Scream VI directors say the series can’t just focus on horror anymore

polygon.com:

The Scream series has released a critically and commercially successful installment in each of the last four decades, which makes it easily one of horror’s most impressive and enduring movie franchises. The most recent movies in the self-aware slasher series are very conscious of that status. While the Scream franchise’s penchant for meta commentary was originally laser-focused on parodying slashers, the 2022 Scream and its sequel, Scream VI, focus more on skewering franchises and IP. According to Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who directed both of the newer Scream movies, it felt necessary to leave horror behind a bit in the new world of superheroes and blockbusters.

“I think that while certainly a Scream movie has to and should talk about the genre, there’s a little bit of a wider net to cast,” Gillett told Polygon. “And I think that is simply because those movies are much more a part of our lives — those big kinds of blockbuster IP, that’s the reality of what’s sitting in theaters now. And so I think you can’t make a movie that’s meta and hoping to talk about entertainment culture, and not fold those things into the conversation.”

Despite the move toward the larger world of blockbusters, Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin aren’t worried about losing the slasher soul of the Scream franchise — a movie with this many deaths earns its horror cred naturally.

“I think part of that is just in the DNA of a Scream movie, because you have a ‘slasher,’ Ghostface,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “I think it always goes back to the slasher. [...] We’ve kind of gone on from there, but I think what makes a great slasher for us is somebody with a knife, and a bunch of people trying to get away from that knife.”

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