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Scream 6 and generational sibling Scream 2 (1997) have most in common the ways they represent major steps up from their direct predecessors. 2 was released less than a year after the original movie — refreshing then and still for being the in–rare–company slasher movie whose thrills were partially couched in a meta, self-referencing sense of humor — and successfully doubled down on the things that had made it great. The comedy effectively upped the ante on the winking-and-nudging cleverness; the stalk-and-slash sequences were gnarlier and more inventive, too. 

Scream 2 had to navigate the tricky challenge of demonstrating that an invigorating change of pace for the long-anemic slasher movie could still invigorate. Functioning both as a reboot of a long-dormant franchise and a long-delayed sequel, last year’s Scream 5 had to contend with similarly difficult burdens, implicitly tasked with trying to get us to reconsider its unquestionable unnecessariness and also proving, considering the franchise’s meta bonafides, that it had something meaningful to say about the state of horror as well as the tiresome trend of dead properties being revived mostly to exploit the sentimentality of the nostalgic. I mostly liked it. But it was also more worried than it needed to be about seeming smart, and I couldn’t help but feel that its self-consciousness prevented it from getting into the kind of groove that could make it work on its own terms.

Read the full column, on Scream 6 and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, on 425.