Scream 7 review: A humorless lowpoint for the iconic franchise

The movie seems fixated on exploring why Neve Campbell wasn't in Scream 6. Who cares?

So it feels like a failure of Mindy’s character that she doesn't recognize Scream 7 performing a similar scramble as it sweats to bring back Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). Sidney was the heroine of the first three movies, but more of a looming supporting player in the fourth and fifth — before a pay dispute kept her out of the sixth entirely. (The closest Mindy comes to any sort of clever observation is a quickly abandoned reference to “nostalgia.”)

But for Mindy to even joke about the fan service of Scream 7 would itself feel like a retread, so the movie plays its machinations straight. The goofiest (and saddest) thing about this new Scream sequel is how it essentially backs itself into the position of pretending to answer some fervent call to bring the series back to its roots. Campbell isn’t back because Scream VI infuriated the fandom. (It got decent reviews and made good money.) And she hasn’t returned so the movie can comment on what happens to a slasher's Final Girl in middle age, either. Rather, she’s here because production company Spyglass Entertainment fired Melissa Barrera (star of the fifth and sixth films) for speaking out against the genocide in Palestine. Co-star Jenna Ortega later dropped out of her own accord, conspicuously timed to this PR nightmare of the company’s own making.

No one makes a meta-joke about any of that in Scream 7 (maybe the filmmakers weren’t in the mood to upset their corporate overlords). And compared to the previous installments, no one talks much about horror movies at all. To some extent, it’s an understandable decision from a story perspective: Sidney was never the film geek of the series. She’s the woman who’s actually experiencing groups of masked maniacs stalking her while killing her friends, family, and casual acquaintances — not studying slasher movies for clues. But if a Scream movie forgoes horror talk or broader pop culture for a story about a mother trying in vain to protect her child from trauma, isn’t it just another middling legacy sequel?

At first, co-writer and director Kevin Williamson seems interested in the way people treat salacious true-crime stories as their own ghoulish fandoms. Williamson is the screenwriter of the original two movies, here getting his first shot at directing a Scream himself, and he acquits himself well with the franchise-signature cold open, which follows a couple checking into a cheesy, horror-themed house rental. It’s none other than the Macher residence where the climaxes of Scream (1996) and Scream (2022) both took place, and Williamson wrings both laughs and scares from this obviously doomed scenario.

Williamson is able to spring several other surprises in the movie’s first 40 minutes or so as he picks up with Sidney, now living in Pine Grove, Indiana and happily married to local police chief Mark (Joel McHale). But Sid’s teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) is frustrated by her mother’s reluctance to discuss her past, and tensions between the two increase when yet another masked killer starts terrorizing the town. Williamson has some fun detailing just how prepared Sid and Mark are for this gruesome inevitability — fans of seeing Ghostface getting knocked around will not be disappointed.

Fans of Williamson’s trademark snippy-snark dialogue, however, will be let down, particularly by the obligatory gathering of the suspects to riff on their archetypes. Because Scream has a deep bench of Ghostface survivors, Williamson throws Tatum’s next-gen crowd of barely-characterized suspects alongside the remaining half of the previous film’s “core four,” Mindy and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding). They’re now interning for reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and weirdly fixated on making their names as content creators. Savoy Brown and Gooding do what they can to create some continuity between the previous films with their still-enjoyable performances, but something feels off.

Maybe it’s the fact that the Meeks-Martin siblings and other characters make constant reference to Sidney's absence from the events of New York (and therefore from Scream VI) as if this is a massive plot hole that’s gone years without explanation and must now be finally addressed. But Sidney — a mother of three — not flying across the country to battle a masked killer targeting Barrera’s Sam Carpenter isn’t actually weird at all. It’s far weirder that Mindy and Chad never mention Sam or her sister Tara. You know, their best friends? And, in Tara’s case, Chad’s possible girlfriend? Instead, we get uneasy sorta-laugh lines about how it wasn’t as good without Sidney there in New York. (No? I thought it was pretty fun.)

But the real problem with Scream 7 isn’t the absence of Tara and Sam, even if they did offer more intriguing story avenues than Sidney getting menaced for the sixth time. It’s Williamson’s inability to flip the movie’s weaknesses into evocative strengths. Tatum’s high school, and Pine Grove in general, seem weirdly underpopulated — the sparing use of extras makes it seem as if the town has a bustling population of about 30 people — and a big scene set downtown closely resembles a movie backlot, albeit one where the lighting rigs are broken. But Williamson doesn’t seem to be seeking any particularly uncanny effects, or even noticing the resemblance as Tatum darts around what is effectively an abandoned set. When Mindy finally gets her chance to opine about genre conventions, she rambles about true crime and Jamie Lee Curtis. None of it sticks, beyond the reminder that the filmmaker is running back some material from his story for Halloween: H20. And honestly, almost every bigger thematic swing Scream 7 could conceivably make out of this material is done better by David Gordon Green’s trilogy of Halloween legacy sequels, whether ruminating on the subsequent life of a “Final Girl,” turning a bucolic small town into a slasher graveyard, or remixing moments from past movies into the present.

Williamson does succeed in bringing quieter, creepier scares into the movie, with a recurring shot of Ghostface faintly materializing in the darkness, unnoticed by major characters, Strangers-style. He also pulls off some impressively nasty gore in several kills. Maybe the most baffling thing about Scream 7 is that it’s not an off-the-rails franchise-ending disaster. It’s entertaining enough, with a few fun side performances and the easy prickliness of Sidney and Gale’s friendship. But it’s missing the giddy carnival-ride audience-movie thrills and clever meta-humor of previous entries, and the more serious material simply isn’t insightful enough to take its place (or distract from its craven origins as a corporate patch-job).

At the end of Scream VI, the heroes were confronted with a makeshift museum of real-life memorabilia, a hall of callbacks. Scream 7 feels like it takes place entirely in that room, while swearing that it’s keeping it real.

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Scream 7 releases in theaters on Friday, Feb. 27.