Ghostface’s go-to creepy phone question is, “Do you like scary movies?”
Increasingly our reply to Wes Craven’s masked serial killer is, “Yes! Unless, of course, it’s another ‘Scream’ sequel.”
Oh, how tedious this once delectable film series has become. What started in 1996 as a clever and frightening send-up of the horror genre with appealing young stars has stumbled klutz-like into mediocrity, cuteness and groan-worthy predictability.
Some say campy. I say snooze-o-rama.
Well, lucky us, a perfect storm of events went down this week that made me scream with joy.
Actress Melissa Barrera, who’s appeared in the previous two movies as Sam — pretty much Sidney Prescott 2.0 — was fired from “Scream 7” for pro-Palestine social media posting that the film’s studio, Spyglass Media, said “flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”
And her co-star Jenna Ortega, who played Sam’s little sister Tara, was revealed not to be returning for “7” reportedly due to her demanding shooting schedule for the Netflix series “Wednesday.”
Your popular, young leads are out the door, so it’s time to call it quits and spare us another one of these duds, right?
Wrong. According to Deadline, writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick are headed back to the drawing board to create an entirely new story (insofar as one can) that could incorporate past stars who’ve already popped into the reboot movies with all the energy of Madame Tussauds wax figures, including Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox.
Getting Campbell onboard again would be a tall order. The 50-year-old actress appeared in the fifth movie but opted against returning for the sixth when the studio’s salary offer wasn’t high enough.
“I did not feel that what I was being offered equated to the value that I bring to this franchise, and have brought to this franchise, for 25 years,” she told People.
Campbell also hates that the filmmakers killed off David Arquette’s Dewey.
“I was so sad about Dewey’s death,” Campbell said this month at Monster-Mania Con. “I thought it was tragic, and I don’t usually like to criticize the writing in these projects.”
Even if Campbell and Cox agree to come back to do battle with Ghostface once more, why bother? Here’s a better idea than begging former stars to make stilted cameos — just kill off this series for good. Its best days are far behind it.
In the 2020s, “Scream” is nothing more than soothing millennial nostalgia bait. A cinematic Ring Pop. And anything that was ever cutting-edge about it has long since gone dull. The only thing terrifying about “6” was how crummy a job they did making Montreal look like New York City.
As cinematic horror has excitingly forged ahead, “Scream” is still stuck bragging about its flip phone.
The genre is at its rip-roaring best when it fully embraces the present, like “Get Out” and “M3GAN” so brilliantly did.
“Scream 6,” I grant you, performed well at the box office, grossing $169 million worldwide. But some of that success can be attributed to Ortega’s growing popularity. And a seventh chapter doing gangbusters business is hardly guaranteed.
Audiences can be fickle and particularly discerning when it comes to scary movies. Look at the recent “Halloween” reboot trilogy — the longer it chugged along, the more its box-office take slid.
And Universal coughed up a mammoth $400 million for the rights to make three “Exorcist” films, only for “The Exorcist: Believer” to gross $135 million worldwide and score dreadful reviews in October.
Instead of letting “Scream” befall a similar fate, Ghostface should ghost us pronto.