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    In ‘Scream VI,’ Ghostface Takes the 1 Train

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    In turning the subway into a vehicle of horror, the movie gets a number of things right — and a few wrong. But verisimilitude wasn’t the filmmakers’ main goal.When Jason Voorhees took Manhattan, he rode the subway. Walter Hill’s gang members in “The Warriors” prowled the M.T.A. Now, Ghostface is riding the 1 train.In “Scream VI,” the latest in the long-running horror franchise, the action moves from suburban Woodsboro, Calif., to New York City, where it follows the heroes on an anxiety-inducing subway ride. Trying to travel downtown for what will end up being the climactic showdown, the stars are trapped on a jam-packed Halloween commute with multiple riders wearing the Edvard Munch-ian masks and black robes that have become a hallmark of these movies. Is one of the straphangers the bad guy? Or are they all just tasteless partygoers donning the costume of a murderer on the loose? Given that this is a “Scream” movie, you can probably guess that at least one of them has a knife primed for stabbing.The sequence is not only the most tension-filled in the film; it also acts as an homage to frightening subway scenes of yore, and plays into present-day fears about the city’s transit system. Even though the latter wasn’t what the filmmakers were going for, it’s par for the course for the genre. “Horror movies notoriously ruin things for people and make people afraid of things,” Guy Busick, one of the film’s writers, said in an interview.In “Scream VI,” Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), the sisters who became Ghostface’s target in the 2022 reboot simply titled “Scream,” have moved to New York. There Tara is attending college along with her high school pals Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) as well as some new acquaintances, a.k.a. potential suspects. It’s all undergraduate drunken revelry until a killer starts stalking.From left, Jenna Ortega, Josh Segarra, Mason Gooding and Melissa Barrera in the film. The subway car was recreated from scratch on a Montreal soundstage.Paramount PicturesAlmost as soon as Busick and his co-writer James Vanderbilt decided to set the film in New York, eager to move the franchise to the big city, they envisioned a subway sequence. But Vanderbilt, who grew up nearby in Connecticut and would frequently visit, wanted to subvert the familiar idea that a relatively abandoned car was the most terrifying scenario. “That thing where it’s 2 in the morning was never scary to me,” he said. “What’s scary to me is it’s really hot and there are 150 people in the car. Take Ghostface out of it. That, to me, is still scary.” Add in Halloween — and the accompanying disguises — and it’s only more unsettling.In the film, the Carpenters and their friends decide they’ll be safer if they all travel together in a very public setting. Amid aggressive crowds, the doors close before two members of the group can get on, and, with cellphone service spotty and plenty of potential slashers present, the plan goes awry.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.The film’s directors, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, were immediately excited by the prospect of a Ghostface attack on the subway. “The whole movie is built around these ideas of danger in public and what’s right in front of you, and that, for us, was the scene where all of that comes together,” Bettinelli-Olpin said.At the same time, they were aware of the challenges. For budgetary reasons, production took place in Montreal, where the transit system looks nothing like New York’s. They considered importing a decommissioned PATH car from New Jersey, but it was too heavy to sit on their production stage. It ultimately fell to the production designer Michele Laliberte to recreate a 1 train from scratch. Shooting took place over three days and involved 140 to 180 extras, clothed in costumes ranging from normal businessman to Debbie Harry in David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” (Fun fact: If you can spot her, it’s Harry’s actual costume.)Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin do not live in New York, and they admit that their version of the subway owes as much to cinema as it does to real life. That fits with the ethos of the self-referential “Scream” series, in which characters are continually offering meta-commentary on what they are going through. “‘Warriors’ is like my touchstone for subway movies,” Bettinelli-Olpin said, referring to the iconic 1979 action flick about warring gangs in which the subways turn into hide-outs and battlefields. “I just assume it’s still like that all the time.” (It’s not.)Jasmin Savoy Brown in a close-up encounter with Ghostface. The filmmakers said they were inspired by “The Warriors” and other films with subway scenes. Paramount PicturesGillett added that they had also looked to the subway sequence in Todd Phillips’s 2019 “Joker” where Joaquin Phoenix’s loner, in clown makeup, is assaulted by three besuited jerks on the train before shooting them. (Technically this takes place in Gotham City, but the film did little to hide its New York locations.) “The level of grit and grime and texture and feeling of it being really, really real was something we really wanted to borrow,” Gillett said.Still, the directors would have debates with the cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz, an actual New Yorker, about how often the lights on the car should flicker, plunging the scene into eerie darkness. “Brett came up to us after the first take and was like, ‘Guys, we need to cut back on these flickers; the subway cars don’t do this anymore,’” Gillett said. But while they wanted some level of authenticity, reality wasn’t exactly their main objective. The goal was the subway as a heightened “house of horrors.”That phrase might be a little too real for some people. Moviemakers have long relished portraying the city’s trains as frightening. (Think of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” Joseph Sargent’s 1974 movie about a hijacked subway train that was remade in 2009 by Tony Scott.) Most of these films — whether new or classic — portray the system as a place of lawlessness.For those of us who currently take the subway, those portrayals can seem a little overblown, although the situation has gotten murkier since the pandemic. The rate of violent crimes per ride has risen since 2019, but a 2022 New York Times analysis revealed that it’s relatively unlikely you will be a target. Still, in New York, some people feel wary about the subway thanks to high-profile incidents that have included stabbings.The real-world relevance wasn’t top of mind for Bettinelli-Olpin, Gillett or the writers, but it’s impossible not to think about that fear when watching the characters’ petrified faces as they search for danger at each stop. And although the filmmakers weren’t trying to evoke a specific post-lockdown perspective, they were going for a sense of dread. “That whole sequence is really about paranoia,” Gillett said. In this case, that paranoia comes from an excess of people packed into a metal tube, rather than a dearth of them.And when you really think about it, there are few things more unnerving than being stuck underground with a bunch of strangers — even if there isn’t a serial killer running loose. More

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      A Stand-Up Set at the Swipe of a MetroCard

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      For about three months, an Upper West Side comedy club has been organizing Saturday-night shows on the 1 train.Rachel Lander, a Brooklyn stand-up comedian, was in the middle of a joke about the 2020 presidential election — her audience’s ears perked for the punchline — when the train reached its final stop.“I’ll finish this later,” Lander said into the mic. “We need to transfer.”Six comedians, a comedy club booker and eight audience members disembarked from the downtown 1 train and walked down the platform like schoolchildren on a field trip to the aquarium. As they passed people waiting for their trains, heads turned toward the group — a strangely boisterous one for a mid-pandemic Saturday night. Two M.T.A. workers glanced at each other quizzically but didn’t ask questions.When the group reached the last car of the uptown train, they piled in and arranged themselves as before: a comic standing at one end of the car, mic in hand and portable speaker on the floor, and the audience seated nearby.“All right, I’m going to finish that story about the election,” Lander said as the passengers settled in.The Stand Up NY group heading to the show, a.k.a. the subway, starting at the 72nd Street station on the 1 line.Adam Powell for The New York TimesFor about three months, New York’s comics had been preparing sets to perform Saturday nights on the 1 train. It may not have been the most glamorous of gigs, but as a comic joked last Saturday, at least it was cleaned regularly. The relentless screeching of the subway had a tendency to drown out punch lines, but a few of the comics agreed that wasn’t so different from the hum of activity in a typical club — the clinking of glasses, the waiters whispering, “What can I get you?”“I need all the live shows I can get to shake off the rust,” said Jeff Scheen, who closed out Saturday’s show as the train reached 42nd Street.The weekly subway gigs are arranged and advertised by Stand Up NY, a club on the Upper West Side. Since it closed last March because of the pandemic, the club’s co-owner, Dani Zoldan, has been inventing ways to keep comics performing in front of live audiences, instead of in stilted Zoom shows. The club has put on about 500 outdoor shows in parks and on rooftops across the city over the past year, Zoldan said. Last June, there was an invitation-only indoor comedy show at the club itself without a formal audience — which was undoubtedly against the rules intended to keep people from gathering, but the police never intervened — and in February, it held comedy shows disguised as weddings (one couple actually got married).Paying patrons and regular passengers alike were on hand Saturday for Alex Quow’s set.Adam Powell for The New York TimesWhen winter came, Zoldan had to get creative again.“I was just wracking my brain,” Zoldan said. “What else could we do? We couldn’t have shows in the club, we couldn’t have outdoor shows anymore.”His solution was the subway, which singers, dancers and musicians have long treated as a stage (comics, less so). At the first subway show in late December, Stand Up NY’s chief of staff and booker, Jon Borromeo, recalled that an M.T.A. conductor approached them and said, “Are you guys doing comedy?” The group braced for a reprimand, but instead the conductor said, “That’s awesome,” gave a thumbs up, and returned to his post.“I was like, ‘Yes! Yes! We have approval from the M.T.A.!’” Borromeo remembered.On Saturday, audience members and comics, who are paid $25 each to perform, met at 72nd Street and Broadway, outside a Bloomingdale’s Outlet store. Carrying the speaker and hand-held microphone, Borromeo led the group to the 72nd Street station, where they swiped in and waited for the downtown 1 train to South Ferry. (Tickets for the show are $15 each, plus the $2.75 fare, but the rules are as loose as the surroundings.)The audience of about eight was lighter than usual, probably because it was a warm spring night and the Passover holiday was beginning. Furqan Muqri, a 33-year-old surgeon from Syracuse, was visiting his brother, Hasan Muqri, a 25-year-old medical student, in the city. The brothers — who were both fully vaccinated — had long attended stand-up comedy shows together, and when they searched the internet for shows during the pandemic, this was what they found.Comics and others took in the stand-up sets on Saturday.Adam Powell for The New York TimesVictoria Ruiz, 25, and Raymond Gipson, 26, showed up after dinner in the West Village, all dolled up for date night. Robert Brock, 38, had visited the club on West 78th Street for years and had brought his 22-year-old daughter, Adonnis Brock, to the show.Under the glaring subway lights, each audience member was a target for crowd work — there was no hiding in the shadows of a club. Pointing to Gipson, who had cozied up to Ruiz, the comedian Alex Quow joked that he was certain that Gipson had received a pandemic stimulus check, based on the fact that Ruiz’s arm had not left his.“My brother right here, he got his stimulus,” Quow said, “His girl has been on him all night!”Then, there were the audience members who did not ask to be audience members. There was the man who rolled his eyes when the show started and did not look up from his phone for 17 stops; the woman who entered the car, glanced at the spectacle and immediately moved on to a new car; the young couple who put up with multiple comics asking them questions about where they were from with good humor.“Hello, welcome to a comedy show that you wanted no part of — I’m so sorry,” the comic Adam Mamawala said as a man wearing a Yankees cap entered the car.The show had the chaotic air of something that could get shut down at any moment by a strict police officer who was not in the mood for a joke. A few people sipped beers, but everyone wore face coverings, making reactions to jokes harder to decipher. Still, the comics said they could tell from crinkled eyes and body language.Jon Borromeo, the Stand Up NY booker and chief of staff, laughing during Rachel Lander’s performance Saturday.Adam Powell for The New York TimesOn the uptown train at the Franklin Street stop, Erik Bergstrom joked about a vegan woman he dated who railed against the unhealthiness of eating cheese, then happily snorted cocaine.At 28th Street, Scheen recounted the evolutionary tale of how male birds lost their penises, holding onto the metal subway pole for stability.Often, the amplified voices of the comedians clashed with an M.T.A. employee reminding riders about transfer points.“He’s making an announcement,” Scheen said. “It’s probably very important and we have no idea. He’s like, ‘Everyone get off the train, the Slasher’s here.’”During the pandemic year, as artists and performers were deprived of their passions and their income, Zoldan has made himself into a determined advocate for the survival of stand-up comedy. He has toed the line for pandemic performances rules (and sometimes brazenly jumped over it); the club has sued the state over rules limiting comedy clubs from welcoming audiences; he even went up against a New York stand-up behemoth, Jerry Seinfeld, whom he accused of not doing enough to support New York’s comedy industry.But, come Friday, there won’t need to be any complicated machinations or creative thinking to get comics in front of a live audience. On April 2, the state said, arts venues will be allowed to hold plays, concerts and other kinds of performances at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and higher limits if patrons show they have tested negative for the coronavirus.Stand Up NY plans to hold its first club shows on Friday evening, with a maximum of 40 audience members. Still, on Saturday, it plans one more night of subway performances, just for fun. More