Having survived the tragic events in Woodsboro, Sam and Tara Carpenter move to New York. Tara is intent on living a normal life and putting it all behind her, while Sam worries that a new assassin may be targeting her and wants to protect her younger sister. When reports of murders by assassins disguised as Ghostface begin to spread, Sam joins Detective Bailey, Kirby Reed and Gale Weathers to organize a team and defend against the threat.
Surprisingly having reached the sixth chapter, Scream is faced with the usual obstacle to overcome, while having to keep the tension alive and overcome the sequel skepticisms.
First episode not set in Woodsboro and without its historic protagonist, Sidney Prescott, Scream VI moves to the metropolis and tries to show us how illuminated avenues and small apartments can hide pitfalls equal to those of provincial houses. By its strongly meta-cinematographic nature, Scream has always been condemned to play upside down. Born in 1996 as a meta-horror, conceived by Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek) and directed by Wes Craven (Nightmare, The last house on the left), aware of what the genre had represented in the previous decade, Scream codified the concept of self-reported horror film, which deals with the mechanisms of horror cinema and dissects them, similarly to what Ghostface does on its victims.
The famous “rules” and “priorities” – who dies last, what not to do to avoid getting killed, etc. – have become a trans-generational cult, exceeding the value of individual films, the details of which few remember, outside the circle of die-hard fans. In order to offer new scares, the screenplay can only twist itself into reasoning about itself and its own myth, about the power of emulation as a new story-telling, using Stab, the film within the film, i.e. the version of Scream that exists in the diegetic plane of the film and is inspired by the bloody events that took place (which are news there).
Together with this intellectual game, however, the film has the commercial need to address a target of teenagers and not resign to senescence, a fact which leads to limiting the complication of theoretical conundrums in favor of a “healthy” slasher entertainment, based on violent killings and repeating situations until the inevitable – but often disappointing – telltale twist. And that leads to insisting on a cast that winks at several generations, but favors the teen side (Jenna Ortega) over the boomer side (Dermot Mulroney, who overloads her characterization to the extreme, Courteney Cox or the ex-teen idol Hayden Panettiere).