Scream Queens Trailer: A Highly Stylized Horror Show

The creators of Glee and American Horror Story have brought highly stylized, high camp quick quips and bloodshed to the tenets of an old-school sorority slasher in the Scream Queens trailer.

When the actual details of Scream Queens’ plot were revealed, it sounded very familiar to slasher fans. A horrible past deed haunts the present on a college campus in the form of a gimmicky masked killer (the Red Devil, the Scream Queens school mascot). Here, such tried-and-true elements meet the work of Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy, who inject highly stylized dialogue and aesthetic into series like Glee and American Horror Story, often swirling cameras around acerbic quips (“Pissy Spacek”) from queen bees like Jessica Lange and Emma Roberts.

In Scream Queens, original Halloween heroine Jamie Lee Curtis takes the authoritative bitch mantle from the likes of Jane Lynch and Jessica Lange (Murphy and his JL’s, huh?) and contends with the young Roberts and Abigail Breslin as the leaders of an elitist sorority by thrusting the school’s outcasts on them. One (Skylar Samuels) also boasts an old hallmark: her mother was an alum.

Murphy previously explained, “It opens in a flashback to 1995 at the sorority where something horrible happens. It’s a mystery that goes unsolved. Flash forward 20 years to today, and it looks like someone is out for revenge. Something horrible happened to a pledge and on the anniversary of that crime, someone is out for vengeance.” 

It seems a pastel massacre ensues, with stalk scenes and lawnmower kills to boot. Scream Queens premieres on FOX this fall.