Introduction
So I saw Scream 7 on opening weekend. I’m a big Ghostface fan from way, way back, but I’ve been seriously dreading this review. I thought maybe if I took some time, the film would make more sense upon reflection. I thought I just needed to digest it a little. Maybe I was missing something? I feel pretty much the way many parents must feel when their child does something incredibly stupid: not angry, just disappointed. Let me explain.
Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers.
Wes Craven’s Legacy
I first encountered the original Scream (1996) before it became a huge franchise. I was maybe seven years old, at an aunt and uncle’s house, where one of my teenage cousins was watching the VHS, and I was catching glimpses from behind a couch. The cold open, for a long time afterward, remained etched in my mind as the scariest sequence of any film I had ever seen. A masked stalker calls the house of a young woman, Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore), and wants to play a game with her. The game is Horror Movie Trivia a.k.a. Do You Wanna Die Tonight?
After Casey incorrectly names Jason Vorhees as the killer in the original Friday the 13 th, Ghostface slaughters her letterman boyfriend tied to a patio chair, breaks into the house, guts her like a fish, and strings her up like a hanging lawn ornament from a rope-swing in the front yard. Director Wes Craven, mastermind of horror, God rest his soul, sets it up brilliantly within the very first shot: the juxtaposition of innocence and fear.
Observations
On the Friday of opening weekend for Scream 7, I took a notebook to my local cinema and jotted down notes like a serious critic. Nerd alert. The racial demographic of my theatre was comprised of approximately 85% black Americans. It’s always been of curious interest to me that this horror franchise resonates specifically with this audience. The meta-commentary in Scream 2 (1997) makes it well known.
The sequel opens with the groovy R&B of D’Angelo’s cover of Prince’s “She’s Always in My Hair,” as Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett-Smith), the first victim of the sequel, provides us with her “dissertation on Black Cinema” while waiting in line to see the opening of Stab, the franchise within the franchise, based on the book The Woodsboro Murders by Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox). Maureen’s death sequence is perhaps even scarier to me than Casey’s, as she emits a primal howl and bleeds out in front of the theater’s audience.
Greek Theater and Cinema
In a broad sense, the entire saga is about a small town with a dark history—the brutal rape and murder of a mother, which spurs her daughter’s revenge. It’s a story about mothers & daughters, mothers & sons, fathers & sons, and fathers & daughters. A prototypical Greek drama.
In Scream 2, our final girl, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) plays the role of Cassandra, the cursed prophet of the Trojan war, in her college’s production of Agamemnon. We, like Greek audiences in ancient times, live for the cathartic bloodbath. And we love Ghostface for giving it to us. The original trilogy’s meta-commentary is ostensibly one of its greatest thematic devices.
The New Era
There are no such devices in Scream 7, however. This latest installment is written and directed by Kevin Williamson, the franchise’s original writer. Williamson also wrote Scream 2 & Scream 4 (2011). Ehren Kruger (The Ring and its sequel) wrote Scream 3, and when Spyglass Media took over the rights, Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt wrote the fifth and sixth installments, with direction by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence Productions.
Now, contrary to popular opinion, I actually enjoyed the Radio Silence era. Scream 5 (2022) & Scream 6 (2023) were, I thought, a refreshing new take with an excellent cast. These films centered around the Carpenter sisters, Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), who had a dynamic on-screen relationship. I was emotionally along for the ride. Barrera was apparently dropped from the project for tweeting support for Palestine on her X account. Ortega, in solidarity, announced scheduling conflicts. Campbell, on X, then announced her return as Sidney Prescott, with Williamson at the helm as director. So much for free speech, I guess.
Unfortunately for Scream 7, this installment lacks narrative originality, relatable characters, or any sort of emotional catharsis. It’s chock full of horror’s mortal enemy—trite nostalgia—all the way to its lackluster and befuddled end.
The Cold Open
The film opens on a couple of content-creating influencers, Scott and Madison (Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph), driving on a dark country road to Stu Macher’s house. Or the Stu Macher Murder-House Experience, rather. Apparently, 30 years after the Woodsboro massacre, the residence of Ghostface #2 is repurposed into a museumesque Air-B&B full of murder memorabilia. The couple gets spooked by a motion-sensor-activated-animatronic-robot Ghostface, which eventually gets replaced by the real Ghostface, though never mind how or to where the animatronic disappears.
The real Ghostface stabs Scott in the side of his head, and of course, Madison runs up the stairs instead of out the front door, which is, this late in the franchise’s game, insulting. During the scuffle between Ghostface and Madison, Ghostface falls over the second-floor banister, and Madison, like an American Ninja Warrior, miraculously catches the chandelier, but has nary the grip or upper forearm strength to swing herself back over to the second-floor landing, and so lets go and drops directly on Ghostface’s erect blade. At about six or so minutes in, I was hoping the cold open was just going to be another montage of Stab vignettes, like Scream 4. No such luck.
Boys, Windows, Sex
Now, here we are in the bedroom of Tatum Evans (Isabel May), Sidney Prescott’s teenage daughter. In a scene which just may be very well copied and pasted from the bedroom scene in the original film, Sidney investigates a ruckus which sounds like the familiar thud of a boy going through the window. After discovering Tatum’s smarmy boyfriend, Ben Brown (Sam Rechner), behind the bed, Sidney invites him to kick rocks in the suburban night.
When she returns to the bedroom, Sidney and her husband Mark (Joel McHale), rehash the ages at which they lost their respective virginities; Sidney at 17 and Mark at 15 (though I guess he initially lied and told her 17?) Given American culture’s heated fervor regarding underage sex, the dialogue here appears like: Oh well, boys will be boys. Though who can say what Williamson’s intent was with this scene? Or the entire film, for that matter.
Sidney the Barista
The next day, Sidney drops Tatum off at school and goes to work. With her extensive background in theatre, trauma therapy, and publishing, Sidney now owns a coffee shop called the Little Latte (I think Williamson really missed an opportunity with a more punk-rock Roastface Coffee). Sidney takes a break to chat with neighbor Jessica Bowden (Anna Camp) about teenage angst. The scene is pointless other than to introduce us to Jessica, who, much like Tatum, is an underdeveloped character whom we don’t see much of until the very end. Hmm, wonder why.
There’s also this bizarre moment where Sidney is working the espresso bar and calls out a latte for a shoddy-looking man named Karl (Kraig Dane), and as Karl grabs his coffee beverage, they share uncomfortable, prolonged eye contact for just a beat too long. This is just one example of the film’s many contrived moments. Karl is clearly a nutter. And we’re given the obvious bait here with no apparent switch.
The Fan Theory
Ghostface then calls Sidney on FaceTime, and it turns out to be Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). One popular fan theory on Reddit precluded the idea that Stu Macher died from the
television crash in the original Scream, and Williamson pays tribute to the fan theory. But Sidney doesn’t really believe that Stu is still alive. She pretty much says it’s someone using A.I. Then, in the film’s big reveal, one of the killers says that he used to be a Google Security Expert, so he has experience with A.I. Why even invite Matthew Lillard back just to set up an expectation that was going to be true all along? Is Kevin Williamson ok?
Burn it Down
Look, I could harp on the bizarre incongruities of Scream 7 all day long. I could go on and on about Tatum’s school’s Fairy Princess play (how on earth did we get from Greek tragedy to this?), or how Ghostface happens to break into her attic when Sidney’s house is secured with features like a built-in panic room (was this an intentional homage to 2002’s Panic Room?), or that her house is lacking some serious dry wall.
I could delve into the two-dimensional Marco Davis (Ethan Embry), the employee of a psychiatric institution who is briefly introduced and then randomly shows up later. Hmm, I wonder why. Or for what abject purpose were Chad and Mindy (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown) Dumbo dropped into this installment?
I could prattle on about how Scream 7 is peppered with throwbacks to the previous films for the sake of nothing other than “remember-whenning.” Sidney’s daughter, who is named after her high school best friend. The leather jacket from college. The murder house. The A.I. montage of previous Ghostfaces, including Laurie Metcalfe and, for some reason, a haggard David Arquette, who both appear in front of some sort of green screen mockup, like they submitted an audition tape from home.
Conclusion
I won’t go on. It’s simply not worth the time or energy. Perhaps we just let it be what it is: a fluke. Despite its “record-breaking” $65-million weekend at the box office, Scream 7 is a total bust from a cinematic perspective. It’s a little more than an olla podrida of nostalgic conceit and A.I.-generated slop. Maybe that’s the true horror, after all.
