Scream VI

It seems churlish to criticise a Scream sequel for being so relentlessly self-referential. After all, the entire series is built out of its characters' acute awareness that the slasher movies they have experienced as viewers can now be used as ammunition against the costumed assailants trying to stab them. The frazzled lectures of each film's terminally aware film freak then function as pitch meetings: the fiction itself speaking to its audience about how they can expect events to be framed from that point on. They either lay out all the twists and turns, with an ironic inflection, or firmly establish a daunting step-by-step that will then be subverted. By Scream VI though, co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, this sustained commitment to metatextual reproduction has transformed into navel-gazing. Despite a New York setting, this is a strangely routine sequel. An instalment happy to churn, adoringly, through the sights and sounds of its own immediate predecessors rather than, say, the 1970s and 1980s horror films that defined the (by now long forgotten) tape rental era. So while Wes Craven's Scream 2 might have featured a sequence based around screenwriter Kevin Williamson's memories of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Scream VI simply regurgitates the invincible supporting cast and university setting of its own ancient ancestor, Scream 2.