slasher

Maniac Cop (1988)

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After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.

Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.

In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.

-Brandon Ledet

Scream 7 (2026)

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I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I must offer thanks to United Airlines for offering the chance to legally and ethically see the film; now having watched it, I can confirm: it fucking sucks. 

After sitting out Scream VI, Neve Campbell returns in this one as Sidney Prescott, now living in Pine Grove, IN and running a cafe called The Little Latte. This means that she’s hundreds of miles away from Woodsboro when a new Ghostface murders a couple who have rented out Stu Macher’s old house, which has been turned into an AirBnB experience themed after the real-life Woodsboro murders and the Stab film franchise that mythologized them. Ghostface torches the place, symbolically burning down the old. In Indiana, Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named for her best friend who was killed all the way back in Scream, is dating a boy named Ben, who recreates the “Billy sneaks into Sidney’s window” scene from that film, although Sidney isn’t fooled for a moment. Despite what we all inferred (and the previous production teams confirmed) about Sidney’s husband being the Mark from Scream 3, we learn here that she’s married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans (Joel McHale). 

In addition to Tatum’s boyfriend Ben, we also meet the rest of her friend group: Hanna (Mckenna Grace), Chloe (Celeste O’Connor, who hasn’t aged or changed their hair style since Madame Web), and creepy next door neighbor Lucas, whose mother Jessica (Anna Camp) is Sidney’s only real adult friend that we meet. Sidney begins to get FaceTime calls from none other than the presumed long-dead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) just as a new Ghostface appears in Pine Grove to terrorize Sidney, her daughter, and her daughter’s friends. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears on the scene, with more recent franchise additions Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) in tow; her show has been cancelled, and she’s trying to climb her way back into relevance with the twins as her crew. Campbell’s fellow nineties mainstream teen actor Ethan Embry also appears as an employee of the mental institution where Stu has apparently spent the past three decades as an amnesiac John Doe before being released, just a couple of weeks prior to the events of the film. 

Scream is my favorite horror franchise, but it’s been well established that my favorite overall media empire is Star Trek, and there’s a quote from one of the producers of the ill-fated 2001 series Star Trek: Enterprise that I couldn’t stop thinking about all throughout Scream 7. I’ve been unable to relocate it, but I think it was Brannon Braga who said, in essence, that Enterprise failed because the shepherds of the franchise failed to consider that they needed a better reason to produce the series than “it’s time to go back to the well again.” The reason that Scream 4 and the two more recent sequels work so well is because they let the ground lie fallow for a while. Scream 3 (which was the worst of the franchise until this one, and even then was not without its inspired moments) ran everything into the ground, and by the time of Scream 4, there were all new elements of the horror genre to deconstruct. 5cream and Scream VI, likewise, justified their existence by playing with the relationship between legacy sequels, toxic fandom, and copycat killings. The franchise’s central conceit—that Ghostface is a mask anyone can wear and attracts people who are obsessed with horror media—is barely paid lip service here. Mindy mentions that this time, the killer is all about nostalgia, and Chad immediately shuts her down by saying that they’re not doing “the rules” this time because the idea is played out, which is the perfect microcosm of just how little care, thought, or effort mattered in the creation of Scream 7. This exists solely because it was time to go back to the well again, and boy, does it show, and it also does little to assuage accusations that this was an attempt to launder the franchise’s image in the wake of the Barrera controversy. 

The characters here are half-baked at best, and the performances are nothing to write home about, either. Isabel May is, as politely as I can put this, not a very good performer, and learning that Mckenna Grace was cast as early victim Hanna after auditioning for Tatum means that the producers passed on having Grace, who gives consistently strong performances, as Sidney’s daughter. That’s inconceivable! An unjustifiable whiff if ever there was one. When Mindy and Chad gather Tatum’s friend group to tell them that, statistically, one of them is likely a party to the killings, every person present is so thinly drawn that the audience knows they must all be red herrings (ironic, given that the actual killers are somehow even less developed, to the point that one of the actors portraying them had to beg for a couple more scenes of character development). Ben is a computer guy, so he might be able to pull off the potential deep-faking of Stu Macher; Lucas is deep in the “true crime lexicon” and is overly invested in the Woodsboro murders; and Chloe, um, has a crush on Lucas. That’s it! In 1996, Scream up-ended what had become the de facto slasher formula of having a bunch of interchangeable teenagers dying at the hands of an implacable killer; in 2026, Scream 7’s teenaged characters are those interchangeable kids. The most memorable new character here is Jimmy Tatro’s ill-fated AirBnB guest who’s dead by the title card. 

It’s impossible to say where the overreliance on nostalgia in this franchise first entered as the series’ original sin. Scream VI could be argued to have started this, given that the killers in that film were recreating kills from the previous movies using actual collected murder weapons. 5cream addressed nostalgia and its effect on toxic fan culture in its text with relation to the in-universe Stab franchise, but the first Stab film was referenced all the way back in Scream 2, so it’s been a part of this narrative for a long time. Scream 3 may have been the first to take it too far, with the narrative revolving around the shooting of a Stab film. A case can be made for any of them, even the original film, but it is undeniable that there is now a clear winner for the film in which this is the most poisonous. Scream 7 has a moment in which Tatum comes downstairs wearing Sidney’s leather jacket from Scream 2, and the music swells in a way that makes it apparent that we’re supposed to have some kind of emotional investment in this piece of apparel. Not even the biggest Screamhead could make a rational argument that this was a look that needed to be inscribed alongside the actual iconic outfits from the franchise (which are, in order, Rose McGowan’s Tatum’s bosomy sweater, Drew Barrymore’s blonde bob and cozy fleece, and Courteney Cox’s horrible bangs in Scream 3). We have dug through the bottom of the barrel for things to reference. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the killer’s deepfake of Stu isn’t the only one that we see of a prior Ghostface. It makes sense that the AI Stu would be made to look as if he had continued to age since 1996, because he’s supposed to be Stu, or close enough to convince Sidney. Why the hell they didn’t bother to de-age Laurie Metcalf or Scott Foley for their cameos at the end would be a riddle for the ages, were it not for the fact that we know the answer: the film-makers were lazy, and they just didn’t care. 

Every interpersonal conflict here is contrived and unrealistic. The idea that Sidney would try to shield her teenage daughter from all of the horrors she faced at the same age, it absolutely holds no water that this would mean that she’d fail to protect her daughter from the reality that their family will never not be in potential danger from various legacy Ghostfaces. Tatum should be strong, fierce, and self-sufficient, not whining to her mother about her over-protectiveness. This might have worked had Grace been in the Tatum role, but May doesn’t have the chops for it, although she’s not alone in the crop of teen actors when it comes to having talent that fails to pass muster. Original Tatum showed more character and imagination in the garage scene alone than new Tatum does in this entire film. Gale and Sidney go live on TV at one point to try and draw “Stu” out, and Gale gets a rise out of Sidney by asking questions about her offspring, which causes Sidney to get defensive and rip off her microphone. This scene doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long-awaited reunion between characters we’ve known for decades, and instead feels like forced conflict, one that’s immediately dismissed when Sidney gets a call from an under-attack Tatum. Chad and Mindy barely even have a reason to be present, and Mindy’s sudden desire to be the new Gale Weathers is baffling. 

Scream 7 has precisely three good ideas. The first is the opening sequence; that the Macher house has become a bit of a shrine that is of interest to true crime obsessives is a fresh concept, and having a new Ghostface murder a couple of them on the spot is such a good opening that I’m surprised it wasn’t already used before. The second good idea is that the film features the death of one of the Ghostfaces in the middle of the second act, catching the characters and the audience off guard. It was such a refreshing change that I was pleased with it, until I remembered that this was just a variation on the opening from Scream VI. Even one of its few good ideas is just a rehash. Finally, what this return to the well brings to the table is the discussion of AI and deepfakes. Having Stu Macher return and there be a question as to whether it’s really him or someone using his likeness to torment Sidney is perhaps the only bold choice that Scream 7 makes, although it ultimately amounts to little more than the nostalgia bait equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby. There were countless different ways that this could have been incorporated, and better fit the Scream concept. Why not have the lead Ghostface pose as Stu Macher online to indoctrinate other would-be Ghostfaces, with the question of whether or not Stu remaining alive is the same? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of bringing Lillard back, why not have a plot point about members of the younger generation finding something that he pre-recorded, “movie rules for killers” on some VHS that a true crime collector discovers? It’s as bad a fumble as casting the lead of The Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight as Sidney Prescott’s daughter instead of Mckenna Grace. 

As a Scream fan, my nomination is that we all agree that the series ended with Scream VI. Sidney was safe and far away, there was a decent capstone of using all of the previous films without retroactively making them “connected” in an unbelievable way, and Kirby got her redemption. Gale was never going to be able to get direct vengeance for Dewey’s death since “Ghostface” is only an idea and not a being, but she got the closest she was ever going to. Sam and her sister put an end to their family’s killer legacy and walked off into the sunset. That’s more than good enough for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Faces of Death (2026)

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Many longtime Scream fans were horrified by what happened to their beloved slasher franchise this year, after the brand chose to self-implode rather than to employ actors vocally opposed to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Just a few months later, it turns out not to be such a big deal that Scream 7 was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show after all. The producers got what they wanted in reliable name-recognition box office returns from the politically apathetic masses, and the more discerning audiences who boycotted can now get what they want in the new Faces of Death: a reboot of a legacy horror franchise that questions the ways the genre has changed in the decades since its start. 2026’s Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least fifteen years. Notably, it does so by tracking the ways horrifically violent imagery has moved from the cineplex to our smartphones, including news footage of the aforementioned genocide.

Euphoria‘s Barbie Ferreira stars as a content moderator for a TikTok-style social media platform called Kino. She spends long, demoralizing days approving or disapproving user-flagged content on the platform, flooding her brain with the most heinous imagery & behavior her fellow humans can conceive & shoot. Much like with the original 1970s mondo movie Faces of Death, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to differentiate what violent content is simulated vs. what is authentic, pressured by her corporate higher-ups to avoid being overly censorious. The plot gets meta when she stumbles across an anonymous account that’s recreating the most gruesome scenes from Faces of Death “for real,” and she struggles to convince anyone in her life that she’s uncovered an active serial killer. When she takes this discovery to online message boards, she is subsequently abducted by that killer to star in his next viral video. Many flame-war social media posts and real-life bludgeonings ensue.

If the new Faces of Death has any overt shortcomings, it’s that it’s not nearly scary nor upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not to the desensitized eyes of a social media addict such as myself. That largely appears to be the point. Technically, this is a bloody bodycount slasher, but all of its payoffs are purely intellectual. Longtime collaborators Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) clearly took on the project as an opportunity to discuss the ways snuff-footage media akin to the original Faces of Death has become mundane thanks to the social media feeds that relentlessly overstuff our brains with real-life grotesqueries. There’s more meaning in the transition of its fictional news broadcast switching from vertical smartphone footage of a suicide to a fluff piece about a puppy shelter than there is in the cruelty of any particular kill. The movie isn’t especially scary, but it is remarkably thoughtful about the current corporate-sponsored hellscape we all willing enter every day through our phone screens.

That lack of genuine scares is no fault of its masked killer, played by Stranger Things‘s Dacre Montgomery. Covering both the ice-cold intellectualism of Hannibal Lecter and the perverse sensuality of Buffalo Bill, Montgomery’s Arthur is the total package. He’s converted his suburban McMansion into a makeshift movie studio, restaging scenes from Faces of Death because reboots are favored by the algorithm. He finds his own sense of style in the process too, murdering his victims via automaton contraptions constructed out of department store mannequins. He’s even transformed himself into a living mannequin of sorts, via skinsuits & masks, further removing himself from the violence he films for views. Everything is mediated through an artificial remove, to the point where his final showdown with Ferreira’s final girl mostly plays out on their individual laptop & phone screens even while they’re standing feet apart in the same blood-spattered room. It’s chilling to think about, even if it’s not especially scary to watch, unlike its namesake source of inspiration.

Faces of Death recently saw its local premiere at The Overlook Film Festival, where Goldhaber & crew gushed about how wonderful New Orleans is as a shooting location. Besides a brief throwaway scene set at a corporate crawfish boil on the lakefront, there isn’t much indicating that the story is set here, whereas most New Orleans movies make sure to toss in a few French Quarter scenes for local flavor. There’s probably some substantive commentary in there about the way screenlife has flattened all modern living to one locationless artificial world devoid of discernible local culture, as this is a movie entirely made of metatextual commentary about the current state of things. The Scream franchise used to think about these kinds of things too, before it devolved into cataloging the life & love soap opera milestones of Sidney Prescott, et al. Now you have to find your Slasher With Ideas kicks elsewhere, starting here.

-Brandon Ledet

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

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There is something both inevitable and unfathomable about there being a new I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel in wide theatrical release right now. Sure, the combination of Hollywood executives’ unquenchable thirst for name-brand IP and the relative dependability of horror cheapies to turn a tidy profit makes it seem like a no-brainer that this vintage 90s title would get the modern rebootquel treatment. It was pretty low on the priority list too, following a long parade of legacy horror sequels of varying quality in recent years, like Scream, Halloween, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Even so, the I Know What You Did Last Summer brand had already been downgraded to straight-to-streaming schlock in its little seen third & fourth entries, so it’s a little surprising to see the title claw its way back onto multiplex marquees. It’s especially surprising when you consider how little there is to the property beyond the recognizability of its title, which makes for easy, memorable parody in Scary Movie-type yuck-em-ups. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film is a by-the-numbers teen slasher with little bloodshed and little novelty. Its setting in a North Carolina fishing village provides some nice background texture for its otherwise indisticntive murder spree, justifying its hook-handed fisherman killer’s costuming beyond its connection to a timeless urban legend. By the second film in the series, it was already apparent that those details weren’t enough to keep the party going, since I Still Know What You Did Last Summer immediately jumped the shark by sending its teens-in-peril on the kind of Bahamas beach trip that usually arrives multiple seasons into a hokey sitcom like Saved by the Bell. That tropical island locale does little to distract from the fact that the series’ killer isn’t iconic enough to have earned a recognizable moniker by his second outing. You can’t even joke about I Still Know being subtitled The Fisherman’s Tropical Vacay or The Hook Man’s Island Getaway because no one would know what you’re talking about. When the killer’s teenage victims refer to him as “The Slicker Guy” deep into the third act, you can feel the whole brand falling apart from under you . . . and yet here we are, two more sequels and a televised series later.

The benefit of contributing to a legacy this bland is that it sets expectations low. No army of black t-shirted horror bros are going to be outraged about the blasphemous desecration of I Know What You Did Last Summer as a sacred object, not the way they were with more disastrous franchise refreshers like The Exorcist: Believer or the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street. That gives director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson free rein to be playful & flippant with the material, even if the exercise requires her to be absurdly reverent to the fabled events of 1997. Through reluctant re-unions, nightmare visitations, and a presumptuous sequel set-up stinger, the main casts of the first two I Know What You Did features return here for unearned moments of horror-icon spotlight: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and, briefly, Brandy. As is now legacyquel tradition, they help fill in a younger cast of imperiled teens on their initial bouts with the slicker killer, adding gravitas to previous outings by constantly referencing Trauma in therapy speak (in this case through classroom lecture and conversational references to The Body Keeps The Score). The 4th of July celebrations, fish-themed parade floats, department store mannequins, and town-hall beauty pageant stage of the original film are all treated with sacred reverence as if anyone would remember those details without having recently rewatched it as homework. Robinson undercuts that reverence with metatextual jokes about how “Nostalgia’s overrated” or how it’s not a viable plan to “fuck off to the Bahamas” to escape this particular killer, but those one-liners only go so far. Her bolder choice is to double down on the sassy, aggressive girliness of her straight-to-Netflix comedy thriller Do Revenge here, aiming her I Know What You Did sequel at teen-girl sensibilities instead of trying to please those teens’ aging Millennial parents. Considering that the first Last Summer movie excelled more as a teen melodrama than as a bodycount slasher anyway, it makes sense that this cutesy reboot would be rigorously engineered specifically “for the girlies and the gays.” What’s impressive is that it pulls off that girlish tone while still being the most violent entry in its series to date.

As with the original cast, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer crew is populated by young twentysomethings who are likely only famous to children (give or take whatever die-hard fans Chase Sui Wonders might have picked up from her turn as the least recognizable actor in Bodies Bodies Bodies). As with the original cast, they spend a reckless night partying on a public road by the fishing-village coast, leading to an anonymous stranger’s vehicular death. They do nothing to rescue or report in that moment of crisis, which seemingly leads to vengeance from beyond the grave the following summer, when a hook-handed killer in a fisherman slicker threatens them with notecards & puncture wounds. This reboot does not deviate from the narrative formula of the original, but it does deviate in tone & extremity. While the 1997 film kept most of its kills offscreen and cleanly preserved on fishing-boat ice, the new one leans into its R rating and throws in some additional fishing-themed tools of death to expand the killer’s arsenal: boning knife, anchor rope, harpoon gun, etc. Robinson also expands the horror-nostalgia scope to include allusions to other famous properties, borrowing the Jaws mayor’s refusal to postpone his town’s 4th of July celebrations, the Scream killer’s kitchen-island voyeurism, and some horror-nerd cred from references to podcasts like Colors of the Dark & This Ends at Prom. She balances out all of this genre-fan pandering by keeping the mood light, sassy, and gay. Same-sex couples, bisexual hookups, and a self-satisfied coining of the term “gentrifislaytion” align the film with other recent reclaimed-for-the-girlies horror titles like Do Revenge, Clown in a Cornfield, and 2021’s Slumber Party Massacre remake than traditionally macho horror-convention-bro fare. I don’t believe any of those titles are remarkably great films, but I also recognize that I am not their primary target audience. I was 12 years old when I watched the first I Know What You Did Last Summer in a suburban movie theater, duped into enjoying an afterschool-special melodrama about reckless driving because it was dressed up in the rain-soaked clothes of a post-Scream slasher. Today’s 12-year-olds now have a mediocre-to-everyone-else slasher of their very own here, just as lacking in distinct iconography but now doubly violent, fun, and queer-friendly. I think that’s beautiful.

-Brandon Ledet

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

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One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?

All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.

I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.

It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.

-Brandon Ledet

Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

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It has got to be frustrating for kids & teens that almost all youth-marketed pop culture these days is reheated leftovers from their parents’ generations. The kids-on-bikes YA horrors of yesteryear have been repackaged in overly nostalgic teen fare like the most recent iterations Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, and Goosebumps. Recent animated kids’ movies have brought Super Mario Bros, Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back from their 20th Century gravesites with updated pop culture references & Chris Pratt vocal tracks to appeal to the whole family, not just the children in the room. No wonder entire theaters full of sugar-addled middle schoolers are launching popcorn in ecstatic uproar for a “Chicken Jockey” meme reference in a Minecraft movie. I have no idea what a chicken jockey is, as I’ve never played the Minecraft video game, and that’s entirely the point. The kids deserve something of their own that has zero appeal for anyone over the age of 30, or the entire theatrical distribution system will die a slow death as Gen-Xers & Millennials age out of the moviegoing habit. I don’t know that the new teen slasher Clown in a Cornfield provides that fresh, much-needed teen appeal that’s missing from modern genre filmmaking, but it’s at least demonstratively aware of the problem.

Like most other YA horrors of recent decades, Clown in a Cornfield starts as a nostalgic throwback to a popular fad of yesteryear – in this case teen slashers of the 80s & 90s. Meanwhile, its setting & iconography pull as much influence from vintage Stephen King material as Stranger Things and the recent two-part adaptation of IT, blatantly positioned as a mashup of IT and Children of the Corn. You see, there’s something evil lurking in the cornfields of Kettle Springs, Missouri, and it’s taken the form of the local corn syrup factory’s birthday-clown mascot, Frendo. The local Gen-Z teens who find themselves at the wrong end of Frendo’s chainsaw anger the evil clown by making prankster YouTube videos mocking how scary he looks on the corn syrup’s advertising, setting up a clash between an ancient entity and Kids These Days’ newfangled online hobbies. Things get even eerier as the adults in town prove to be arbitrarily hostile towards the kids for merely existing, locking them up in afterschool detention, bedroom groundings, and literal jail cells for the slightest annoyances. By the time Frendo emerges from the liminal-space cornfield at the edge of town to massacre the teens at their annual barnyard kegger on Founders Day, it’s outright generational warfare, where the crime of being a teenager is an automatic death sentence.

The teens of Kettle Springs are vocally fed up with having to live in a world defined by their parents’ retro pop culture references. We meet the New Kid on the Block, Quinn (Katie Douglas), while she groans at her dad for half-mumbling the lyrics of an Eric B & Rakim track, reminding him that the 1980s is, mathematically speaking, just as outdated for her now as the 1940s was for him then. Later, when her new friend group of fun-loving Zoomer YouTubers is chased around her new hometown by a killer clown, their escape plans are frequently thwarted by their ignorance of older, more physical technology—namely, rotary phones & stick shifts—demonstrating that a disconnection from the past cuts both ways. When confronted with any “The problem with your generation is …” lectures from parents, teachers, and the local sheriff (an unusually macho Will Sasso), the kids spit back accusations of world-destroying apathy at those Gen-X grumps, laying out their motivations for declaring generational warfare in the clearest terms possible. The movie smartly lands on the teens’ side of that cultural debate, even if its violence is a little too safe and its soundtrack is a little too unhip to actually appeal to real-world teens. Maybe that means its appeal is most potent for a crowd slightly younger than its protagonist, which was exactly the case with the teen horrors of my own tween years way back when: I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, The Craft, Urban Legend, etc.

As the goofball title suggests, Clown in a Cornfield is foremost a horror comedy, finding ironic humor in these lethal intergenerational clashes. The title is fulfilled in the first three minutes of runtime, wherein two Gen-X teens are slain by Frendo in 1991, discovering his presence via the novelty squeaks and oversized prints of his clown shoes. As Frendo slashes, decapitates, and impales his way through Quinn’s Gen-Z friend group, their corn-syrup-thick blood fills the screen with convincing brutality, but the overall focus is on the teens-vs-adults culture clash, not on crafting memorable gore gags. The movie has a similar splatstick-satire energy as director Eli Craig’s earlier triumph Tucker & Dale vs Evil in that way, except maybe with fewer laughs per minute. Given the recent popularity of fellow killer-clown horror franchise Terrifier, it’s unlikely that there’s enough blood or cruelty here to satisfy teens who’re hungry for a memorably extreme, rowdy experience at the picture show with their dirtbag friends. Its YA patina means that it’s a little safer & healthier for their developing brains than the unbridled misogyny & general misanthropy of films like Terrifier, which is just about the last thing that audience wants to hear from a crusty adult like me. So, Clown in a Cornfield still ultimately appeals to parents more than kids, even while actively trying to combat that impulse. It’s cute, which makes it harmless, which makes it “cringe” to its target audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Buzz Cut (2022)

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There’s not a lot of information online about Buzz Cut, a New Zealand film from a couple of years ago that recently made its stateside debut. With most movies, you’ll see some variation between multiple synopses on different websites, but everywhere that the film has any online presence at all, the informative text is identical, from IMDb to the movie’s few sparse reviews to the description on Hoopla (where I found it): The Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem”) encounter a killer Bee Keeper in a crazy Kiwi horror-comedy that is part Animal House and part 80’s slasher movie. It sounds promising, especially since NZ churned out one of the best horror comedies of the last decade with 2014’s Housebound (directed by future M3GAN helmer Gerard Johnstone). More, the film has a great retro horror poster featuring the film’s slasher, an apiarist (that is, a beekeeper) wielding a chainsaw while surrounded by bees and featuring two great taglines: “By the time you hear the buzzing[,] it’s too late” and “Bee prepared, bee warned, bee scared!” Unfortunately, although there are a few pretty funny bits throughout, some great stylistic choices, and a fairly well-developed plot for a parody, the film’s tendency toward outdated, mean-spirited humor makes the film feel like a throwback in a bad way. 

Jemma is the newest member of the Hash House Harriers, a group of runners who meet up once a year to go on a nature run and spend some time getting sloshed in a cabin. Jemma is especially out of her depth here, since the co-worker who invited her has contracted a bug that renders him unable to participate that year, and the other dozen or so participants are all strangers to her, although not to each other. The main case feels large and unwieldy at first, since it’s naturally a pretty large crew owing to the nature of slashers meaning they’re going to have to start dropping like flies sooner or later. We get two introductions to all of them, the fist of which comes as the camera moves through the converted bus on which they’re en route to “The Hash” and labels each of them with their “hash names,” which range from raunchy puns (Wino-na Ride-Her, Sir Cum Navigator) to mocking insults (Mini-Schlong, Fugly Moa, Rigid Beef Whistle) to what I think are NZ references that are impenetrable to me (Gnarly Barney, Angry Dragon, Gorb). When the gang stops for a rest break, Sir Cum provides Jemma, who has yet to be given a hash name, additional introduction to the players via bits of exposition about each member of the group … and drops a transphobic slur right out of the gate. 

So … yeah — when the film cites one of its influences as Animal House, we’re not talking about the parts where Dean Wormer delivers a hilarious speech about why he wants to get rid of Delta House, or the food fight, or the guitar smashing, or the unbelievable series of events leading up to the fate of that poor horse, we’re talking about the parts where our heroes use the word “n*gro,” play fast and loose with sexual assault and statutory laws, and all the other things that have aged more and more poorly in intervening years. This kind of shit is often present in slashers of yore, but it feels like writer-director Martin Renner really overshot the mark with this retro throwback and ended up in territory that’s not difficult to watch because it’s offensive (which it is), but because it’s not very funny. It stands out in sharp relief to a lot of other good jokes in the script. There’s a particularly funny sequence where the group gathers and drunkenly (and stonedly) argue about social mores, eating habits, and pop culture in a way that betrays both their present inebriation and their intrinsic idiocy. Dim-witted pretty boy Gnarly Barney mistakes Mini-Schlong’s statement that he’s a pescatarian as a profession of faith; Sir Cum is furious that Schlong believes that Deckard is a replicant; Barney confuses Stephen Hawking and Stephen King, and Angry Dragon is stuck on the idea that Star Trek star DeForest Kelley was somehow involved with the clearcutting of the Amazon because she’s hung up on his first name. It’s proof positive that the talent behind this film are not without comedic insight and ability and that they could have produced a funnier movie if they had reined in some of the bits that push past humorously raunchy into retch-inducing territory and cut all the racist shit. 

The film called to mind The FP, another independently produced parody of bygone genre gems, and another which wore its filmmaking competence on its sleeve while being mired down in making cheap jokes that punch down. There are some great stylistic choices here that betray a cleverness that carries over into the script, but only, like, 50% of it. I particularly like the use of old-timey black & white interstitials that explain the hash, and the bit where the pranksters in the group have to navigate the presence of two separate “local farmer with ominous warning” archetypes. In another callback to the cheapy horror flicks of yesteryear, there are two distinct scenes with gratuitous partial frontal nudity, and as the second takes place at a strip club visited in flashback, the characters gathered around to hear this story mock the teller for the unnecessary setting and narrative focus. It’s not that there’s nothing here to enjoy, but I’ve really skipped over a lot of things that are just awful. For instance, one of the runners is a New Zealander of Chinese descent, dudded out as a Rastafarian and going by the hash name “Bruce Ma Lee” (get it?). In one of his very few scenes, his every line of dialogue consists solely of describing the shapes of clouds as various couplings and copulations of his clubmates using language that is as puerile as it is exaggeratedly “broken.” Although there are many things about it that I wish I could recommend, you only get four free borrows from Hoopla a month, and I wouldn’t burn one of them on Buzz Cut. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Candy Land (2023)

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Whether it’s to avoid dating itself with the rapidly evolving technology of smartphones & social media or if it’s to avoid the practical problem-solving that modern tech offers, a lot of contemporary horror drags its settings back to earlier, grimier eras of the genre’s past.  Personally, I’m getting bored with how much current horror product is an echo of 1970s grindhouse & 1980s neon sleaze. That nostalgic impulse is getting really shortsighted in its avoidance of documenting & processing the world we actually live in now, if not outright cowardly & lazy.  So, if most contemporary horror has to live in the past for narrative convenience, I’m going to be more excited to see movies set outside that genre heyday of the first slasher wave.  For instance, the recent slasher prequel Pearl is inherently more interesting than its grimy sister film X, since its own tongue-in-cheek genre pastiche of Technicolor melodramas is way less familiar & less overmined than the grindhouse Texas Chainsaw riff it followed.  The same goes for the truck stop sex worker slasher Candy Land, which is set in the grunge & grime of the mid-1990s, after the first slasher wave crested and the second, meta-comedic wave began post-Scream.  As soon as the film opens with a montage of transactional sex scenes set to Porno for Pyros’ “Pets,” it already feels like a much-needed break from the digitally added 1970s grain and the Carpenter-nostalgic 1980s synths of its fellow low-budget festival horrors, which have long been a matter of routine.

What endears me most to Candy Land‘s grunge-90s setting is that it doesn’t appear to be nostalgic about past horror trends at all.  It’s instead nostalgic for the film festival boom of the Sundance era that made names like Soderbergh, Araki, and Haynes stars of the indie scene.  Candy Land starts as a very cool, loose hangout dramedy about the daily rituals of truck stop sex workers (or “lot lizards” in CB radio lingo) before it gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic slasher to pay the bills.  The true glory days of independent filmmaking are over, and most low-budget productions that want to score wide distribution have to resort to flashy genre gimmicks to earn streaming sales on the festival market.  And so, we have a workplace drama that opens with sex work and ends with murder, holding back the necessary kill rhythms of a body count slasher as long as it can until it’s time to deliver the goods.  Unlike most slashers that dive headfirst into the bloodbath, that delayed payoff allows you space to care about the characters in peril: a good-girl-gone-bad played by The Deuce‘s Olivia Luccardi, a sweetheart hedonist gigolo played by X‘s Owen Campbell, a shit-heel sheriff played by Sliver‘s Billy Baldwin, etc.  There’s a built-in tension & danger in the main characters’ profession that makes for a great horror setting (something it’s most frank about in an extensive, brutal scene of male-on-male rape), but writer-director John Swab appears to be more interested in making a truck stop Working Girls than a truck stop Friday the 13th.  I admire his practicality.  Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding. 

Candy Land excels more in its minor character observations than in the tension release of its cathartic violence.  It’s set in an insular world where all sex is transactional, all sexuality is fluid, and all cops are bastards.  The truck stop brothel has a grunge-fashionista uniform of leather jackets, acrylic nails, booty shorts, and heavy metal t-shirts.  The girls shower, menstruate, and parade puffs of pubic & armpit hair in defiantly casual, thoughtless exhibitionism.  There’s a pronounced overlap in the rules & rituals of working the truck stop and the rules & rituals of the fundamentalist Christian cult Luccardi’s newbie abandoned to get there, both with their own built-in, complex lingo.  There’s also some unmistakable political commentary in which of those two insular cults proves to be harmful to the community at large – first to the johns, then to the workers.  Its Christmastime setting underlines the tension between those two warring worlds with a bitter irony that’s been present in the slasher genre as far back as its pre-Halloween landmark Black Christmas.  The movie might have been more rewarding if it didn’t have to sweep aside its observations of social minutia to make room for bloody hyperviolence, but I doubt it could’ve been widely distributed or even made at all without that genre hook.  At least Swab didn’t default to the industry’s current go-to setting for that horror hook; he instead recalls a brighter time in indie filmmaking when you could make a notable, low-key sex worker drama without having to hit a specific body count metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Sick (2023)

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Besides maybe the horny-old-biddies football comedy 80 For Brady being inexplicably set in 2017, the new straight-to-Peacock slasher Sick is likely to be the most conceptually bizarre period piece of the season.  The COVID-19 pandemic might be waning, but it is still ongoing, which makes screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s decision to set Sick in the early-pandemic days of Spring 2020 a little confusing, if not outright immoral.  COVID-themed horror that takes advantage of the pandemic’s of-the-moment novelty and finance-forgiving social isolation is now a three-year-old gimmick at this point, with early standouts like the excellent screenlife ghost story Host getting produced & released in the same timeframe when Sick is set.  So, why would Williamson bother stepping outside his highly successful slasher franchise Scream to dial the clock back to those early COVID days, when that’s already such an overcrowded market?  Apparently, it’s because he’s been itching to complain about people who are a little too zealous & militant about mask-wearing, social-distancing safety measures in public life, and he couldn’t be satisfied venting about it in a Facebook rant like every other Gen-X crank, so he made a feature film instead.

In its opening hour, Sick appears to take the ambient terror of COVID very seriously, likening it to the intangible menace of horrors like Final Destination, The Happening, and Skinamarink.  Again, this is a period piece set in the early wiping-down-your-groceries era of the pandemic, when coherent public understanding of how COVID spreads—let alone vaccines—had yet to formulate.  There’s an oppressive paranoia in all public life that’s distinct to that era, illustrated by how a single cough in a grocery store has all other shoppers shooting daggers in your direction.  The tension is instantly high, and the vibes are instantly bad, which is a great start for a lean, low-budget slasher with only 80 minutes of playtime.  It’s also a great excuse to isolate a slasher’s teens-in-peril victims, who plan to ride the pandemic out by self-quarantining in a cabin in the woods.  The knife-wielding killer who stalks them also comes pre-masked, as was the fashion (and legitimate safety precaution) of the time.  All of this COVID-based terror is cleverly considered, but once the killer’s face & motives are revealed, Williamson’s screenplay devolves from we’re-all-in-this-together societal camaraderie into bitchy “Some of you are taking this pandemic stuff a little too seriously” apathy, and all of the tension gives way to eyerolls & jerk-off motions.

As often as Williams is determined to step on rakes in the last few pages of his screenplay, a lot of Sick‘s faults are smoothed over by DTV action director John Hyams’s knack for bone-crunching impact & small-scale visual spectacle.  The novelty of COVID horror is fading, and the basic tropes of the home-invasion slasher are so familiar that Williamson made a name for himself mocking them in a meta-horror franchise nearly three decades ago, but Hyams manages to make Sick feel consistently thrilling & surprising from moment to moment.  Yes, we have already seen Jason Voorhees emerge from Crystal Lake as an unkillable ghoul, but have we ever seen him thrust his blade at victims from under the water, like a deadly-sharp Jaws fin?  Yes, we’ve already seen teens chased around a remote cabin after enjoying a few hand-rolled joints, but rarely with such creative, dynamic blocking & fight choreography – since most independent first-wave slashers of that ilk were made by youngsters who enjoyed a few beers & joints on-set themselves.  Honestly, Sick has all the hallmarks of a classic slasher: style, efficiency, brutality, novelty, and boneheaded reactionary politics that sour nearly all of those merits.  According to that scorecard, Hyams has acquitted himself, Williamson has embarrassed everyone and, as is always true, Jane Adams (whose role I won’t spoil) deserves better.

-Brandon Ledet

Sissy (2022)

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I saw a good number of my favorite movies of the year (so far) at Overlook Film Fest in June, which is usually the case.  The programming at that annual horror festival is unmatched by any other local fest I can name, as long as you’re a fully committed genre nerd who doesn’t pay much attention to the Awards Prestige dramas of the fall.  It’s also condensed to a single weekend in early summer, which means it’s impossible for me to catch every movie I want to see in the program. So, I often spend the half-year after Overlook catching up with titles I missed during the festival (which almost invariably pop up on the streaming platform Shudder at one time or another).  Often, I feel validated in which movies I opted to skip at the fest (i.e., She Will), but every now and then there’s a fun little novelty like Sissy that I wish I had seen with a crowd.  It’s always hard to tell how much of an enthusiasm boost I’m giving to movies based on the horror-nerd fervor of the festival, but I do suspect that Sissy killed in the room at Overlook, and I would have loved to share in that joy.

In micro-subgenre terms, Sissy offers an Australian splatstick comedy version of the modern social media thriller. Let’s call it Heavenly Tweetures, Ingrid Goes Down Under, Aussies Aussies Aussies, whatever you like.  It references cult sitcom Kath & Kim in its opening minutes, so you immediately know that it’s filling an Australia-specific niche.  At the same time, its story of a “mental health” social media influencer who becomes a homicidal maniac when she reunites with her childhood bully is a fairly standard-issue template for its genre.  Sissy only Aussifies that template in its irreverent tone & practical-effects gore.  There’s a Dead Alive tinge to its head-crunching kills that makes for a good, goofy time even when the movie is at its most brutal.  That buoyancy seeps through its ironic Disney princess musical score, its Blood Brilliant Tampons™ visual jokes, and its adoring Love Island reality TV parodies; but it’s the gore gags I most would’ve wanted to experience with a crowd.  They’re delighfully vicious, and they’re ultimately what makes the movie special.

There really isn’t much to Sissy‘s social media satire that you can’t find elsewhere.  The titular killer’s addiction to the endorphin rush of notification chimes and her sociopathic ability to alternate between self-care rhetoric & spon-con abuse of her self-appointed position as a mental health authority are familiar to anyone who’s drawn to this kind of material.  I’d even argue that the other notable social media satire at this year’s Overlook, Deadstream, did a much better job of squeezing laughs out of that exact Youtuber brain-rot persona.  There’s a sincerity to Sissy‘s central drama that you won’t find in Deadstream, though, from its nostalgia for childhood BFF kinship to the anxiety-inducing horrors of joining an established adult friend group midstream.  If there’s any incisive social commentary to be found here, it might be in the #terminallyonline understanding of morality where everyone falls into one of two categories: “A Good Person” or “Cancelled.”  It’s when Sissy desperately, violently strikes out to avoid becoming “Cancelled” that the movie evolves into its ideal form: a flippantly funny slasher, not a thoughtful social treatise.

If watching a mental wellness YouTuber become Jokerfied at the first threat of getting cancelled appeals to you, Sissy is a hoot.  That premise is very appealing to me, so I’m not sure why I didn’t prioritize it at Overlook the way I did with Deadstream.  Frankly, I should be cancelled for the offense.

-Brandon Ledet