Review of Scream VI (2023) by Hnestlyonthesly — 22 May 2023

How many Screams do you need to see before you see Scream 6? The question was one that I asked anyone who asked me what I was doing this weekend, because, like the casting directors wisely predicted when inviting Jenna Ortega on deck, I am really just here to watch Wednesday Addams get stabbed by a ghost. A ghostface? Ghostface? I asked as many questions as I could to Friend who was there with Friend-wife, who also had seen approximately none of the movies before this one. We traded notes and I mentioned Bilge Ebiri’s harried run down in Vulture. Bilge Ebiri seemed so out of sorts and tired with the constant churn of these films and the hyperawareness of the horror genre by the horror genre that I was sort of glad to come in a Scream queen virgin. It’s one of the reasons why I squealed with glee upon seeing the aforementioned horror film professor Ebiri talks about is none other than D-list Margot Robbie from Ready or Not(!!)! And if you’ve been asking yourself for the past three years, hey, what is D-list Robbie doing these days, I can now happily tell you probably whatever she was doing before her brief and amazing cameo in this franchise.

Like I said, I have very little familiarity with Scream in particular, but it sounds like a lot of what Scream and Scream fans did in their early iterations was set the groundwork for the structuralist horror fans among us, who are hunting for the down and dirty variations on a theme and structure. Friend made it after his fancy dinner–we all acknowledged the sublime weirdness of missing the Oscars in order to watch a movie late on a Sunday night–and I’m sure that I would be remiss in mentioning that his favorite movie, Cabin in the Woods, is sort of the distillation of Scream’s ethos to systematize and the lightly meta-parody the horror genre. The subtle passes at genre tropes and mise-en-abyme structure scenes all left us chuckling in the first act, and though it seems like your enjoyment might vary based on your familiarity with the 5th film particularly, in which we meet a lot of the gang, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had. It definitely feels like Halloween lasts about four full days and nights in the first act, and I’m almost 100% confident that former OTM host Bob Garfield plays the therapist and I will not accept any facts to the contrary.

One of the things that I find most vexing coming out of a Scream (is that how we describe seeing this movie? or, having been Screamed at?) is it seems like there’s this tradition of guessing who the killer is and being surprised by which close friend is responsible or whatever, but this far into the franchise, it feels like that surprise is a lot more of a game that it ever could’ve been previously, because it starts feeling a little unsolvable, a little Orient Express, and I suppose that tumbly reveal is part of the fun if you’re primed to make big leaps of intuition. Friend describes this tendency as playing on a typical Gen Z trait, FOMO: everyone wants to be the killer and there’s a lot of pressure to fit in. It’s almost weirder in Scream 7 if everyone isn’t the killer, constantly putting on and taking off masks and cloaks every moment they’re not directly trained on the camera.

Anyway, I am completely unafraid of being stabbed in the darkness of my home right now after having seen it late last night and that’s mostly because my phone is literally always on silent and I cannot imagine picking it up for a blocked number ever in a million years, but also because the thing that makes this movie so delightful is the way that it finds humor in the scares, like some of the best horror film predecessors. It’s something that makes this a must-see in a theater with strangers and rewards virgin Scream queens like myself.