Scream 7, 2026
Directed by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Courteney Cox, Jasmin Savoy-Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Mark Consuelos, Tim Simons, Joel McHale, David Arquette, and Matthew Lillard.
SYNOPSIS:
When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the quiet town where Sidney has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target. Determined to protect her family, she must face the horrors of her past to put an end to the bloodshed once and for all.
For well publicised reasons the Scream franchise abandons the intriguing direction it was heading in at end of the terrific sixth installment to return to the familiar kind of tedious cat-in-the-cupboard whodunnit slasher that Wes Craven’s genre-changing 96 original so brilliantly riffed on.
As a result this seventh outing feels like a hastily cobbled together pool of ideas to hang loosely on the fact that franchise OG Neve Campbell returns in a meta Jamie Lee-Curtis in Halloween (2018) tale of mother/daughter generational trauma. It’s even referenced as such.
Original writer and first-time director Kevin Williamson shows flashes in the blade from the off, with the signature Scream pre-credit sequence one of the very best. Perfectly capturing the climate of true-crime obsessives (also covered in the Halloween reboot) with the kind of wit and knowing jokes that has punctuated the franchise.
In their brief roles, Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph make more of an impression than any of the new cast additions, with the scene executing that trickiest of balancing acts between terror, laughs and smarts that the rest of the film simply cannot match. It’s that good. It’s also incredibly frustrating, because it has no connective tissue to the rest of the film, which appears to be more interested in reaching out to the past. There’s nothing wrong with that, but didn’t Scream 5 already do this franchise’s Force Awakens?
Anyhoo. Skip forward to suburban America and we find the returning Campbell, who the film repeatedly points out skipped the events of its New York predecessor for laughs, without being meta enough to own up to the reasons why. She is at loggerheads with her daughter Tatum (Isabel May), who appears to be living out a facsimile of her mother’s teenage years, even letting a Skeet Ulrich-wanabe (Sam Rechner) climb through her window and deliver a Billy Loomis monologue that feels like it has been done a thousand times before. It’s indicative of a film that feels tired and seen-it-all-before.
On which, Ghostface, so often a stealthy whisp of a killer, snaking around corners like corporeal mist, permanently trapped in a hall of mirrors, and terrifying because of it, comes across like even he/she/they can’t be bothered. The scheming cruelty has been replaced with a plodding boogeyman, preoccupied with Mortal Kombat finishing moves rather than the stalk-and-slash brilliance of Billy and Stu’s original phantoms.
It might be because the new blood Ghostface is pursuing fail to rise above being anything other than fodder. Remember how gutted you were when Randy was er…gutted, or the cries of “Nooooooo” when Dewey was finally downed? They’ll be no such anguish for this unmemorable lot.
Instead the heavy lifting is left to Campbell, Courteney Cox, and the returning Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy-Brown, who feel copy ‘n’ pasted into proceedings as a reminder about how good 5 and 6’s next-gen cast was, but it’s only to the detriment of 7.
The overarching whodunit element of the film, which is always so integral to the success of the Scream series, is sadly a case of who cares. Sidney’s initial approach to being contacted by yet another voice-changing stalker is refreshingly couldn’t-give-a-shit, indicating that this could be a terrific final girl one-on-one showdown with her own iconic shape. A real battle. Ripley in the Queen’s nest level-stuff. Instead it just becomes a conveyor belt of kills, some fun, with Sidney largely circling the periphery of the Scooby Doo adventure.
Blunting the point of a razor-sharp 30-year old horror franchise, this has enough moments to make it worthy of fun dissemination at one of Randy’s house-parties, but there’s not much else worth screaming about seventh time around.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
