Scream 6 questions if we need Scream 7 at all

Instead, the big reveal is that there isn’t one Ghostface, or even two three. Even as a shock, their motive feels like something out of 4chan’s grotesque fever dreams: they are the family of Ritchie (Jack Quaid’s psycho killer from the last film) and want revenge on Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) for killing her beloved boy – and they started spreading QAnon lies about them.

It got me. Expectations were shattered, and it led to a rather gratifying applause as Ortega kills Ritchie’s younger brother and hisses, “Now fuck you die a virgin.” It’s a bigger spectacle than the end of the last few Scream movies. But I’m not convinced it’s better.

The last movie’s twist, where Ritchie and Amber (Mikey Madison) killed all those people because they wanted to rewrite the plot of their favorite franchise, had a delicious, thinly veiled comment about toxic fandom in a post-The Last Jedi World. the movie before scream 4, also worked as a cutting satire on influencer culture before it was a household word, with Jill Roberts (played by Julia Roberts’ niece, Emma Roberts) doing whatever it took to gain social media clout and play the victim. Prophetic.

scream 6 goes back a bit to the 90s Scream the soapier storylines of the sequels. Once again, the killer of the last film came from a crazy family that continues his good work. It’s out of left field, almost unpredictable, and wacky enough to allow Sam to don her father’s costume and voice box. Eventually Ghostface becomes the good guy. It’s subversive, but could it bring the story to its breaking point?

The delicate magic of Scream movies is that they are always self-analyzing and critique their own decisions, aware that the series walks a knife-edge between clever and smug, funny and self-parodic. The last part, written by the mastermind of the first film, Kevin Williamson, was scream 4and that movie even began to envision the movies-within-movies, the Stab franchise, falling into meta-masturbation at the time of stitch 7

Six films in the actual Scream Movies avoided that fate. At present. The new creative heads of Radio Silence even gave the series back its sharpness with the set pieces from scream 5 and especially 6 to be the first really tense ones since the second film. But maybe they did their job too well for me. I don’t want to see the Core Four slaughtered any more than Dewey and Gale. That could of course be the root of great horror, but Scream went there too. Twice. Remember that before Dewey’s bittersweet death scream 5Randy Meeks was also in “Core Four”. scream 2.