Barely a year has passed between Scream VI and the Scream of 2022. The speed with which Paramount has coordinated with its creators to launch a new installment is obviously due to how well the previous one did at the box office, while referring to what happened in the late 90s. Between the first Scream y Scream 2 an exact year passed, 1996 and 1997. The producers did everything they could to take advantage of the slipstream of the original blockbuster, and interestingly this rush led to its most famous scene and an absolute fan favorite: Ghostface’s inaugural murder in a movie theater. cinema.
Fantastic cinema comes to suffer for the human condition
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Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson orchestrated a memorable prologue where the Woodsboro murders had inspired a movie within a movie, Stab. From there the writers of Scream they would stretch out that fictional franchise to convolute more and more of the meta-referential game, never quite reaching the impact of that first scene. The new Ghostface was infiltrating the premiere of Stab, taking advantage of the phenomenon unleashed by that film to make their own. Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps were murdered under the cover of a pop culture celebration, the psychopath confusing himself with his reflection on the screen.
The immediate success in the time of Scream and his vision of meta-terror had given rise to this brilliant occurrence, overcoming all the creative inertias and automatisms that a license squeezed in such a sudden way could have given rise to. They are the same inertias, the feeling that you are trying to exploit something that does not give more than itself, into which you fall Scream VI.
In the era of Ghostface
“It is a film about horror, which does not mean that it is a parody or a pastiche. Rather, it exploits the conventions of the genre, the descriptions of which it incorporates into the plot, to amplify feelings of fear and tranquility. In this excerpt from his doctoral thesis flatline constructspublished in 1999, Mark Fisher was not referring to Scream. In fact, the cultural critic never completely connected with the saga. The movie he was alluding to was in the mouth of feardirected by John Carpenter.
Almost 30 years have passed since, in a period of time between 1993 and 1995, American fiction released three fundamental films to understand the terror that turns on itself. In the dark half George A. Romero adapted the homonymous novel where the alter ego with which Stephen King had signed some of his books came to life and tormented him. In Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Freddy Krueger burst into our reality to mark the filming of the umpteenth installment of Nightmare in Elm street. While the key scene of in the mouth of fearas Scream 2It took place in a cinema.
Sam Neill’s character saw his world invaded by the literary creations of the horror novelist Sutter Cane —whose acronym, to further entangle the skein, reminded Stephen King—, and he ended up going crazy. “Ultimately the protagonist is drawn into the hyperreal: a reality fatally tainted by fiction,” Fisher wrote. Screamconserving Craven behind new nightmareembraced the idea of making explicit the conventions of the horror genre (specifically the slasher), but he let them monopolize all his attractions.
Inducing fear has never been the highest priority of Scream. Rather, it has been ironic about fear, approaching it as a set of meanings mediated by Hollywood that reveals both the clichés and the inevitable sociopolitical mutations: the presence of the saga is essential for this. Stab from Scream 2. Thanks to these fictional movies Scream it has been able to flow like a self-contained cosmos, laughing at itself and at all that this may imply for horror cinema without actually practicing terror.
Wit has accustomed to flow regularly, with some more fortunate deviation from the mean —Scream 3 targeting the secret turbidities of Hollywood, Scream 4 worrying about social networks—, but it being inevitable that these self-imposed margins were tightening more and more. The Scream of 2022 he still knew how to avoid this regime of self-absorption based on laughing at the fandoms and inconsequential nods to the conversation about gender —as was the case with the elevated horror– but Scream VIperhaps because of the rush, he cannot even benefit from something like this.
What may well be the worst film in the saga leads to Scream to be buried under layers and layers of references that are confused with each other. Scream intersects with Stab, Stab intersects with Scary Movie, and a whole tangle of postmodern noise takes shape that, by not even allowing itself to function as fiction, reveals that it rises above the void. As, in a certain sense, the phenomenon always rose Scream.
The bottomless pit of the referential
The extreme speed with which it has materialized Scream VI It has excluded the raise that Neve Campbell was asking for to return as Sidney Prescott, the heroine of the saga. Her absence had to guarantee an increase in prominence for the sisters played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega —especially now that the latter has become a star for several years. Wednesday—and there is something like that. The story of James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick part of the new generation of protagonists that he introduced Scream 2022.
These protagonists have gone to study at the university in New York, so the scenario is similar to Scream 2 and the characters themselves verbalize it. Jasmin Savoy Brown, maintaining the role of Randy Meeks after the previous installment —that is, a horror fan who predicts the plot based on her cinephilia—, marks a delirious monologue where she tries to place this new Ghostface attack in a serial narrative let your friends understand. It only occurs to him to conclude that “they are living within a franchise.”
To the saga Scream He is used to dealing with rhetoric like this, justifying implausible twists with self-awareness and complicity. The problem is that Scream VI handles too many extra-film decisions—Campbell’s own absence or Hayden Panettiere’s return after Scream 4— so that the ironic grimace can justify them all, and the footage becomes a hysterical mess where only certain tinkering with the expectations that the saga itself has generated land on its feet. For example, phone calls or a prologue that true to tradition Scream it is again the most memorable of the set.
They are fireworks, in short, that being so marked by the neurotic anxiety that the phenomenon has reached Scream they highlight the errors already present in the previous film. Beyond the fact that the script is incapable of weaving a solvent dramatic arc for the protagonists -because this can never matter as much as the potential to surprise with some revelation or death-, the direction of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett is as poor as was glimpsed in Wedding nightthe work that put them in the orbit of Scream.
The staging of Scream VI it reveals both the rewrites of the script according to the point at which the negotiation of the Campbell contract passed and the haste with which everything has been put on its feet. It is crude, of zero planning, which does not seem to matter to the creators either in terms of the disdain with which they handle suspense or horror. The stinginess with the gore it aligns with a tragically short imagination for murder, which is content to take place in some shocking location.
The main one is an old movie theater that closes the circle. A room like the one where Sam Neill laughed maniacally as he realized there was no escape. A room like the one where Ghostface merged with cosplayers by Ghostface. Circles are closed shapes, with no gap where something can penetrate, and Scream he closes his with an equally impenetrable film, limited to a constant feedback of ghostly echoes and rhymes. Jokes and self-reflective winks try to cover it up, but there really is very little reflection in that circle. And much less cinema.