Scream Queens

It opens in a flashback to 1995 at the sorority where something horrible happens. It’s a mystery that goes unsolved. Flash forward 20 years to today, and it looks like someone is out for revenge. Something horrible happened to a pledge and on the anniversary of that crime, someone is out for vengeance.

Why we’re looking forward to this: There’s a lot of great horror on television at the moment, from Bates Motel to Hannibal to American Horror Story and the current king of carnage The Walking Dead, but there’s always room for something that’s both familiar and fresh at the same time.

Enter Scream Queens, which is being pitched as Heathers meets Friday 13^th and has us salivating just at that description. Add a fine cast which includes Emma Roberts, Nick Jonas, Ariana Grande and the undisputed Queen of Scream herself Jamie Lee Curtis and we’re positively frothing at the mouth.

Harking back initially to the original Scream movies and then to such beloved genre fare as Prom Night, Black Christmas and just about every slasher movie made in the 1980s, Scream Queens looks as though its mix of masked killer and pitch black humour will make it must see television when it debuts this autumn.

Promising to off one victim each week of its initial fifteen week run, Scream Queens has us getting all misty eyed about another underrated stalk and slash TV show that was far better than it’s given credit for, namely Harper’s Island, and hoping that it will at least equal this overlooked 2009 show.

Scream Queens assaults our small screens this autumn.

RICHARD COSGROVE