Published on
“We are in a franchise” one of the characters in Scream VI declares, a line that feels oddly belated, considering the series has been a franchise for at least two decades. The four Wes Craven films formed a satisfying quadrilogy that never really needed further installments. But if the series had to continue, the Scream 4 approach made the most sense: new entries arriving after a fresh horror trend has emerged—something the films can actually satirize and comment on. Part four skewered the 2000s remake boom; part five took aim at the legacy sequel phenomenon. Scream VI, by contrast, has surprisingly little to say, no matter how hard it strains to suggest otherwise, and often feels more like a rushed cash-in on the previous film’s success than a sequel with a real reason to exist.
After surviving the Ghostface massacre, sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter leave Woodsboro for New York, hoping for a fresh start, only to find themselves stalked by a new killer with ties to the past. As murders spread across the city and the body count rises, they must rely on old allies and new friends to uncover who is behind the mask before Ghostface strikes again.
In the opening scene, someone is watching Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, an obvious wink at this film’s setting. The big criticism of Jason’s eighth outing, of course, is that despite the title, it spends most of its runtime on a boat. Scream VI avoids that mistake and commits fully to the big-city setting. But instead of embracing iconic New York landmarks, it mostly sticks to alleyways, subways, and parks, making it painfully obvious that—once again—a cheaper stand-in city is doubling for New York. It’s a classic filmmaking trick, but also a bit of a cheat. I wanted to see Ghostface stalking Times Square; instead, I got Ghostface on the subway.
By now, the Scream movies have built such convoluted ties between their characters that the mythology often threatens to collapse under its own weight. It’s the same problem that dragged down Scream 3 with its overcooked obsession with the Maureen Prescott backstory. Scream VI continues the story of Sam Carpenter—the daughter of Billy Loomis, the killer from the original—and her half-sister Tara, now in college and coping with trauma in opposite ways. Sam turns to therapy, while Tara tries to bury the past and embrace a normal student life. It’s a promising dynamic, but the film barely explores it before abandoning it the moment the killings begin.
What follows is the now-tiresome Scream template that every sequel dutifully recycles. The movie buff explains the rules. Ghostface picks off characters one by one while taunting victims over the phone. Red herrings are tossed at the audience. And the final reveal arrives as another convoluted pile-up that you were never meant to solve anyway, since the culprits are inevitably introduced under false names.
With Dewey killed off in the previous film and Neve Campbell sitting this one out, only series regular Courteney Cox returns as Gale Weathers for yet another showdown with Ghostface. Also back are Hayden Panettiere as Kirby from Scream 4, now improbably an FBI agent, and a de-aged Skeet Ulrich as Billy Loomis, still lingering as a figment of Sam’s imagination. Cox can play Gale in her sleep by now, but the fact that she’s nearing sixty and has so visibly altered her appearance can be distracting—there’s often something oddly uncanny about her on screen. The same goes for Ulrich, whose de-aging effects remain, unintentionally, among the creepiest things in this film or the previous one.
Scream VI is a by-the-numbers sequel that delivers exactly what audiences expect, but rarely anything more—certainly nothing genuinely original. The film looks slick, the weathered Ghostface mask is a nice touch, echoing the aged masks in the David Gordon Green Halloween films, and the cameos from familiar horror icons in the subway sequence are a fun wink for genre fans. There are also flashes of real tension, especially in a couple of expertly staged set pieces, like the bodega attack, which show what the film can do when it leans into suspense. But taken as a whole, this is just another run-of-the-mill Scream entry—competently made, occasionally thrilling, but ultimately too content to repeat the formula rather than stab at something fresher.
