Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, never without Tyler Gillett, makes horror films that lock the doors, announce the rules and let the bodies burst. The set pieces are the reason to go. The talk between them is where his films lose us.
Fi1m perspective
A house with the doors locked, a set of rules somebody is about to break, and a body that does not so much bleed as go off. That is a Radio Silence film, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin has never made one without Tyler Gillett beside him. The two share every credit, from a segment of the anthology V/H/S (2012) to Abigail (2024), and it is fair to treat the work as one signature with two hands. The signature is horror that is also a comedy and also, by the last reel, an action film, staged in one building that gets smaller as the night goes on.
Bettinelli-Olpin came to it sideways. He played guitar and wrote lyrics for the East Bay punk band Link 80 from 1993, worked as a music journalist, and formed the short-film collective Chad, Matt & Rob in 2007 while in the New Line Cinema mailroom. Radio Silence followed in 2011, with Chad Villella producing, then Devil's Due (2014) and Southbound (2015). Ready or Not (2019), in which a bride spends her wedding night being hunted through her in-laws' house, is the film that made the pair's name and set the template. Since then the work has been bigger and louder: Scream (2022), Scream VI (2023) and Abigail, which is Ready or Not with the furniture rearranged and a twelve-year-old vampire in place of the bride.
What works is the set piece. The fifth Scream opens with a sequence we called first-rate and earns its 18 certificate with kills nastier than the series had managed in years; the sixth takes Ghostface to New York, gives him a shotgun, and produces two more of the best. The gore is practical and proud of it. Abigail's vampires burst rather than bleed, and Alisha Weir's small monster is superb. The first time a body went off in Abigail we laughed, loudly, and were slightly embarrassed to notice we wanted it to happen again. Bettinelli-Olpin is good with a crowd, too: David Arquette in the 2022 film caught us off guard entirely.
What does not work is the talking. The 2022 Scream stops every ten minutes to tell you what kind of film it is, and by the second hour we had heard enough. Scream VI is tired between its set pieces and builds towards the weakest mystery in the series. Abigail, which owes nothing to a franchise and could have been ninety minutes of chase, is twenty minutes too long and cannot stop explaining its own rules. Guy Busick, who wrote both Scream films with James Vanderbilt and has worked with the pair four times, is the common thread; but three films with the same fault means the habit belongs to the directors.
A sequel to Ready or Not is due in 2026. We would like somebody to run through a large house and for nobody, at any point, to stop and tell them what the rules are.
Biography
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin is an American film director, writer, actor and musician. He is a founding member of the East Bay punk band Link 80 and co-creator of the filmmaking collectives Chad, Matt & Rob and Radio Silence.
He first gained recognition in the found-footage genre with the Radio Silence segment “10/31/98” in V/H/S (2012). With Tyler Gillett he co-directed the horror features Devil’s Due (2014), a segment of Southbound (2015), Ready or Not (2019), Scream (2022), Scream VI (2023) and Abigail (2024). He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
