Dayten Rose

Sort of like the Pentiment review, I’ll acknowledge up front that we’re well in the spoiler window for this movie that came out literally yesterday. I plan on avoiding spoilers, but I’m not going to try too hard — no specifics, but broad strokes. For my spoiler-free moviegoing opinion… it was fun! I had a good time!

What follows is my “guy with a Substack” opinion. And I’m not going to do it in a numbered list, because I mostly just have one point I want to explore.

My difficulty is this: I enjoy criticism, but I don’t love being critical about things. Generally, I’d rather love more things than less things. Or rather, I am very often the guy in the group chat who says things like “the writing was so bad,” or “how did all of the relevant characters get to the climactic location so fast,” or “why does everyone call him a trickster god if in every single action sequence he just punches around until some plot twists happen and we learn that he never had anything up his sleeve to begin with.” I don’t love being that person. But I do think it’s important to be thoughtful about media — it’s the best compliment you can give!

Point is, I won’t pick a star rating or anything like that. I pretty much liked Bilge Ebiri’s review for Vulture and Monica Castillo’s for Roger Ebert if you’re looking for someone to show their work. Really great set pieces. Those who like watching people throw things at Ghostface will have a good time.

Here’s the big thorn in my side though: every single reviewer is taking it on trust that this is even a slasher movie. And like… Did we watch the same movie? I’m not trying to be pretentious here, Scream VI is a completely serviceable action movie. But it’s an action movie! Slashers are a subset of horror, and horror kind of has to be subversive. Nothing in Scream VI was uncomfortable, because it wasn’t actually doing anything. Instead, it did what all “too big to fail” franchises do: it made itself about found family. Because family is the most universal, inoffensive, nothing-at-all theme for a movie to be about. You all put your hands in before the climax, “Go team!,” you fight, you win, you fade out on “Red Right Hand.”

I’m not exaggerating — the crew has this whole “core four” chant. It’s kind of cute? But it turns the movie into a feel good triumph of friendship over adversity rather than something dangerous. Every character that you badly want to live, lives. Nothing surprising happens. At all. Like John McClane picking the glass out of his feet and trotting along to the next gunfight, a stab wound in a Scream movie is an inconvenience that barely survives the cutaway.

(For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen any of the original Scream sequels. These movies do tend to think about the bonds between characters more than your average slasher.)

Friday the 13th, for example: that the characters have pre-existing relationships is mostly incidental. When bodies start dropping, none of that matters beyond an “I should go look for her.” A Nightmare on Elm Street shows people really worrying about each other, but that doesn’t stop what’s coming. In Scream VI — and maybe Scream V? I can’t remember — worry is a balm, the ultimate painkiller, antiseptic, and suture all rolled into one. If only you, the audience, believes it, your favorite character will rise from certain death.

One point about slashers made by Carol J. Clover (whose work I talked about in the Psycho/Friday the 13th post), which I really loved, is that sequels are more like retellings. No matter what entry you watch — or even which franchise — you can expect most of the same archetypes, situations, and themes. They’re like campfire stories in that way. Scream VI isn’t like that. It trades the Final Girl for the Final Four; the dumb horniness for the chaste brushing of hands; the tooth-and-nail survival for the quippy fight scene; the incompetent male hanger-on for the himbo savior.

So what does that make this movie? A bloodier-than-average Avengers or Fast and the Furious thing — way more fun than either of those, actually. And for the record, fun is more than enough to justify a movie ticket in my view.

Oh, and the subway scene. That ruled.

And while I’m down here in the grab bag, a two other thoughts. And these WILL be a numbered list!

1. Shame on the New Yorkers reviewing this movie like “oh, New York is portrayed unrealistically” and, “out-of-towners might notice a few missing major landmarks.” New York is a fake city. Saying your movie is set in NYC is the equivalent of saying “don’t think about it too hard, it’s a city OK?” No one cares except for New Yorkers — just like if a movie is ever set in Kansas City I’ll be bummed if it’s filmed in Vancouver, but I think I might have to keep dreaming on that one.
2. Jenna Ortega is a universal treasure. And Mason Gooding! What a great cast!

Like I said, I’m on a slasher kick right now. I didn’t plan it to align with the release of Scream VI, and while I do plan to see it, I don’t want to rush around in the name of relevance or whatever. In return, I’ll do a two for one. First up, Psycho.

1. So a lot of sources, especially academic sources, trace Psycho as the major influence on the slasher genre, presaging the Golden Age of slashers — between Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Which, by the way, you can track a similar life cycle for other genre Golden Ages: the Western started with your traditional upstanding white-hat stuff, but as the public lost interest directors got more experimental. The Searchers (1956) is considered the best Western, but it’s thought of for its more psychological elements. Spaghetti Westerns came the decade after, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which is actually the best Western.
2. Oh, yeah, so Psycho. It’s funny — I don’t have a ton of evidence for this, but I feel like Psycho had a lot of reverse whodunnit DNA. The psychoanalyst literally does a parlor room scene at the end. Could you trace some lineage from mystery, to thriller, to slasher? Would that lineage include The Bat, which like Psycho had some of the earliest spoiler warnings?
3. Carol J. Clover named the “Final Girl” archetype, and she points out that out of the Final Girl comes pretty much every difference between Psycho and more straight up slashers. I liked the clever planning in Psycho, but it was pretty distributed between leads. Slashers are partially defined by the ineptitude of everyone but the Final Girl.

And Friday the 13th!

1. Less to say about this one. It was a tough watch. The snake that gets killed early on is real — which, bummer, I watched Friday the 13th instead of Halloween because I heard a dog dies in Halloween, but the real life dog is A-OK. And, you know, it’s not a very sensitive movie. Just a disclaimer, I guess.
2. It didn’t have a lot of plot. That’s not a knock on it, it’s sort of what I expected, but I didn’t expect the degree to which it’s just disconnected killings. More modern slashers, I feel like, try much harder to tie things together. Not to talk out of class or anything, but from some interviews I’ve read I feel like the director, Sean Cunningham, was really just pulling stuff out of his ass. Which worked, all things considered.
3. Carol J. Clover also pointed out how genre is similar to folklore, with “free exchange of themes” and “archetypal characters.” Sequels are “better taken as remakes than sequels.” I thought that was neat! All of Clover’s slasher scholarship is extremely neat! (Also, jumping back to Psycho, I’m interested in the interaction between an auteur “artwork” versus a folkloric genre. That, I think is the big big difference between Psycho and the slasher.)
4. One unmitigated positive: the score. Particularly the “ki ki ki, ma ma ma.” When I learned (just moments ago) that it’s from the syllables “kill her, mommy,” my heart sank because of how unimaginably dumb that is. Then it soared again, tetherball-like, because it’s actually extremely good. Ah, the human condition.