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.