Stranger Scream

Many people will tell you that spooky season ends today, but I am here to tell you that spooky season is always. There are more skeletons on earth than people, and inside each of us is a skeleton longing for freedom, plotting against the fleshy carapace that contains it. Spooky season is eternal, for the fight against our greatest enemy, the skeleton army sleeping beneath us, never ends. 

Anyway, there is finally a trailer for Stranger Things season five.

 

You know what is legit hilarious? Go back and watch the first season of Stranger Things and marvel at how SIMPLE it is. It’s just a kid missing kid story wrapped up in some spooky bits. There’s a mystery, yes, and absolutely the worldbuilding contains references to a much larger world than that of Hawkins, Indiana, but it is just crazy to look at how straightforward season one is and then watch this trailer and wonder how we got from there to here. I kind of feel like the series never really recovered from Eleven’s side quest to Chicago. 

I’m still going to watch, of course. However bonkers the show has gotten, I do love these characters. I want to see how it all turns out. I also want to see what happens to Steve Harrington. In re-watching season one, it is really striking how far he’s come as a character. I honestly think the glue holding Stranger Things is Joe Keery acting the hell out of Steve’s redemption arc.

I’m also SUPER curious to see how Netflix’s PR team handles press with David Harbour in the coming weeks. An actor going through a divorce is nothing, but Lily Allen read Harbour for filth on her new album, West End Girl, which includes so many unflattering details about the dissolution of her marriage to Harbour that she might have permanently killed his “zaddy” reputation with the internet. (In hindsight, their AD Open Door tour should have been a bigger red flag. No one who cares about their partner carpets the bathroom. You only carpet the bathroom if you hope your partner gets some kind of toe fungus.)

But Stranger Things is not the only spooky franchise using the peak of spooky season to advertise, as Scream 7 dropped a trailer, too. Sidney Prescott is back because Spyglass, the production company behind the Scream franchise, paid Neve Campbell her worth to return for the seventh entry into the franchise she launched.

 

I love Scream, always and forever, it was the defining slasher of my youth, and Scream 2 gets a pass for including Timothy Olyphant, but can we admit that, as a franchise, Scream is terrible? Scream 7 looks exactly like the Halloween franchise. That films series got a decent soft reboot in 2018 with Halloween but then went off the rails with Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends (Kills is the worst one by far). Scream 7 is giving me Halloween Kills vibes. I just don’t know how many excuses you can make for Ghostface to still be around stalking Sidney Prescott. Eventually there won’t be anyone left to be mad at her, the whole world will have been inducted into the parade of Ghostfaces.

Don’t look for logic! you shout, to which I say, they’re the ones insisting on a series of inter-connected killers. At least 2022’s Scream—still mad it wasn’t titled 5cream—and Scream VI attempted to move away from Sidney and to a new generation of victims (though still with connections to the original film), but with Campbell’s return to the franchise, we are once again being asked to believe that Sidney Prescott is an irresistible lure for serial murderers everywhere. At least in Halloween it’s the same guy returning to finish the job he started, in Scream it’s like Sidney is murder catnip, her mere presence causes a Ghostface to materialize as if summoned. 

Not unlike Stranger Things, it’s hilarious to go back and compare how simple Scream is compared to the franchise lore built over the next five films. It is the nature of long-form storytelling to morph and evolve and for worldbuilding to deepen, but similarly, some stories don’t actually have the narrative scaffolding to support such storytelling. Scream probably shouldn’t have run on this long, but good luck convincing a movie studio not to squeeze their golden goose so hard it asphyxiates. No one knows how to let anything end anymore.