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Whether you love or hate the Scream franchise, it’s hard at this stage not to at least respect it. Even without the subterranean bar set by other lazy slasher sequels (stalk, stab, repeat, yawn) it’s a series that has now been around for 30 years and tasked itself with extending an ongoing narrative of insanely convoluted soap, finding new ways to comment on the horror genre and appealing to a savvier generation of younger fans (the sixth film managed to be the highest-grossing in the US). If nothing has rivalled the 1996 original, it’s still hard to argue that there’s been an objectively bad Scream movie, even at the franchise’s less effective moments, there’s been a buzz of effort and energy present.
The run continues, albeit with perhaps more notes than usual, with Scream 7, a scrappy, passably entertaining new chapter that limps to the screen with wounds on show. The original plan had been to continue the story of the Carpenter sisters, introduced in 2022’s hit relaunch, but after the shameful firing of star Melissa Barrera who dared to speak out about a genocide, it was back to the drawing board. Said drawing board was then just a headshot of Neve Campbell, the original Scream queen, and a bunch of dollar signs next to it as the actor had rightfully turned down the sixth film over what she said was a lowball offer. Some seven million reasons to rejoin later (according to reports) and she’s back front and centre, along with many amusing “why weren’t you in New York?” references, and with some familiar, and confusing, old friends.
Control of the series has been returned to Kevin Williamson, who wrote the original film along with the second and the fourth, proudly able to claim the best three films of the whole franchise with a great deal of help from Wes Craven. He’s co-writing and directing here (his first film as director since 1999’s defanged dark comedy Teaching Mrs Tingle) and the pair are joined by a returning Courtney Cox and the tease of some fan service cameos from characters we’d assumed were dead. Even for a series that has prided itself on goofy Scooby Doo reveals, the supposed suspense of the film is waiting to see just how goofy things are going to get …
After an effectively tense and promisingly choreographed cold open which sees a true crime tourist couple making the mistake of AirBnb-ing the infamous Stu Macher house from the original, we’re back with Sidney as she tries to make a new, killer-free life for herself. Her eldest daughter Tatum (Yellowstone universe’s Isabel May, playing 17, which throws the timeline into question given how the fourth one was made in 2011) is curious about her mother’s past and even though as Sidney explains, it’s not only online but on screen in the Stab movies, there’s a distance between the two, a gap between what is known and what is spoken about. It doesn’t take long for Sidney’s past to catch up with her once again as a gory killing spree begins, potentially orchestrated by someone assumed dead. While there is a local interest in her perverse brand of celebrity, at this point, if Sidney were to move into your town, you’d be forgiven for chasing her out with pitchforks.
Despite being the father of not only the franchise but the self-referential, self-parodying horror subgenre, Williamson has chosen not to give the film any larger meta commentary. The sixth chapter was also lighter in that regard, carrying over the fifth film’s playful skewering of online-brained fanboy culture but mainly focused on a simpler revenge narrative. We’ve been teased with a campaign sold on an “everything has led to this”-style reveal (it’s been marketed as the final Scream even though it clearly won’t be) but the ending has a clumsy made-up-on-the-spot messiness to it that does not feel like this was some big plan all along. It’s hard to explain exactly what my issues were with the deranged “so this is why I’m doing this” explanation without dipping into spoiler territory but what’s frustrating is that there is something conceptually interesting about the reasoning that does smartly speak to issues bigger than this one film but it just isn’t handled as slickly as one would expect from someone like Williamson, who seems a little lost in territory he used to know so well.
The guy who was once able to define big- and small-screen teenspeak for an era – overly verbose yet witty and, at the time, genuinely cool – is unable to capture the sound or vibe of a new generation, the latest teen recruits all a little too bland to register. It’s telling that the film only really kicks into gear when Cox’s fame-hungry journalist returns with the much-stabbed surviving twins, played by Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy-Brown (their entrance is one of the film’s few applause-worthy masterstrokes). They’re all able to nail the right light-footed tone and zippy energy needed for a Scream movie but Williamson, along with returning writer Guy Busick, often struggles to juggle the new and the old with too many spinning plates that he often forgets which ones are still spinning and why. Campbell and Cox are thankfully afforded more to do and the film does give their complicated trauma-bond friendship an interesting, if underwritten, arc. There are also some inventively nasty kills (Williamson’s claim that this would be a less violent Scream feels like a misdirect) yet despite all of the callbacks, the most effective nostalgia play ends up being the return of original composer Marco Beltrami whose rousing, if largely reused, score has a genuine goosebump effect.
The problem with the Scream films is that while the bar might be low outside of the franchise for not only a seventh slasher but a seventh of anything, the bar within it, for a Scream sequel is that much higher. There’s just about enough here to show signs of life (with tracking suggesting a huge opening, Scream 8 is an inevitability) but Williamson often feels like he’s treading water when he should be drawing blood.
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Scream 7 is out in cinemas on 27 February
