Shock Till You Drop’s Scream Queens Review
On paper, Scream Queens is your basic old-school horror throwback: a masked maniac is killing the members of the most exclusive sorority on campus. And frankly, there is not a lot more to it, but thats okay.
Chanel (Emma Roberts) is the queen bee of the exclusive Kappa Kappa Tau sorority. Apparently there are only three other girls in the sorority, and they go by Chanel #2, Chanel #3, and Chanel #5 (there was a #4 but she bailed). Dean Munsch (Jamie Lee Curtis) has just taken over as the head of the school, and she hates the Greek system – especially Kappa house. In addition to the usual sorority problems of underage drinking and drug use, Kappa has a history of horror. Last years Kappa president was maimed when her tanning spray was replaced with acid. Twenty years earlier, in 1995, a girl bled to death in a bathtub after birthing a baby she didnt know she was pregnant with. When Munsch finds out that she cant pull the sororitys charter immediately, she does the next best thing: force Kappa to accept any student who wants to pledge. That means the pretty, rich, snobby girls decline to pledge, and Kappa is left with the dregs of school society.
The remaining pledges include our heroine Grace (Skyler Samuels), a pretty freshman who is pledging Kappa in honor of her mother, a former Kappa who died when Grace was two; Zayday, Graces boisterous, African-American roommate; Hester, a girl with scoliosis and a full neck brace; Tiffany, a deaf girl with an unhealthy obsession with Taylor Swift; Mac or Butch (Chanel doesnt know), a hardcore womens libber who believes that all heterosexual sex is tantamount to rape; and Jennifer, a candle vlogger with no friends who is brought in to pledge by the dean. Naturally, Chanel and her minions are not happy about this turn of events, so she cooks up a fake murder plan to scare the pledges away. But the fake murder turns real (maybe) and a mysterious devil-masked killer starts stalking the nubile coeds.
When watching the first two episodes of Scream Queens, it is hard to know just how serious to take it. Yes, I know it is described as a horror/comedy, but the comedic elements are not actually laugh-out-loud funny. Instead, the comedy is big, obvious, loud, and uncomfortably close to the truth. Chanel is the Ultimate Mean Girl, who calls the sorority house keeper white mammy; who wants to make sure no fatties or ethnics join Kappa; who screams hysterically at baristas who challenge her perversely complicated latte order. The character lacks subtlety; she is a louder, more spoiled version of the character Roberts played in American Horror Story: Coven.
Niecy Nash, as a private security guard, and Nasim Pedrad, as the lawyer from the national Kappa chapter, each bring subtlety to their characters, probably owing to the fact that both ladies have a comedy background. As such, Pedrad can pull off a reference to White Party formal, in which the guests are encouraged to wear white or be white, and Nash, perhaps channeling her experience in Reno 911! is hilariously believable as the most confident, least capable security guard ever. Jamie Lee Curtis starts off as the straight-woman, but she quickly reveals herself to be as f*cked-up as the sorority girls she hates, which muddles her character. Not in that charmingly complex way, but in a confused, what-are-we-doing-here way. On the other side of the spectrum, Grace is impossibly sweet and good and innocent. Although it is not spelled out in the first two episodes, it seems fairly obvious that there is a secret Graces dad is keeping from her.
Scream Queens carries a lot of the Ryan Murphy trademarks: beautiful sets, phenomenal costumes, unlikeable characters, and pushing the envelope as far as broadcast standards will allow – which isnt that far when you compare it to American Horror Story. One gets the feeling that, if this show were on FX, there would be a lot more sex, a lot more gore, and copious use of the N-word. As it stands, there is a pretty low gore-factor. The devil kills with a very basic old-skool butcher knife, and he is not particularly brutal about it. For a horror-comedy, I was hoping for more cartoony violence.
Structurally, Scream Queens is not too different from MTVs Scream series. Students are dying at the hands of a creepy, mysterious masked figure, and everyone is a suspect. I have no faith that it will become anything more than that – and thats okay. Scream Queens stands to be a glorious hour of television during which you can just turn off your brain, relax, and enjoy a bunch of hateful people getting slaughtered.
Scream Queens premieres September 22 on Fox.
