More than two decades on and half a dozen films later, Wes Craven’s iconic franchise continues the tradition of advancing the genre, even as it meditates on its own influence and jabs at the tropes it helped create. The unknown new Ghostface tells us in the trailer, “there’s never been one like me.” While it sounds like the boast of any lunatic inclined to don the mask, it actually transpires to be the logline for the whole of Scream VI. No Scream installment can ever be as earthshaking as the first, but the most recent is the most surprising since the original.
Out of Woodsboro and sans Sydney, Scream VI was always going to be new territory, but in execution it proves to be at once more intimate and ambitious than previous entries. The trademark witty dialogue and meta humor remain, but the promise of a different kind of Ghostface puts a new spin on familiar dynamics.
With fewer iconic legacy characters around which new to navigate, the Carpenter sisters are much more fully realized, likewise bringing a new logic to the fore. Sydney’s stoic heroism was always an anchor to the big personalities elsewhere in the world. Conversely, the Carpenters don’t operate on final girl logic, and that too brings a different flavor to the proceedings.
But more than a bagful of new tricks, Scream VI has a new tone. There is a dark sense of immediacy and invasion brought on by the inability for our heroes to hide, even in a city of millions. It is a living breathing paranoia, that manifests, finally in a sense of angst and outrage. It’s gritty in a way the series never has been. As raw and intense as the brutality often has been, the fallout tends to happen after the screen fades to black. But this Scream operates in trauma and is the sharper for it.
Come for Kirby. And stay for Kirby — duh. But stick after the fact on how the series, in its sixth outing, found a way to tap into something entirely fresh and perfectly at home in its mythology.
__________