What is there to say about the Scream movies that they haven’t already said about themselves?
As a meta-textual, self-referential genre-takedown vehicle, that’s always been more or less its suit of armour. From the seminal slasher that started the franchise in 1996, the Wes Craven series has always framed itself as a subversion machine that both identified the cliches of other slasher movies, then either engaged with them or ignored them to make the jump scares more difficult to predict.
It did this by rehashing the same plot time and time again. And now it’s doing the same thing in Scream 7, the OK-but-not-great sequel to the sequel of the “requel,” — that would be a reboot sequel for those not in the know.
That plot usually follows a tough-as-nails final girl (virtually always Neve Campbell’s Sydney Prescott) who sees her friends and family picked off by a mysterious, mask-wearing serial killer. While this version jumps forward in time — positioning Prescott as an understandably overprotective mom to rebellious teen Tatum (Isabel May) — the rest is similar.
The knife-wielding maniac Ghostface is once again supposedly someone close to Prescott. And acting like a psychic extension of a culture that both covets and dehumanizes its women, the killer attempts to punish her for some innocuous transgression from her past.
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Like always, Prescott and her friends (including the second biggest box-office draw, Courteney Cox’s cutthroat reporter Gale Weathers) only have two tools to defend themselves: the magical power of friendship, and an encyclopedic knowledge of how, when, and which people tend to die in horror movies.
It’s a formula that has, surprisingly, led to one of the best-received horror franchises of all time. With the exception of the unfortunate Scream 3 and now (foreshadowing) Scream 7, every entry currently holds a fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes — a near-impossible task for a 30-year-old series of any kind, let alone the low-brow slasher.
But of course, it also makes them somewhat impervious to criticism. How do you deride the cheesy murder movie for being cheesy, when every character points out how cheesy it is? How do you say Scream 4 doesn’t understand how hackneyed and predictable its “masked killer calls young girls before killing them” setup has become, when its opening sequence features Kristen Bell murdering a pedantic critic for saying just that?
That makes the way the series’ writer and director (Guy Busick and Kevin Williamson) approached this entry all the more bizarre.
Campbell’s return to the franchise — after a much-publicized salary dispute led to her absence in Scream VI — is clearly a draw for fans. But in terms of “return-to-form,” there’s not much form on offer. Sure, there’s a veritable cavalcade of nostalgia-bait via cameos and quips — and more blood than a Stephen King prom night — but the heart of this brand is notably, and bafflingly absent.
That would be Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera, the stars of Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) and directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin.
Barrera was infamously dropped from the series after making social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war that the production company deemed antisemitic. Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin soon followed, as did Ortega, who told The Cut that all the departures made it feel as if Scream 7 was “kind of falling apart.”
Outside the theatre, these staffing changes resulted in last-minute rewrites, then protests and calls for a boycott over what some have deemed a sort of neo-McCarthyism. And inside the theatre, the results aren’t much better.
While abandoning the new characters that somehow made a story structure rooted in the past feel new, Scream 7 also ditches what was the entire point of the movies in the first place.
Ditched deconstruction
Aside from perhaps a single perfunctory scene rehashing the rules of a horror flick, Scream 7 entirely throws out the idea that these movies are meta deconstructions of film at all.
So, instead of a Last Action Hero for gore, we get Tron: Ares: a functional, if uninspired, fan-service return that feels drained of all the tonal originality of the first movie.
Which is all the more dire for a franchise like Scream; removing the one thing that makes it unique only emphasizes how the film — and especially its big bad — are essentially toothless.
In fact, it was more or less designed that way. On paper, the universe of Scream is set up to mock the relentless sameness of the horror landscape: youthful protagonists voyeuristically slaughtered for the unforgivable sin of youth has been done and redone so often it becomes painfully — and boringly — obvious who’s going to be picked off next.
The early films used that in a way that has since become a cliche of its own: having the characters lean into their stereotypes, then identify and criticize those tropes alongside the audience.
The smartest way the previous Scream movies accomplished that was always to refer to the formulas we already know. Look no further than how the first film subverted the “final girl” concept by immediately killing off its most famous actress. Or how the second had a whole scene explaining the rules of horror sequels and then repeatedly returned to those rules.
In fact, no soulless, out-of-touch critic could sum it up better than one character already did in Scream VI: “The worst part is, franchises are just continuing episodic instalments designed to boost an IP.”
Bland big bad
That bland formula folded back in on itself also makes a fairly boring big bad work.
Ghostface, after all, is just a psycho in a Party City costume. There’s no invulnerability like Friday The 13th‘s Jason Voorhees, no mystical voodoo magic like Child Play‘s Chucky, no eldritchian horror of It‘s Pennywise. Instead, he’s got a hunting knife, (occasionally) a bulletproof vest, a pay-as-you-go phone plan and all the power of a neighbourhood weirdo who hits the gym maybe twice a week.
So when Scream 7 becomes nothing more than a dime-a-dozen whodunnit, there’s not much left to do but yawn.
The players have already had their arcs stretched past the breaking point: after going from heartless vulture to reluctant friend, to vulnerable hero, then inexplicably back to unethical newshound, Gale Weathers has returned to the friendly ally position in a character evolution that infinitely loops in on itself.
The villain reveal is almost laughably obvious, while the killer’s derivative and cartoonish monologue sits firmly at the bottom of all seven entries. And Sydney Prescott’s “protect my daughter from the horrors I survived” plot feels just as contrived as it did when Tim Burton slotted it into Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
There is perhaps an attempt at originality here. In addressing the terrors she’s already survived, we’re informed that Prescott cannot escape the trauma that’s followed her all her life. Instead, she is defined by trauma, like a cinematic Sisyphus, doomed to eternal torment for our entertainment.
But with no effort made to set up the context, it comes off as a random aside rather than criticism of the audience’s insatiable appetite for vicarious violence. And coming as late as it does in a franchise that feels firmly out of steam, it’s a better argument than any that maybe we should just let it die.
