I am going to start this off by saying that I don’t think the acting is the problem in Scream 5 & 6. I have seen all of the actors in different things and know that they are incredible performers. I’m not going to be calling anyone wooden, or stiff, or bad because those are objectively not true statements. Melissa Barrera is a great final girl and leading actress, she absolutely bodies in Abigail, pun not intended. Jenna Ortega slays in every movie she’s in ever, and every TV show. They are not the issue on why these movies aren’t as enjoyable as their predecessors (and I only count Scream and Scream 4 in that category. You guys can shit on the new ones all you want, Scream 2 and 3 are ass.)
The problem with the new ones is that the writing is a tremendous downgrade from where it used to be. I try so hard to revisit these films because I want to like them, I want to find the same love I have for the first and fourth film in these new ones, but the terrible writing keeps sucking me out of the story and reminds me that, oh yeah, I’m watching a movie…a bad one at that. Nothing can save bad writing, I don’t care what anyone says, but good acting, good directing, and a good soundtrack can only go so far in compensating for some of the worst written scenes put to film.
And we can start with the obvious fact – these are tumblr original characters.
I am so glad that we millennials are now in big writers’ rooms, making our big projects, but can we please leave our fanfic ideas to just rot in our brain as what they are intended to be: romanticized nothings? The characters of Sam, Tara, Chad and Mindy really are just shells of their predecessors, adding nothing to the story besides a small nod to their origins. Also, they are all (besides Tara) related to characters from previous films – which can work, ie Jill Roberts, but it can also be really cringe and an apparent and obvious attempt at making audiences like them. These characters are like nepo hires, only here because of their famous parents. I’m honestly amazed Gale and Dewey didn’t have a kid who was a cop or a reporter, or Sidney wasn’t secretly Sam’s mom, that’s how embarrassingly forced the writing is.
And I feel the biggest victim to this shitty writing is the character of Sam, Billy Loomis’ secret, mentally ill daughter. Firstly, giving Billy Loomis a secret daughter is bad. It’s just bad, It’s giving ‘child original character fanfic’ vibes which, if you’re like me, no one liked reading about. Nobody cared what Billy’s kid was up to, we wanted to read about Billy. Secondly, that same daughter has schizophrenia (imagine, as a writer, demonizing this mental disorder in the year of 2024. Imagine that being your idea) and has to suppress the violent urges she apparently inherited from her father whom she also sees as a hallucination. Never mind that the “hallucination” is sentient and can help her out by pointing out physical things in a room, thereby making him by all accounts a ghost, but whatever. Sure.
Imagine putting that to screen. My friend said this, and I know it’s a popular take online as well, but it’s giving Betty on Riverdale having ‘the serial killer gene’. If the character of Sam wasn’t written by the hand of a 14 year old on tumblr way back when who simply wanted to be close to Billy, color me shocked. I have never, in my adult life, seen something so embarrassingly tween fanfic coded in a movie that wasn’t just fanfic brought to life, like the After series. And it’s such a dated, dated reference that is so quintessentially 2013 I am floored.
And the other characters don’t get off much better – Randy has a niece and nephew, Chad and Mindy, who are basically like if you spliced Randy down the middle and he got split into two people. They’re not written as charming as Randy, or as likable despite being inherently designed to be slightly off putting, and so instead it’s just Randy-lite. They, like their uncle, spout off movie facts and horror movie rules that the other characters need to abide by. One of these rules (I think it’s in 6 but who the fuck knows, these are both such ass movies) is that they are “the core four”, meaning nothing could happen to them. If a line like this was said in the first Scream, one of the core four would then immediately die, because it subverts your expectations. That’s the point. Well not in these movies, where it’s just true – nothing happens to these four little assholes. So why the fuck am I supposed to be emotionally invested? Should I care about the side characters aka the obvious plot fodder, knowing they will die because nothing can happen to the main four? It immediately robs me of any ounce of concern I could have had for these shitty replacements, which was exceptionally hard to muster in the first place because these characters are so one note.
Tara I haven’t mentioned yet but she’s also not great. She just exists and is annoying. Imagine if Sidney had a little sister who just constantly followed her around and yelled at her for things that were outside of her control. That’s Tara.
There are certain scenes I have softened on when I take off the nostalgia goggles; for instance, I used to hate the scene in Scream 5 where Mindy is watching the Stab movie (in universe Scream) that features her uncle’s death, with this weird version of nostalgia or something. But then I remember how fucking foul all of the original characters are about Casey’s death, or how Jill kills her own friends in the fourth film, so it’s also kind of like…yeah, that’s normal in the Scream universe. But I still had a reason to care about the characters in the prior films. Every character in the reboot seems to exist to just say, ‘remember this in the first Scream? Don’t you wish you were watching that instead?!’
Which, yeah, honestly. I do.
I think it would help if not every character was a descendant of an already existing character. While watching with a friend I made a comment, and I saw Amanda the Jedi make the same joke later, but the characters in this feel like Fast & the Furious – it’s about family. Why does Stu have to have a slimey nephew, only for that character not to matter and immediately get killed off? Why does Wes (plot fodder since that geek wasn’t one of the Core Four. Get wrecked, Wes) have to be Deputy Judy Hick’s son? Why is Chad, despite being Randy’s nephew, a clear stand in for Dewey now, being the guy who gets bodied in every movie but gives a thumb’s up at the end? I’ll tell you why – the writers cannot write good characters you would care about on their own. They have to tie them to beloved existing characters because these are not strong, likable, or well thought out. They barely have personalities except chunks of things you can apparently inherit from family, like a love of scary movies or the urge to murder. (Note, you cannot inherit those things).
Oh yes, that reminds me, the actual murderers in Scream 5 and 6. Major spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen these two movies yet which, bless you. Ignorance is bliss.
I’m gonna say right now, 6 is a rehash of Scream 2 with regards to the killers; they are the family of Richie, one of the killers from the fifth film. I’m starting off with this one because despite almost being a carbon copy of the second film, it’s the least offensive. Vengeful family is fine if you want to do that, and I can hardly say Scream 2 is the first movie to have angry, vengeful parent as the killer. It’s honestly exactly the same and way less interesting, but also way less convoluted (Billy’s mom killing people with the same name as the victims from the first Scream is one of the stupidest and most unnecessary plot details I have literally ever seen). While this is boring, it’s not nearly as bad Scream 5 which is a promising concept that falls victim to terrible, terrible writing.
The killers are Richie, Sam’s boyfriend, and Amber, Tara’s friend. Richie and Amber who met on Reddit, were sad at the way the Stab franchise had been going (which fuck you, making a dig at Jill Roberts like that) so they are going to give the stab writers new material to work with. Firstly, this was clearly a direct play on the Star Wars fandom, which is known to very toxic. It’s a commentary on stan culture and how awful that fandom can be – but that’s the thing, that’s an entirely different fandom. The horror community, as a whole, are not like Richie and Amber. They aren’t weird fanatics who harass actors or emulate the murders (for the most part, there are always a few who take things too far. But they are the rare exception). I thought the whole mantra of Scream was that movies didn’t make psychopaths, yet here we are blaming movies and fans. What a bizarre slap in the face to not only the actual Scream fandom, which is certainly one of the nicest I’ve seen by far, but also to the whole point of the Scream franchise. What the fuck is going on in the writer’s room, and why are the fans being punished both literally and metaphorically. I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that this is the best we can do with Scream when there are so many aspects of the horror movie commentary they could have commented on (true crime, for instance, would be a huge one). To make up a problem that predominately does not exist in the horror community and then make that the sole focus of the film really just emphasizes how Scream has lost it’s way. It no longer has it’s finger of the pulse on what is trending to satirize, or comment on.
At the very beginning of Scream 6, one of the Ghostface killers says, ‘who gives a fuck about movies’, and I believe that is writing team saying fuck you to what we once loved about the franchise. Because if anyone does give a fuck, it’s no one in that writer’s room.
I’m glad Melissa Barrera no longer has to be associated with what this franchise has become, and I hope she finds success elsewhere. I can’t imagine wanting to be the final girl on this sinking ship.