Here’s Eliza Janssen’s spoiler-free take on the latest chapter of the Scream franchise: the body count is impressive, but this Ghostface doesn’t leave much of a mark on the ongoing canon overall.
No Woodsboro and no Sidney: the sixth film in the Scream franchise starts off with a few big, bold changes. The former’s not so shocking, since VI ends up closely resembling Scream 2, the other great sequel that graduated its terrified teen characters into a college setting. But can a creepy Ghostface call really connect with us if Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott isn’t on the other end of the line?
Thankfully, yep it can, as this robust yet somewhat inessential chapter successfully proves. Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers is now the only OG 1996 cast member to put in an appearance (save for some ghostly, corny visions of Skeet Ulrich), and even those scenes are pretty dang brief too. What we get instead is impressive suspense, inventive new settings, and greater emotional investment in our new “core four”, as cheery jock Chad (Mason Gooding) embarrassingly dubs his friends/fresh meat Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown).
Could one of these likeable young people have snapped after the legacy-worshipping events of last year’s Scream 5? Sam is seen as the prime suspect, still haunted by her deadbeat dad Billy Loomis’ bloody backstory: a shadowy legion of Reddit neckbeards and Instagram Live pundits hover like vultures around her, waiting for evidence that she’s just as slash-happy as her old man. But nah, it’s far more likely that one (or more!) of Scream VI’s expendable new characters—goofy roomies, a grizzled cop, or Sam’s hunky secret boyfriend—is playing Ghostface, even leaving previous Ghostface’s masks dotted around NYC like so many rejected slices of pizza. Right??
At the centre of it all, the tense sisterly relationship between Sam and Tara gives solid if formulaic story structure. Barrera is far more convincing and charismatic here than in Scream 2022, where Ortega kind of acted circles around her in the more interesting “victimised little sis” role. In the movie’s most nail-biting sequence, they’re forced to crawl across a ladder to escape from Ghostface into an adjacent apartment, nicely activating our phobias of both heights and getting disembowelled by a homicidal Halloween try-hard.
But with Neve Campbell out of the picture due to salary disputes with Paramount, we know there’s no way either sister is going to plummet to their death in the alleyway below. Despite the usual, red herring-stuffed “legacy sequels have NEW rules” TedTalk from Randy Meeks’ niece Mindy, these gals are cemented as our new heroes: they’ve gotta stick around until this film’s very stabby finale at least.
The team behind Ready or Not seem to have the Scream format perfected by this point, sweetly letting old collaborator Samara Weaving keep her Aussie accent intact as our traditional cold open victim. Those opening 10 minutes are so self-consciously twisty, they retroactively make Scream 2022 look a bit more unimaginative. The return of fan fave character Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) after what totally looked like a fatal stomach stabbing in Scream 4 signals that unlikely survival is on the cards here, and as such, we’re informed a few too many times that a seemingly massacred character is doing just fine in hospital offscreen.
But for the most part, what fans love about the Scream saga is well represented here: hilarious reminders that Ghostface is truly just a dude in a suit whenever he takes a spill or bonks into a wall or something…cute nods to classic horror in New York passersby’s referential Halloween costumes…and an entertaining, lore-rich killer reveal.
If we’re going to see Ghostface slay again in part seven, I’d love for the in-universe Stab movies to get the spotlight once more, perhaps in the form of a tacky true crime streaming series or an “elevated horror” A24 reboot. Give Mindy and co. some fresh ammunition for their never-ending discussion of “the rules for horror franchises”—the poor kids are in what should now be considered the most consistently great horror franchise of them all, after all.
