Scream Queen Is an Oscar-Worthy Prestige Role Now, But No One Told ‘Ready or Not 2’

Becoming a horror-movie scream queen has been a viable career path for nearly half a century at this point, but it wasn’t always a particularly desirable one. Jamie Lee Curtis famously had trouble getting non-horror roles after Halloween; it took her a full five years (and several additional slashers, sequels, and John Carpenter reteams) before her role in Trading Places fully extricated her from the genre. By the time Curtis won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the genre-influenced but non-horror Everything Everywhere All At Once, though, working as a horror star as a woman was not necessarily a sentence to increasingly shlocky sequels and convention appearances to make ends meet. Just a few years later, during this year’s Oscar ceremony, Amy Madigan won in the same category for playing an outright horror villain: Aunt Gladys, the witchy woman behind the eerie mystery of Weapons.

Though Madigan herself isn’t exactly a horror mainstay, the overall success of horror at this year’s Oscars should be comforting to those who are. All in all, the genre took home eight awards via three different movies: one for Weapons, four for the vampire thriller Sinners, and three for Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein. This is a year where indie body horror The Ugly Stepsister got a makeup nomination, seemingly riding the wave that made The Substance an unlikely Oscar-winner last year. When Demi Moore was starting out in Hollywood in the 1980s, the idea that she’d get her first-ever nomination for a horror film probably seemed unthinkable. (You have to wonder what Curtis thought of Moore and Madigan getting such acclaim for a genre that wasn’t exactly their first home.) The modern crop of ultra-talented scream queens who embrace their genre roots should breathe a sigh of relief.

Photo: ©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Just don’t get complacent, or you’ll wind up in something like Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. This new sequel to the 2019 horror-action-comedy should be a victory lap in the wake of so many cultural happenings, big and small: the success of the first film; the expansion of the Scream Queen into a multifaceted job title; the ongoing popularity of horror movies in both theatrical and streaming releases; the newfound respectability of horror seen at the last couple of Oscar ceremonies; the careers of stars Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton. Instead, it’s just a plain old lap: The movie runs around the Ready or Not track one more time, regularly pausing to splatter CG blood and/or shout “fuck!” like it’s the funniest joke the filmmakers have ever heard.

The premise to the original movie was irresistible, even when it felt derived from sharper class-warrior sagas and other mischievous slasher-action pictures like You’re Next: Grace (Weaving), a young woman with no family to speak of, marries into a rich family, and discovers this signs her up for a horrifying ritual. She must play a game of hide-and-seek with the whole lot of her in-laws (including her new husband). If she eludes them until dawn, she wins. If she doesn’t, she’ll be made a blood sacrifice to the devil. Cue Weaving committing gory acts of self-defense in a blood-spattered wedding dress and sneakers, like a Kill Bill speed-run where the Bride springs up immediately rather than entering a multi-year coma.

Photos: Everett Collection ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Ready or Not 2 throws her back into the fray; turns out, there are other rich families who are entitled to use the recent hide-and-seek winner for a double-or-nothing proposition. The winner gets the controlling seat on some kind of Satanic version of the John Wick high table. As before, many of the players are ruthless but also kind of dumb. The most dangerously conniving are two siblings played by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy.

Grace’s survival never really feels in doubt in both movies, and that’s more feature than bug; one of the best things about Weaving’s scream-queen career is how feral she’s able to play in movies like this and Azrael. It’s fun to see her fight her way out of a corner, which Ready or Not 2 at least seems to understand: At one point, Grace and one of her new opponents hit each other with pepper spray and grapple messily around a wedding-venue ballroom, attempting to fight each other off when they can barely see each other. Not every starlet will be convincing screaming in eye-stinging pain and frustrated rage as she whams her enemy in the face with a keyboard. Weaving is; you can take her pain seriously even when the movie is having a laugh.

But when it comes time to give her a more emotional side, Ready or Not 2 goes full old-time slasher sequel: retcons and indifference. It turns out that Grace does have a family member: Faith (Kathryn Newton), her estranged younger sister, visits Grace during her brief hospital stay, and when Grace is recaptured by the feuding families, Faith is taken along for the ride. It’s a fine way to up the ante, except that the filmmakers assign the sisters the most perfunctory of backstories. Grace left their mutual foster home at 18 for a scholarship and a chance to live in New York City; Faith, feeling utterly abandoned by this decision, angrily cut her older sister out of her life. The you-abandoned-me/I-did-this-for-us dynamic is the kind of sibling relationship that exists far more vividly in the brains of screenwriters than in the complications of real life. That’s because it doesn’t require any genuine nuance or personality, just an endless, pointless argument easily summarized and re-summarized until it can be resolved with a faux-emotional, pre-digested forgiveness.  (Is “you went off to college when you were 18!” really a reasonable motivation for a decade-long estrangement? Wouldn’t it make more sense for their rift to be less one-sided?)

It’s painful to see Weaving and Newton saddled with this non-story, because they should be a marquee scream-queen team-up. Newton, who previously worked with directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet on the vampire-kid thriller Abigail, has a comic insouciance to complement Weaving’s grit. She’s especially terrific, and complicated, in Lisa Frankenstein. Here, she doesn’t get much more to do than snap her gum and utter the same “fuck! for emphasis as everyone else. Rather than either revealing a secret skill set for Faith that makes her surprisingly prepared for this style of combat or making her comically unsuited for the challenge and therefore Grace’s damsel in distress, the movie just kind of shrugs and makes her another generic spitfire. She’s not as good at fighting as Grace, but she also isn’t nursing wounds from a previous all-nighter. The movie seems weirdly willing to let things cancel out, rather than bring conflicts to a proper head.

Normally, there wouldn’t be anything particularly notable about a too-little-too-late horror-action-comedy sequel. But coming off the heels of such a prestige-horror renaissance, Ready or Not 2 instead serves as a reminder of how much more we’ve come to expect from genre movies – even if they’re just supposed to be fun, quippy, action-heavy larks. At other times in horror history, Weaving and Newton might have been expected to suffer through their genre associations and use the feeble bits of action or comedy in Ready or Not 2 to claw their way toward respectability. Now the movie seems lucky to have them, and careless to offer so little in return.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.