Tyler Gillett, one half of Radio Silence, makes rowdy, bloody horror comedies in which a group of people are locked in a house with something that wants to kill them. The set pieces are good and getting better; the films around them talk too much.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in the second act of a Tyler Gillett film, someone explains the rules. In Abigail (2024) the kidnappers work out what will and will not kill a vampire and say it aloud, more than once. In Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) the characters stop to tell one another what kind of sequel they are in. Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who direct together as Radio Silence, plainly enjoy this, and for a while so do we. Then it goes on.
The pair came up through YouTube shorts, then a segment of V/H/S (2012), then Devil's Due (2014), a found-footage film that ran out of things to do with the format, and the anthology Southbound (2015). Ready or Not (2019), in which a bride spends her wedding night being hunted through her in-laws' house, gave them the shape they have used since: one building, locked doors, a group of people who deserve one another, and a great deal of blood. Paramount then handed them Scream; Universal handed them Abigail. They have not had to change the furniture much.
What they do well is the set piece. The 2022 Scream has a first-rate opening. Scream VI takes Ghostface to New York, gives him a shotgun, and produces two sequences that are the best the series has managed in years. Abigail prefers practical effects, and its bodies burst rather than bleed, which is funnier and nastier than the alternative. We enjoyed Abigail more than we expected to, and the reason is Alisha Weir, a twelve-year-old ballerina and a superb small monster, who is more frightening than anyone twice her height in the house.
What they do less well is everything between the set pieces. The two Scream films are written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, Busick now on his third film with them, and both scripts stop every ten minutes to tell us what kind of film we are watching. By the second hour of the 2022 film we had heard enough. Scream VI builds towards its weakest mystery. Abigail, which has no franchise to talk about, still cannot stop reciting its own rules, and is twenty minutes too long. Our scores sit between 65 and 70: decent, likeable, never quite the film we would send a stranger to see.
Gillett has said the work has to do a little bit of genre dance, a tone dance, and he is right that the balance of scares and laughs is the hard part and that they usually keep it. A Ready or Not sequel is due in 2026, and a Mummy film after that. We will go. We would go more gladly if, just once, they locked the door and let the house do the talking.
Biography
Tyler Gillett is an American film director, cinematographer, writer and producer. Born on 6 March 1982 in Flagstaff, Arizona, he earned dual BFAs in film production and studio art/photography from the University of Arizona in 2004.
Gillett began his career in the camera department and later directed shorts and series before co-founding the filmmaking collective Radio Silence with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Chad Villella. The group first gained attention with their segment in the 2012 anthology V/H/S.
As part of Radio Silence, Gillett has co-directed the horror films Devil's Due (2014), Southbound (2015), Ready or Not (2019), Scream (2022), Scream VI (2023) and Abigail (2024).
