The sixth entry in the 27-year-old slasher franchise that was once credited with bringing the genre back from the dead, Scream VI is the sequel to the 2022 requel Scream (an abominable portmanteau of reboot and sequel). The film starts off strong, not only with a more clever prologue than the recent requel (hereafter referenced as Scream 5), but also by giving this numbered sequel a properly numbered title. Unfortunately, the film lacks the courage of its opening scene, making the risky surprise a mere disappointing feint.
From there, Scream VI (opting for the gravitas of roman numerals) picks up with the Carpenter sisters Sam and Tara (Barrera and Ortega). Attending college in New York, younger Tara has taken the move-forward approach to dealing with past trauma, while her older sister Sam has taken a more measured but militant approach, attending therapy but also being over-protective of Tara. It is their relationship that is ostensibly the heart of the film, but as emotional filler, it feels only skin-deep.
The surviving cast from Scream 5 returns, sans Neve Campbell for unfortunate salary dispute reasons. Of course there are a handful of new characters to round out the suspect list, with the welcome return of Scream 4’s Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), whose trauma reaction was to become a Fed. Sadly, none of these additions bring much benefit. That’s not to say they’re bad, but that the script is so focused on the soap opera of Sam coming to terms with her father being the original Ghostface that any remaining dialogue is relegated to clunky exposition and the requisite “there are certain rules one must abide by” retread. And as with Scream 5, no amount of self-awareness or horror nerd references (nice Murder Party costume) can save this self-serious slog. Even setting it during Halloween adds nothing new to the franchise as Scream 2’s opening kill was set in a movie theater full of costumed Stab fanatics.
The one bit of clever and timely storytelling is in the public’s perception of our main heroine, Sam. As is wont to happen on the internet, conspiracies have arisen that Sam was somehow the real killer, that she managed to orchestrate the events that occurred in Scream 5, thereby framing the “fake” killer(s). It’s an interesting concept that is brought up only to be barely explored.
By the time Scream (1996) came out, the three main slasher-film villains had devolved into unstoppable, supernatural murder machines. These latest two movies serve as an example of why those movies went the supernatural route, because as silly as Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees eventually became, it pales in comparison to the tortured lengths the Scream franchise has gone to conjure up yet another reason for a live human to don the Ghostface garb.
Unburdened by its own lore and the need to cannibalize its own legacy, to turn its protagonists and villains into franchise mainstays as if this was a “cinematic universe,” the “Scream genre” of a human killer wielding a knife and using technology to outsmart savvy teens is still ripe. In fact, the writer of the first four Scream movies, Kevin Williamson, wrote one last year that might be the best “Scream” movie of the past decade. It just so happens to be called Sick (2022).
