Evil

• The pandemic changed our perception of space so that places we usually take for granted suddenly fell under heavy scrutiny.
• Seeing the world from six feet of enforced social distancing, restrictions, closures and hygiene protocols redefined our daily haunts.
• Horror is a genre of extrapolation in which potential danger becomes certain death; it feeds and gets fat on worst-case scenarios.

The suffocating city

• Add to this the cramped, sweaty apartments and the even sweatier crowded frat parties that appear in the film itself, and Scream 6 is a movie rife with the big city hyper-claustrophobia many felt with COVID-19.
• April 2023 saw the release of a sweatier — and significantly bloodier — horror movie: Evil Dead Rise.
• Evil Dead mirrors Scream 6’s confined spaces and perspiring bodies and adds a dash of suffocating isolation, the whole film taking place in a decrepit, soon-to-be demolished apartment building.

Confined spaces

• In Evil Dead Rise, the parking garage in the basement offers only the tenuous promise of exit.
• Evil Dead also makes handy (and terrifying) use one of the most hyper-claustrophobic pandemic spaces of all: the elevator.

Moving up to the city

• The franchises have only this year made the switch to city life.
• With the exception of Army of Darkness, the Evil Dead movies have always taken place in remote forest cabins with routes to civilization severed.
• For many, living in a big city during the pandemic was a horror movie, especially for people with limited means who had no choice but to stay put and manage.

Killer without a face

• Perhaps: a horror movie where the killer has no identity and no intent.
• The Ghostface mask in Scream keeps the killer anonymous, while the evil presence summoned by the demonic book in Evil Dead chooses its victim at random.
• In Scream 6, a full subway train is a bloodbath waiting to happen, and in a busy supermarket no one is safe.

Unsafe intimacy

• Family is all the more complicated with the inclusion of children and the comforting lies their equally terrified parents must continue to tell them.
• In these films the façade of city safety is sliced open so that the rotting insides leak out.