Scream Queens

Brando seems to really like Fox’s horror comedy, Scream Queens. Like, a lot. Like, too much. Um…no one tell him it got cancelled, okay?

If someone were to tell me that the only way to save the universe from total destruction at the hands of some kind of ooze-based alien life form, was for me to write a sweet television series that made people laugh and be super excited as people are chased by chainsaw wielding serial murders, Scream Queens is what I would eventually come up with.

Scream Queens is the perfect TV series that isn’t based on some sort of giant, transforming robot. It has thrills, chills, spills, kills, terror, college angst, the devil and Jamie Lee Curtis! It has a great flow, an engrossing storyline that never gets too complicated but never treats you like an idiot, and a cast of characters that may not exactly be likeable (at all) but make you still want to see what they are going to get up to next, and what will become of them as the Red Devil Killer massacres his/her way across Wallace University.

The show focuses on a sorority inhabited by some of the most horrific humans to ever walk the Earth. Namely Chanel Oberlin and her minions; Chanel #2, who is a fairly nondescript dead-meat character; Chanel #3, an earmuff wearing, bi-curious sociopath; and Chanel #5 who is the “fat” one, the victim of most of Chanel’s abuse and yet still manages to be unsympathetic; and then there is their less heinous pledge class. The pledges are mostly dead-meat characters with one basic trait to differentiate them, and allow Chanel to crap all over them during her super hilarious voiceovers.

Then the two “good girl” characters, Zayday and Grace, who are also unlikable in their own ways, (mostly because they are goody-goodies who don’t really fit in with the total insanity that is the rest of the cast). That, and Grace is kind of preachy and no one likes that in a character. There are a handful of characters who exist outside the sorority as well, like the sinister Dean Cathy Munsch; Grace’s overly protective dad; Chanel’s on and off boyfriend, the hilariously off the wall Chad Radwell; and the super grating security guard Denise Hemphill, who will make you laugh and also do a face palm as she manages to survive the madness that has engulfed everyone.

While none of the characters are inherently likable, they are all so hilariously ridiculous that they become strangely endearing, and when one gets bumped off, you miss their antics, even though they totally had their disembowelment coming, just because they were scumbags and on TV, scumbags need to get wiped out. It’s just the way it is.

The story is a simple one: a killer is loose on campus and the sorority sisters are all on the chopping block. It is a race against time to figure out who is doing the killing before they are all ground down into lean roast bitch. It is the same basic plot as your average horror movie, extended over the runtime of a 13 episode first season, which might sound like a recipe for something that drags on and becomes tedious, but there is a lot going on with the characters and their demented, nonsensical interactions with each other. Dean Munsch’s attempts to keep the murders out of the public eye, Zayday’s bid to unseat Chanel as house president, Grace’s search for her dead mother, and Chanel’s constant attempts to get back with Chad Radwell provide more than enough amusement to keep you entertained during the periods in between grisly murders.

The killer is a person in a red devil costume who seems to have a grudge against the sorority and its members. Kills range from your garden variety stabbings to girls having their spray tanner replaced with hydrochloric acid, to the old head-in-the-deep-fryer trick, and they are all given just enough gristle and red stuff that it satisfies the horror fans in the audience, but not so much that their less than horror fan wives don’t get super grossed out.

Over all Scream Queens is the perfect non-cartoon TV series as it is basically all the insanity anyone could ever ask for, wrapped up in a well produced, perfectly performed wrapper that keeps you entertained and fully engrossed the entire time it is on the screen. There is always something fun happening, and that is really what TV is all about…that and hearing about people getting stabbed in the face and watching douchebags get their arms cut off with a chainsaw. Stabbings and chainsaws are awesome, Scream Queens is awesome and your life will be way more awesome if you just take my advice and invest a few hours in giving the greatest horror comedy of our generation an honest shot!

Tags: cancelled, fox, scream queens, television

About the Author

Brando Quiring is an aspiring writer and all around good guy whose interests include giant robots, things that go bump in the night, spicy food, and smaller robots. He believes that through his studies of life around him and his contributions to it, he will some day save the world.