Movie Review: SCREAM VI 

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• Paramount Pictures

It took a recent marathon viewing of the Scream franchise to lock on to something I'd never really realized previously: The Scream movies are not slasher movies, at least not the kind about which all the characters make meta-references. While the original 1996 Scream established a paradigm of acknowledging tropes from vintage teens-vs.-killers movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th and director Wes Craven's own A Nightmare on Elm St., the Scream movies themselves were not built around an iconic single killer; they were suspense whodunnits.

In fact, it took last year's "legacy-quel" from new series directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and the screenwriting team of James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick for the series to acknowledge the reality that the Scream movies have always been about themselves more than about other scary movies—and if that particular installment also managed to skewer a certain type of insufferable genre-movie buff along the way, so much the better.

So now, more than 25 years into the franchise's history, as the same creative team returns for Scream VI, it feels like these movies have slipped into a kind of comfort zone with exploiting the expectations surrounding not horror movies in general, but these particular horror movies. We're going to get a "first attack" set piece—here involving Samara Weaving, from Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett's Ready or Not—most likely featuring a phone call from our now-familiar voice of the killer (Roger L. Jackson). There will be a laboriously drawn-out climactic monologue explaining the murderous motivations.

In between, we'll get at least one lengthy discourse on the "rules" of whatever place we find ourselves in the franchise, and probably at least one needle-drop of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," ideally with some creatively tense Ghostface carnage along the way.

By those standards, Scream VI gives the audience 100 percent of what it came for (although minus Neve Campbell, the absence of whose resilient heroine Sidney Prescott is explained away early on by Courteney Cox's equally resilient journalist Gale Weathers). The surviving "core four" of the previous movie—sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), and twins Mindy (Jasmin Savoy-Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding)—have moved from Woodsboro to New York City, the latter three for college and Sam to keep an eye on Tara.

Not surprisingly, though, their trauma follows them across the country, first in the form of online rumors that Sam herself might have orchestrated the murders she survived, and eventually in the form of yet another copycat masked killer.

It was considered a bit of a violation by purists that the series continued after the death of Wes Craven, but 2022's Scream showed that Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett have their own particular talent for delivering the goods while sticking to the formula. In the absence of Campbell, they bring back surprise Scream 4 survivor Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), now an FBI agent. They round up a new group of suspects, including Sam's new romantic interest (Josh Segarra), Chad's roommate (Jack Champion), Mindy's girlfriend (Devyn Nekoda) and an investigating police officer (Dermot Mulroney). And they've made their central protagonists tough and engaging, with Barrera improving on her work from last year and Ortega remaining ferociously committed to conveying pain and terror.

More significantly, these filmmakers are just damned good at crafting crawl-out-of-your skin tension. There are at least two corkers on display here: one with our protagonists split up on two different subway trains on Halloween night, with Ghostface masks everywhere; and another involving an escape from the killer between buildings across a suspended ladder, which might be the series' best sequence since Scream 2's escape from the police car. Again, these are suspense movies rather than slasher movies, so they need to deliver on that count—and mission accomplished.

Is it still a little bit of an obligatory bummer every time these movies need to stop dead in their tracks for villain speeches? Yeah. Is the ongoing presence of Cox's Gale, even across multiple time zones, something that now feels like it has to be justified self-referentially? Totally. All that stuff, though, is just part of the package that you sign up for when you watch a Scream movie. They keep telling us exactly what to expect from them, and kind of surprisingly, they keep delivering, built on the notion that this franchise doesn't just comment on a genre. It created one.