Taking Another Stab: SCREAM VI

Scream VI works on two levels, as befits an entry in this series of slasher meta-commentaries. The first is as a bloody mystery, a cast slashed to gory bits one by one as a way of ruling out suspects until a grand splattery finale reveals all. The second is slyer, as a movie about characters who are really tired of being in this series. When Jenna Ortega, a survivor from the last one, turns to her sister (Melissa Barrera), a fellow carryover from 5, to fatalistically ask when, or if, she can simply be a normal person again, I felt that exhausted sadness. She’s over it. Later, a victim bleeding profusely from the abdomen will turn to look practically straight down the camera and mutter, “fuck this franchise.” Oh, not this one, per se. In the world of the Screams, their real slaughters have been regularly turned into the series-within-the-series of Stab movies. Its a neat ouroboros, sometimes too neatly fan-flattering, here turned into something like a lament. The movie’s world is ever more full of costumes and posters, having thoroughly commodified the traumas our characters drag around with them. Talk about intrusive thoughts. Their whole world is intrusive, and this movie is sharp enough to realize, in our modern moment, the internet facilitates that. It hasn’t just made pop culture fandoms louder; it’s made true crime and conspiracy theories part of them, and a form of social currency among the know-nothings who flatter themselves amateur truth-tellers. It’s its own brand of hell those caught in the center of tragedy can’t escape.

Here’s a movie about survivors threatened once again by the Ghostface Killer, this time in New York City, with yet another villain’s elaborate plot to draw blood from the old familiar tropes. They’re menaced by the ghost of sequels present. It’s tense and twisty and violent and funny, and well-paced, balanced, and framed. It stands comfortably with the best of the series, albeit without the late Wes Craven’s human touch balancing mean-spirited cleverness with genuine feelings for its victims. Still, this one’s very best moments—of tender connection, of honest emotion, of sisterly bonding or genuine first-blushes of romance—hook into a similar place. Returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick redeem the worst routine dissatisfying notes of their previous attempt at sequalizing the once-dormant franchise by using this effort to turn their newer characters from stock repeats into something closer to understandable individuals. (Even the legacy characters who appear (namely Courtney Cox and Hayden Panettiere) and the fresh faces (Dermot Mulroney, Liana Liberato, and Jack Champion) step into something closer to believable focus akin to the series’ Craven efforts.) The movie runs them back through the machinery of its punishing plot, and wrings enjoyment out of it, even as it sees the whole slasher cycle as a curse its characters are doomed to relive every few years until the box office appetite for these cools off again.

Scream and SCREAM Again

The mad genius of Wes Craven’s Scream movies was making them sharp commentary on the very genre of which they were exceedingly effective versions, and which he helped create. The innovation of Kevin Williamson’s screenplay was, after a couple decades of slasher pictures, making its characters young people who’d seen slasher pictures before. This thorough understanding of the types and tropes of the subgenre made for a thick layer of 90’s irony in their dialogue. Here were young people targeted in a small-town knifing spree from a masked killer, and they nonetheless thought a command of these stories’ cliches would keep them safe—typified in a scene where the horror nut pontificates about rules for survival, including never leaving alone saying “I’ll be right back.” This made the plot’s twists and turns all the more satisfying and surprising—cutting into the conventions by zigging where others zagged, or maybe doubling back around to predictable to catch you all the more off-balance. The first is one of the best of its kind, and a total deconstruction of it at the same time. As the series progressed, it became all the more meta, too, with good sequels including discussions of sequels, as the events of the first film inspired an in-universe horror franchise: Stab. By the 2011 release of the underrated Scream 4, it even became a generational commentary, a belated sequel to a cult property in which younger characters were fans of the movies based on the events of the first movies. That Craven continued making these warmly photographed and sleekly paced thrill machines capable of pulling off bloody kills and teasing genre play in the same movies, sometimes in the same scene, made them excellent entertainments.

So of course the fifth in the series, the confusingly titled Scream, is pretty aware it’s been another 11 years since the last and therefore must, in the current vogue, be all things to all people—a fresh cast of new people doing the same things, and a returning cast looking sideways at the proceedings until reluctantly drawn into the same old same old. It’s also the first in the series (save a forgotten three-season MTV show from a few years ago that goes unreferenced here) without either Craven, who passed away in 2015, or Williamson, who serves only as producer here. Maybe that accounts for the movie’s sense of grinding mechanics. It has been directed, by Ready or Not’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and written, by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, in what I could only think of as a karaoke version of the original’s moves. It has a small portion of Craven’s playful use of obstructed negative space, and a bit of the bite of Williamson’s writing. But it’s also clear the originals were the work of auteurs, while this new one is merely the product of talented technicians. They know the notes, but not the music. There’s a cute teen star (Jenna Ortega) on the wrong end of a menacing phone call in the opening scene. There’s a quickly sketched youth group full of victims and suspects (Melissa Barrera, Jack Quaid, Dylan Minnette, and others). There’s a reluctant call to action for the series’ previous survivors (David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell). And there’s an unknown ghostface killer skulking about in a gory whodunnit. The movie plunks down the sequences and surprises exactly where you’d expect them. It’s inelegant, but sometimes effective and always self-aware—like the bloodbath finale inaugurated by the killer waving a gun shouting, “Welcome to the third act, bitch!”

The project mistakes calling out obstacles and missteps for absolution when stumbling over them. There are long sequences in which characters lay out the new rules of a re-quel, along the way name-checking Terminator, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Halloween as recent examples of the quasi-remake sequel. There’s joking about the title, too, forgoing a number for a faux-remake naming convention in vogue, a fake grab for a glimmer of originality in the face of so much derivative. One character quips she prefers The Babadook and Hereditary to the Stabs, a fine wink at the art house horror cycle we’re in. Another complains the Stabs went off the rails with the fifth one. (Ha.) Still another references a toxic fanbase that won’t let long-running franchises try new things. That’s pretty sharp commentary on the online right-wing reactionaries who’ve latched onto long-running franchise fanbases to recruit young people into their shallow ax-grinding, anti-“woke” sloganeering. And the movie as a whole does a good job updating the talking points of its self-aware joshing for the current cultural landscape. I appreciated the effort. But the joy of the originals was not just that it could call out current horror tropes, but could upend them in unexpected puncturings. And they had characters you could care about even in the slasher structure—the deaths felt sad even as they fulfilled the genre’s obligation. This one’s everything you’d expect all the way down, and too routine to flesh out its feelings like that. Even the surprises are inevitable. There’s some low genre pleasure as far as that goes, and the young cast is gamely throwing itself into largely under-written parts. At best, it's watchable echoes of pleasures past. But, as is so often the case with these formulaic legacy sequels, there’s something depressing about the legacy characters, and us, stuck in this loop.

Run for Your Life: SCRE4M

Now practically, rightfully, part of the horror canon, Scream hit theaters in 1996 bringing a sense of self-awareness to what otherwise would have been stock horror characters. It is a loving homage to slasher films that’s also a great slasher film in its own right. The follow up is a winking homage to sequelitis, while the third is such homage to bad sequels that it is one.

Scre4m is a back-to-basics slasher picture that also dives deep down the rabbit-hole of franchise metatextuality with all of the wit you’d want to expect from this series. It’s rare for horror fans to get a worthy sequel, rarer still to get one fifteen years after the original. With the same behind-the-camera talent, the film has Wes Craven bringing crisp, suspenseful direction and Kevin Williamson bringing a frighteningly fun script. Together, they approach the level of terrifying snark that makes Scream such a great entry in the horror genre, and the lack of which causes the other sequels (especially 2000’s Scream 3) to feel so discouragingly rote.

But Scre4m, recognizing and exploiting its own status as a cultural memory, pulls off the unexpected feat of feeling at once old and new. It’s old because the Scream veterans, perpetual final girl Neve Campbell, bumbling cop David Arquette, and reporter Courtney Cox, return to see a new bloodbath. It’s new, because they’re set up in tension with the changing times. Their tragedy, the Woodsboro murders that take up the first film, is now settling into the past, nothing more than a scary story. The films-within-the-films based off of the tragic events are now the source of cult appeal amongst the local teens, for which they feel like a quaint throwback. These kids are of the generation of Saw and Paranormal Activity, after all.

Rather than address the found-footage and torture horror head-on, this new film brushes them aside. This isn’t a Scream movie for our time; this is a Scream movie in our time. It cleverly works as a hybrid remake and sequel with a new mysterious Ghostface killer patterning a killing spree on the original film’s events. The new group of teens is centered on Emma Roberts, Julia’s niece playing the niece of the original film’s final girl. Her friends include a number of hot young starlets like Hayden Panetiere and Marielle Jaffe along with Erik Knudsen, Rory Culkin, and Nico Tortorella. In fact, this slasher film has so many characters on hand to be both victims and suspects (with little comedic turns for the likes of the very charming Alison Brie, Adam Brody, and Anthony Anderson and roles for Mary McDonnell, Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin) that the cast sometimes seems to be lining up for a much more sprawling film.

What we get, however, is nicely focused, no matter how cluttered it seems to get along the way. The new cast of vulnerable horror-savvy high-schoolers mixes well with the old favorites and Craven and Williamson are smart enough to keep both parts of their two-pronged plot lively and complementary. They feed off of each other and comment upon each other, much like a sequel (or remake) feeds off of its original, which is part of the point.

The movie is, in the best Scream tradition, energetically entertaining with jump scares and laughs, some surprising kills and at least one truly unexpected (and also surprisingly thematically satisfying) twist. In fact, I would venture to say that Scre4m is the best of the sequels. It’s a devilish delight that I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing. I doubt anything in this series will ever get back to the shock of the original, especially its masterful rug-pulling opening scene, but this is about as close as we’re likely to get.

Quick Look: MY SOUL TO TAKE

With My Soul to Take, the story of a dead schizophrenic serial killer who may or may not have returned from the dead after sixteen years just to kill a group of high schoolers, Wes Craven’s offering up leftovers from his greatest accomplishments. It’s a little Nightmare on Elm Street here, a little Scream there. I had a good time. It’s a fairly shaggy slasher picture, but it’s sort of charming in its steady, almost anachronistic style. And its straight-faced use of red herrings and obvious twisty horror plotting makes it a bit of an earnest, unselfconscious throwback. The killer’s prey is a carefully diverse group of teenagers (all in their twenties, of course). There’s a jock (Nick Lashaway), popular girls (Emily Meade and Paulina Olszynski), an Evangelical Christian (Zena Grey), a geek (John Magaro), and a blind kid (Denzel Whitaker). Our main point of entry into the story, which is partly a bleary coming-of-age story, is a troubled teen played by Max Thieriot, who handles quite well a part that calls for a blend of high emotion and low pop-psychological semi-supernatural oddness. He’s given several moments that could very well have become accidental camp in lesser hands. The cast has some nice banter mixed in with some real clunkers, like a failed bon mot from the Christian girl suggesting relief from the heat of their crisis with some “prayer conditioning.” But above all, Craven’s film works in its erratic, loopy way as a look at a community that is literally haunted by memories of sudden and scarring violence. Its high point comes not from a particularly frightening scare or a squeamishly gross gash of gore, but instead from a scene that finds a brother and a sister, both marked by the town’s killings of sixteen years prior, smashing apart the last relics of their tainted memories.

Another New Nightmare: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

The main raison d’etre of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake is theoretically the casting of a mid-comeback Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, the series’ dream-haunting serial killer. In practice, the great actor has been given significantly less than nothing to do with the role; he settles into a pattern of twitches and growls that are matched with equally tiring glares and stares of the ominous variety. To make matters worse, the changes to the character could have led to a film with interesting ideas to share, if the filmmakers had any clear way of saying them, if the makers even realized the existence of such ideas.

In the original 1984 semi-classic from Wes Craven, Krueger was a serial killer who met his demise at the hands of an angry mob of grieving, outraged citizens. He subsequently haunts the dreams of a collection of teens through the course of the film. Now that’s it is 2010, that’s just too simple a premise, I guess. Now Krueger was a pedophile who was killed by a group of angry parents. Years later, he haunts the dreams of his victims, now teens and young adults. That could be a powerful message for a horror movie; one that casts a stark light on the ways child abuse can leave an intense impact on the victims’ lives, one that says the damage some are capable of committing against the most innocent among us is the real nightmare. But first-time feature director Samuel Bayer and his team are content to leave the idea as a dully formed and dumbly wielded bludgeon of sensationalism in an otherwise dull, painfully adequate horror film.

If you find sudden appearances that are synchronized with loud blats or clangs on the soundtrack the height of scariness, then by all means you will be terrified by this remake which cycles through the memorable images of the original with all the energy of a boring routine and all the imagination of a checklist. The claw in the bathtub? Check. The bulging wallpaper? Check. The soupy carpet? Check. The slow-mo jump rope? The menacing boiler rooms? The levitating girl? The bloody body bag in the school hall? Check, check, check, check. They’re all accounted for, but in worse shape than before.

Craven’s original has a sluggish, dreamlike quality. Watching for the first time, I was never quite sure when we were in or out of a dream. The characters and the threat to their lives are revealed efficiently and creepily and the odd incongruous jolts of creepy imagery are genuinely shocking. I loved the quietly creeping mood of the film that slowly overwhelms. I loved the hall monitor’s sudden transformation, the stairs that melt underfoot, and the unpredictable, shifting Krueger. The remake gets this all wrong. The pace isn’t dreamlike; it’s just sleepy. It’s not creepy or shocking, just rote. Information is doled out in entirely inefficient ways. If I hadn’t seen the original it would have been quite late in the film before I even figured out what the exact nature of the threat was.

It’s a frustration, I suppose. This is a film that couldn’t even hurdle my very low expectations. There’s an attractive young cast who are quite excellent at moping with suitably tired expressions including Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, and Kellan Lutz. They are asked to do so little, they may as well be living statues. The movie really lets down its cast and its audience, but above all, the movie lets down Haley, who, from behind ugly, uninspired makeup, is just as unneeded as the film itself.