Abigail (2024)

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Alisha Weir

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I had nominally avoided it during its theatrical release last year, as Dracula’s Daughter (1936) was easily one of my least favorite of the Universal monster movies. But, then Beyond the Caving in the Woods comes a-calling, and one of these days I may have seen all the horror movies.

Did I Like It: I’m left mostly bewildered by the film. Had it committed to its original idea and indeed been a remake of Dracula’s Daughter, it might have accomplished a number of things previously just out of reach. It would have the been the best possible type of remake, taking a previous film that didn’t work and improving things. It could have also been Universal’s attempt—the fourth one, by my count—in recent years to make a shared monster universe.

But it isn’t either of those things. It barely manages to answer the pitch of “Reservoir Dogs (1992) but Lawrence Tierney turns out to be a vampire and also, there’s a little bit of Home Alone (1990) in there as well.” It accomplishes that excessively busy goal only so much as it ticks off those disparate elements in a perfunctory fashion. I didn’t think I’d get to the end of this longing to watch Dracula’s Daughter, but I definitely didn’t feel like I got anything out of the film that I wouldn’t have gotten from watching Reservoir Dogs, Home Alone… or any of the other attempts Universal has made to light the Dark Universe.

The humor of it all doesn’t quite connect, characters react in awkward ways to everything happening in the film, and at the risk of offering spoilers, I had to look at a plot synopsis to really understand that Joey (Barrera) wasn’t made into a vampire in the film’s climax.

It’s a mess. It may be a mildly likable mess, but it is still a mess.

Scream VI (2023)*

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Jenna Ortega, Mason Gooding

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, brand new. Well, sort of brand new.

Did I Like It: No review of this film will probably be complete without reckoning with the elephant steadfastly refusing to enter the room, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott**. Campbell’s  decision to not participate in the film did nothing to remove her from the suspect list. That the filmmakers were still able without skipping a beat to get this film into theaters inside of a year after the release of Scream (2022) tells me pretty clearly that Sidney was not a vital part of this story. Watching it unfold makes it pretty clear that the film probably wouldn’t have room for her. Campbell claims that she was being undervalued by the franchise she has brought so much to in the past, and in a series where it is important to not believe much of what we are told, I believe her completely.

That aside, I find this new film to be an exercise in half measures. The opening sequence—with Ghostfaces upon Ghostfaces being hunted by other Ghostfaces—is promising to the point that I think the series may have found a new lease on life that I was never completely convinced had been earned in last year’s entry. What’s more, spending time with the new “core four” characters this time was so engaging that I doubled down on my desire for six more Screams to come. This doesn’t even cover the fact that Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox, the only original cast member to return, even though I have sneaking suspicion that Matthew Lillard is in a cell somewhere, waiting for Scream 7–Sceaivii?—to come find him) gave Ghostface the fake out we all didn’t know we had been waiting for for nearly thirty years.

And then the ending happens, and most (but not all) of that promise goes up in smoke. Difficult to talk about the ending of a Scream without playing all of the available spoiler cards, but it’s a little disappointing that the new character played by the most famous actor in the cast winds up being behind it all. That’s a rule that will get you to solution of most crime procedural episodes before the second commercial break. That the whole affair ends up being a barely warmed-over rehash of the series-best Scream 2 (1997) doesn’t help anything. And the fact that both the protagonists and the villains of the piece could all come together and agree that Sidney Prescott should not be bothered right now strains the credulity of even the most naive of moviegoers. Namely, me.

Maybe we did need Sidney and Neve Campbell after all.

*Or is the title really SCREAIVI? I’m honestly not sure.

**Which I absolutely typed as Sidney Bristow originally. Thank Wes Craven that I was able to catch that one before sending the review to the press.

Scream (2022)

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Where Scream 4 (2011) seemed like it didn’t have enough targets and not enough time had passed since the original films to have much of anything to say about how horror and movies have changed in the ensuing years, there are an army of legacy sequels to fuel this film’s runtime, to say nothing of an ongoing, tense meditation between the more confectionary pleasures of slasher films and the rise of so-called elevated horror. 

At the beginning of this, the fifth film in the Scream series, the idea of continuing the series felt like a bit of a chore for this viewer. Indeed, had I not been on the upswing of my Beyond the Cabin in the Woods renaissance, I probably would have been content to miss this one. I’m glad I didn’t. The mystery of just who is the killer is played exceedingly well, to the point where I dismissed my initial, correct instincts. “It can’t be the boyfriend! They already did that,” I told myself, stupidly. Every ounce of the movie is designed to subvert expectations, right from the moment that the first idiot who decides to pick up a landline call in the 2020s actually makes it to the end of the picture.

Additionally, I have ultimately given up the ghost(face) on seeing Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell, winning this year’s “Mark Hamill in Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) award for barely showing up in the a legacy sequel, despite being integral to the film’s advertising) be the killer in one of these movies. It’s never going to happen, and now I can make my peace with the fact that it will never happen. I’m glad that there can be a horror movie legacy character who has mastered the ability of not letting their trauma dominate them. It’s just another subversion of expectation from a franchise built, at its best, on the idea.