appear physically in every entry (Roger Labon Jackson continues to voice Ghostface Killer, as he has since the 1996 original). That’s not the film’s most pressing insight into the franchise-ification of classic properties, but it might be the most noticeable for longtime fans.

You can be cynical if you want. I’m sure they saved some money on Campbell’s paycheck, though I can’t imagine they saved money shooting in New York. But like Mindy says, each entry in a franchise zigs where the previous one zagged. Alien 3 was nihilistic after the benign optimism of Aliens. My favorite detail about Spider-Man: Homecoming was the way Peter Parker kept finding himself in situations where his spider skills were neutralized, like the skyline-free suburbs and the single peak of the Washington Monument. Scream VI jettisons the previous film‘s return to the basics by removing the star and moving the franchise out of Woodsboro, California, for the first time; dropping the self-awareness and playing all the emotions straight; and staging the best horror set pieces in crowded, well-lit areas like a bodega and the New York subway. What it loses in satirical edge it makes up for with some of the best straight-up horror thrills since the Scream 2 (IMO the highlight of the series). These most recent films are great examples of two different but equally thrilling ways to enjoy movies: the first meticulously playing the game, the second leaning its head back and enjoying the ride.

Fair warning—I won’t give away the whole movie below, but if you want to go in spoiler free, you should skip to the last paragraph.

Paramount Pictures

Even the flaws are on point. The big reveal is a bit of a letdown, and the series’ efforts to repeatedly solidify its new cast as some iconic team feel a bit rich considering the millions of dollars are riding on whether the audience buys it. But these are the same problems with Scream 2, the film this new one most closely emulates—not quite so endearing here, but still. Scream stopped trying to one-up its slasher openings with the third installment, but this one really goes for it! If the original Scream laid out a challenge that each subsequent one needed to match, Scream VI rises to parts of that challenge that none of the previous entries even tried. It makes it very easy to forgive a script that plays it safe. I would say it’s my second-least-favorite entry, but it’s closer to my favorite (Scream 2) than my least favorite (Scream 3). Film franchises are not supposed to look this good on their sixth go. I can’t think of a comparable example. I guess we’ll have to wait for Toy Story 6 in 2035.

Probably the worst parts involve old cast members. I guess Gale just is never going to grow or change. Her role in this film is indistinguishable from the last five, with the exception of being blander and far more predictable. Another character is resurrected by plot recon—she didn’t really die in a previous film, she just “died for four minutes” before the movie gods rewarded her for her fan-favorite status. But even here, the movie at least plays with the characters’ predictability. Will there be a Scream film where Gale eventually picks up the knife, or is she content with stabbing people in the back metaphorically?

Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers. Paramount Pictures

The script comes from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, whose careers are even more scattershot than the directors’. Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first, second, and fourth entries, serves as a producer. Alongside Cox and Jackson, his name is one of the only ones that repeats (albeit in various roles) across all six entries. Who knows where the series’ magic truly comes from? At this point, it almost feels like the Ghostface mask itself. The killers vary in every way, but once they don the costume, they become the same inhumanly agile, cruelly acerbic force of nature. The thread that unites this whole franchise seems to be a love of genre storytelling—a determination that when you make a Scream film, you must rise to the expectations of an audience that has seen and thought about a lot of movies. The best moments come not when the filmmakers simply know what the audience expects but when the filmmakers know the audience knows the filmmakers know what the audience expects. It’s a game we play together, and so far everyone who’s played on the filmmaking end has taken it dead serious. No idea whether that will continue into future entries, but I wouldn’t bet against them.