Sick is one of the great horror films to come out of the pandemic. Set in April 2020, when 97% of the United States was quarantined, and the death toll had already topped 10 000, it immerses us in a time when Covid was even more dangerous than a slasher. Director John Hyams and screenwriters Kevin Williamson and Katelyn Crabb introduce the horror and paranoia of this era of peak pandemic by transitioning from the Ghostface mask to the Covid mask in a brilliant reworking of the opening scene from Scream, Williamson’s masterpiece. Here, we start by following Tyler, a college student, played by Joel Courtney, on a visit to his local supermarket, where he starts receiving a series of text messages from a Covid-conscious descendant of Ghostface, who “will only play if you’re Covid safe.” Right from the outset, this unseen killer is identified with the amorphous threat of the virus, most dramatically when he takes a photograph of Tyler from further back in the cashier line. Spinning around in a split-second effort to discern his stalker, all Tyler sees is an endless recession of socially distanced masked faces, punctuated by the first truly hacking cough that we hear in the film. From there, the killer transitions to a phone call, but only once Tyler has returned to the safe haven of his car, just after he has sanitised his hands. Finally, when Tyler reaches his dorm room, and prepares to close his door on the pandemic, the killer strikes in a particularly brutal murder.

This prologue paves the way for a Covid era slasher film, whose narrative proper replaces the hypersexualised young adults of an older horror generation with Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million), a pair of privileged isolators in an enormous lake house, two miles away from the nearest cough droplets. Parker is flippant about safety – she has a slight cold and no Covid symptoms, so refuses to wear a mask – while Miri is more cautious and insists on the six foot rule inside. Nevertheless, both women are capable of isolating in comfort, turning the slasher prologue into a return of the repressed, a reminder of all the people who can’t afford to socially distance. The result is the true spiritual sequel to Scream, rather than the perkily joyless post-Craven remakes, not least because Sick is suffused with the same dark sense of humour, and the same capacity to split the difference between the horrors of slashers and the horrors of adolescence. The pandemic artfully accentuates and intersects with the drama of university life, often recalling the Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens Facebook group that became an emblem for the frustrated generation who spent their tertiary lives in lockdown.

More to the point perhaps, all the domestic thresholds of Scream have turned into Covid thresholds, nesting Parker and Miri within one space after another. Sick may be only seventy-five minutes but it’s not afraid to luxuriate in languorous and atmospheric pacing to capture these thresholds, dwelling on one pregnantly empty (or apparently empty) space after another to evoke the omniscient and permeable gaze of the slasher. This produces a kind of pandemic temporality, condensed and distended all at once, not unlike the effect of Host, the other great pandemic horror film, which felt endless despite being confined to the duration of an hour-long Zoom call. In fact, so paranoid is this lockdown distinction between inside and outside that it quickly supervenes even the most porous of digital technologies, reinvesting the American house, as a mise-en-scene, with the heightened sentience of the classical slasher era. Parker and Miri have phone reception for virtually the entire film but it doesn’t ever dent the slasher’s brooding presence, with the result that their digital network quickly regresses back to one of the core proto-networking tropes of 90s slashers: urban legends, nuggets of arcane information with no clear province or authorship. At one point, Parker tells an urban legend about a baby and a snake that also features in an episode of Dawson’s Creek written by Kevin Williamson – a literal relic of the proto-networked 90s – only for Miri to expound on its genealogy as a European folk tale that migrated to and evolved in America.

So seamlessly does the killer absorb the digital infrastructure that might be fortified against him that it barely modulates the atmosphere of the film when he actually steals Parker and Miri’s phones, in the stealthiest sequence of all. Nevertheless, this does effect a shift in the rhythm of the film as a whole, immersing us in the primal fear of the pandemic, at least as it appeared on film – a restoration of blank physical space and time without the network to prop it up and render it legible. Over its third act, Sick opts for a profound agoraphobia, dropping us in the enormous voids and pools of darkness between Parker’s mansion and the nearest lake house, which feels even more isolated in the midst of lockdown. It’s hard to rival the terror of the lake in Friday the 13^th but Williamson, Crabb and Hyams do a pretty good job here, as Parker steers a buoy out into the middle of the amorphous darkness, a space that defies all distinction between air, land and liquid, only for the slasher to emerge from all that abstracted murk with even more volatility and virility than before. Scenes like this are a testament to the genius of pairing Williamson with Hyams, who has an uncanny and mercurial capacity to orchestrate gazes and spaces. As in Alone, one of his gifts is for blurred faces (or masks) in the background that may or may not have seen what is occurring in the foreground.

Like all good slasher films too, the killers here are profoundly ambivalent with respect to the law. Just as the classical slashers of the 70s were both disenfranchised by and overidentified with the sexual revolution, the slashers of Sick are both agents and victims of social distancing. For it turns out that we have an entire family of slashers – mother Pamela (Jane Adams), father Jason (Marc Menchaca) and son Jeb (Chris Reid) – intent on avenging their second son Benji, who died after kissing Parker at an anti-Covid party that became a superspreader event. At heart, these killers are particularly committed and brutal contact tracers, clinically informing Parker, when she begs them to spare Miri, that “per CDC guidelines you were meant to quarantine alone, so that is on you.” In another kind of film this might have felt like glib satire or a rampant anti-lockdown screed but Williamson’s gift for balancing horror and comedy preserves the essential ambivalence of the slasher – nowhere more so than in the twist that these killers have been wearing masks for safety purposes rather than aesthetic purposes, practising social distancing as a critical component of their murderous rampage. The quilting-point between Ghostface and Covid mask is the chloroformed mask with which the family initially drugs Parker, and in the figurative richness of that motif lies a narrative potential that far exceeds Sick’s modest running time. And if peak pandemic had continued indefinitely, Sick would surely have become a franchise – perhaps almost as iconic as Scream – since it is attuned to the Covid world in a way that few films have managed during or since.