The characters are self-decribed “archetypal cliches” fated to die “long, drawn out deaths.”

And as they’re horror fans often commenting on the conventions of the genre, it’s safe to label “Killer Book Club” what it is — a Spanish “Scream” without the laughs.

It’s a slick, university-set thriller with a sexy young cast and grisly deaths that the viewer works her or his way through to figure out whodunit. But from the archetypal characters to the standard-issue murder settings and modes of death, there isn’t much here to hold the interest of anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie.

“Scream” was packed with jokes for a reason, amigos.

Veki Velilla plays Angela, “the heroine,” a leader among the lit students who gather in the boiler room they’re allowed to meet in and decorate. She’s a published writer struggling through horror-block to finish a second book.

The other “types” include “the brat” (Priscilla Delgado), “The Babe” (Ane Rot), “The Librarian” (María Cerezuela), “The Wild Man” (Carlos Alcaide), “The Simp”(Álvaro Mel ) “The Influencer”(Hamza Zaidi) and “The Emo” (Iván Pellicer).

A prologue apparently shows us the fiery end of Angela’s debut novel and now, six years later, she’d love guidance from her sympathetic lit professor (Daniel Grao). But he’s a “going through a divorce” sexual assaulter cliche.

No worries. Angela’s posse, obsessed with “killer clown” narratives (Let’s learn what coulrophobia means, kids!), gathers and plots — with her — revenge. But donning clown suits and scaring Prof. Cruzado leads to bloodying Professor Cruzado and that leads to him falling over a railing, impaled upon the lance of Don Quixote, a statue that probably graces the entrance to many a Spanish Lit Universidad.

They think they’ve gotten away with it when the text messages start — chapters of a new novel, “The Mad Clowns,” “Chapter One, The Death of the Professor.”

Someone saw them. Or maybe it was someone in their group of eight who taunts, threatens and promises to kill them “one by one,” just like in every horror story/movie since “The Masque of the Red Death.“

Carlos García Miranda’s humorless script is strictly formula, with the murders taking place at a foggy bus stop, a crimson-red (lighting) morgue and the like.

The problem-solving, led by the librarian, is simple but as with other elements of the narrative, our writer isn’t playing fair — this victim just “passed out,” that new character is half-expected. The sex is as foreshadowed as the murders. Even the book club members turning on each other (“You got us into this mess!” in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed.) is more tedious than entertaining.

Good looking film, but if you aren’t going to mock the horror book/movie conventions you’re sending up, I really don’t see the point.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Veki Velilla, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado, Iván Pellicer, Hamza Zaidi, Carlos Alcaide, María Cerezuela, Ane Rot and Daniel Grao

Credits: Directed by Carlos Alonso Ojea, scripted by Carlos García Miranda. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29