Review: Scream 7 — Crooked Marquee

For an entry in a film series that imagines itself to be self-aware, Scream 7 appears to have no idea that it is well past time to throw in the (bloody) towel. There is little that’s fresh about this outing, other than the new faces of the actors who join series vets Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox as well as Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. Yet even that fresh blood can’t help Scream 7 do anything other than congeal into something that should’ve died years ago (at least before the making of Scream VI).

Original screenwriter Kevin Williamson returns to the franchise, this time as both co-writer and director, but the wit that he brought to the scripts for Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4 is nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s replaced by at least five winking references to the absence of Sydney Prescott (and Campbell) in the New York murders in the last movie, only a couple of which are actually funny. By the final one, it’s beating a dead horse with far less enthusiasm than a psycho would have for that grisly activity. There are a few requisite call-outs to other, better horror movies (Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs, Friday the 13th), but it’s less interested in the stabs at satirizing the genre. Veep’s Timothy Simons gets the biggest laughs as a high school drama teacher (excellent casting), and Cox’s Gale Weathers remains as delightfully bitchy as ever, though that owes more to Cox’s delivery than the script.

Scream 7 inexplicably follows Scream (aka the fifth one) and Scream VI, rivaling only Fast & Furious in its lack of title consistency. The opening sequence is the series’ weakest; no offense to Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph (whose names I had to look up, which may also be a comment on my aging out of the key demo), but they are no Drew Barrymore. Or Jada Pinkett Smith. Or Liev Schreiber. And their murders (spoiler?) aren’t at the level we’ve come to expect from this franchise that even in its worst moments at least knew how to execute a good kill. There’s a dearth of creative deaths here with a few notable exceptions, but there’s also just a dearth of deaths for the standards set by the series. There are long periods, especially in the first half, where we’re just twiddling our thumbs. It relies more on jump scares than actual tension, thinking that the sound of a box cutter ripping through cardboard is enough to make us leap out of our seats. I was as bored as Matthew Lillard’s Stu Macher in the original, but I turned that complacent energy into something more productive than destructive (aka writing this review and not killing people).

It’s great to see Campbell back as Sidney Prescott (Sidney Prescott-Evans now, thank you very much), and while Scream 7 mentions her return eleventy times, it pretends like Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega) from the previous two films never existed. This entry finds Sydney living in the small town of Pine Grove, far from Woodsboro, California, but never far from the trauma that continues to haunt her. She’s now married to the chief of police, Mark Evans (Joel McHale), with three kids, but Scream 7 only really cares about her oldest, Tatum (Isabel May), who is now as old as Sidney was at the time of the Woodsboro murders. Tatum’s friends start dying, and Sidney is once again forced to reckon with masked killers who want her and her loved ones dead. Like every other movie nowadays, Scream 7 incorporates AI into its plot, apparently as much of a requirement for Hollywood screenplays as it is in the workflows of corporate America.

Over the course of six previous movies, I have never guessed whose face is behind the Ghostface mask, but I figured it out this time around. I have not gotten smarter, but these movies have definitely gotten dumber—or assume that its viewers have. By its nature, it’s nearly impossible to replicate the first Scream (not to be confused with 2022’s movie of the same name), which upended the genre with intelligence, wit, and affection, all while being fun, funny, and frightening. Scream 7 lacks any semblance of its energy on either the horror or the comedy side of things. It’s not scary, and it’s not that funny. I wish some studio executive had the bravery to kill the franchise. Be sure to shoot it in the head.