In the brand new Tubi Original film Requiem for a Scream, human suffering is music to your ears.
Requiem for a Scream follows the story of Artemis as she heads up to her family’s lake house to throw a party to celebrate her sister’s life and spread her sister’s ashes in their final resting place. On the guest list are all of her childhood friends, some of whom she hasn’t seen in years.
Everything up to this point is slasher film-making 101. We have a young group of partying friends who decide to spend the weekend up at an isolated location. Even the cast of characters is comprised of your stereotypical slasher victims: there’s the virtuous final girl, the best friend, the black guy, the stoner, and the romantic interest of the final girl.
Also, like all slasher movies, unbeknownst to our campers, there is a killer on the loose nearby. Most slasher move killers have a twisted agenda for why they kill. This killer is no different. His motive for murder is to construct a symphony comprised of his victims’ screams of terror.
Unluckily for our lake house guests, one of the killer’s memory cards containing his “masterpiece” is inside the house – the same house he has been using to kill his victims for years, unbeknownst to Artemis and her family.
It isn’t long into the group’s celebration that the killer decides to make his presence known. Determined to retrieve his lost property, he quickly targets one of the unsuspecting partygoers as his first victim.
The killer, however, leaves this first victim alive just long enough to allow them to alert their friends of the attack. This is where Requiem for a Scream breaks away from the cookie-cutter slasher movie formula for a while.
Proving that this antagonist can think, we learn that he knew that, after discovering their friend, the group would make every attempt to save them and would eventually bring the body inside the house, which is actually what the killer wanted.
From here, the group discovers that the killer has planted a walkie-talkie on the body of their friend to communicate his demand: Return the card if they want to live.
Requiem for a Scream then jumps back into the slasher movie playbook as the group of friends continues to make idiotic decisions and attempts to come up with a plan to contact the authorities and outsmart the killer instead of just giving him the memory card.
No surprise to the audience, their initial plan fails, resulting in the death of another friend by evisceration. The stand-out scene during this whole portion of the film is the killer’s cold remarks that he understands the group “had to try.” This once again proves that the antagonist isn’t just a copy-and-paste killer, but instead has a level of intelligence.
Regrettably, as soon as you think this killer might be a stand-out feature of the film, the filmmakers make the decision to flip the script and have him begin to make stupid decisions right after it appeared he had been one step ahead of the group this whole time.
In this moment of weakness, Artemis is able to escape. She stumbles upon the killer’s lair and makes the shocking discovery that she and her sister had been among the killer’s intended targets.
In another moment of stupidity, the once smart killer makes the mistake of failing to see Artemis. Thankfully, he proves he has one last glimmer of intelligence when he rectifies this mistake by capturing her.
This will be the last time the killer makes an intelligent decision, as he quickly sinks into the stereotypical slasher movie killer trope of repeatedly making stupid decisions until eventually winding up being bested by the final girl.
Requiem for a Scream throws in a twist when Artemis’ father shows up at the lake house after discovering that his daughter has lied to him and secretly snuck up the house with her sister’s ashes.
His introduction into the primary story is short-lived as the killer arrives at the house posing as a police officer. He informs the survivors that he managed to track the brief signal of a call the group had managed to get out before the killer disrupted their signal.
Like in any slasher movie, as the antagonist gets dumber, the protagonist gets smarter. Not fooled by the ruse, the survivors engage the killer in an altercation that results in the killer picking off the remaining cast of characters that are no longer essential to the plot.
In a reenactment of the film’s cold open, where the killer forced a girl to sing for her life and the life of an unknown associate of hers, he now has Artemis and her father tied to the same chairs within the lake house and he forces Artemis to hit the perfect pitch if she hopes to survive.
Continuing on his path of making terrible decisions, the killer then begins to explain his whole plan and motivation for killing, and how it ties into Artemis’ family purchasing the land that once belonged to his father.
Watch Requiem for a Scream and find out if the killer adds Artemis’ voice to his opus or if she will have what it takes to live up to the title of final girl and put an end to this killer’s musical number.
Requiem for a Scream is a movie about singing with virtually no singing. This is likely because the killer is more obsessed with the screams of his victims than their voices. Yet, he still demands that his victims hit the perfect pitch.
I feel like it would have been a better concept to have his recordings just be the collective screams of all his victims that he could then weave together into his twisted symphony. That would have made more sense than having people hit high C notes.
In a world filled with numerous slasher films to choose from, Requiem for a Scream managed to bring some interesting concepts to the genre, concepts that the movie, unfortunately, failed to see to fruition.
This could have been a whole different film if they would have kept the killer as cold and as ruthless as he first appeared to be. Instead, they resorted to the odd tricks of the trade and had the antagonist be tricked by the group of kids like out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
If you’re a fan of the slasher genre, then Requiem for a Scream is worth checking out, as the film does offer those fleeting moments of originality.
If slasher films are not your preference, then you might want to skip this particular film and watch one of the many other titles available on Tubi.
Requiem for a Scream stars Cassandra Scerbo as Artemis, Georgia Leva as Shira, Zachary Roozen as Declan, Brandon Santana as Theo, India McGee as Alex, Taylor Kalupa as Harper, and Daniel Covin as Will.
Last Updated on February 8, 2023 by Horror Facts
