Review | ‘Scream 7’ is the final nail in the coffin

Illustration by Zoe Arntsen, Illustrator

“Scream 7” is without charm or ingenuity, a tired husk of a franchise, barely clinging to life and desperately lacking in that department as well.

After a quintet of movies in which Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)  is terrorized by a variety of masked psychos, she has settled into a quiet, suburban life in Pine Grove, Indiana. She runs a coffee shop whilst raising her teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), with her husband Mark (Joel McHale). 

Once again, though, that tranquility is short-lived when the vicious franchise icon Ghostface returns, promising to destroy Prescott’s life and kill Tatum. This time, it seems the source of the dread might even be a figure from Sidney’s past that she thought she’d bid farewell to long ago.

I had my hopes for “Scream 7” after the previous entry revitalized the franchise by bringing its new cast — and with it, a whole new generation — to a brand new location in New York City. All this, while retaining fan favorites like Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Patnierre). However, as this latest stab at the series took shape, I got the sense that this franchise was regressing. 

Not only did Paramount replace the filmmaking team behind the previous two films, but also fired the ostensible new lead, Melissa Barrera, over some pro-Palestine posts on social media. This sent the “Scream” team crawling back to Neve Campbell, after a mere one-movie absence due to a salary dispute. 

For the first time, the “Scream” franchise has no new ideas. We’re back in a small town, where, outside of Sidney’s presence and the history she brings with her, violence seems impossible. Pine Grove looks a whole lot like Woodsboro, where the films began. 

There’s a colorful cast of high schoolers with their whole lives ahead of them — or not, given they’re in a “Scream” movie. Even Gale returns, this time with the only remaining characters introduced in the previous two films, siblings Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown).

Now, I know, I know. These “Scream” movies have their own pleasures. To hold them to serious critical scrutiny would do them and their charms a disservice. But even by the standards of a “Scream” movie (Are the kills gnarly? Is the killer’s reveal shocking? Is the opening scary?), this movie frequently disappoints by every metric. 

Even a lesser “Scream” flick can be saved by the reveal of who’s behind the pale white mask. This one impresses with a fake-out halfway through. It finally pursues a new idea about who could be after Prescott, but that is quickly dropped as other masked killers still lurk. The moment this movie unmasks those faces is where it fully goes off the track with a reveal that is laughable in how perfunctory the characters have been up to that point.

Outside of a surprisingly mean-spirited kill involving a beer tap and a head wound, even the violence within the film isn’t particularly creative or memorable. Worst of all, this is the least formidable Ghostface has ever been. 

Maybe it’s seeing him back in a familiar setting or just how many times we’ve seen the cloak and mask combo on-screen. At one point, he pursues Tatum on foot, and I wasn’t just unafraid of the central threat, but for the first time in seven movies, he looked silly. He didn’t look like a cold, calculating killer; he looked like he’d walked out of Spirit Halloween. 

If these movies have forgotten how to make Ghostface scary, they really are lost.

Even Neve Campbell seems sort of checked out here. It’s not as if they’ve given new layers to Prescott’s journey beyond a teenage daughter she has to prepare for a lifetime of PTSD. She’s spent almost as long settling into a comfortable life before having it ripped away from her as she has been pursued by Ghostface. 

The clashes between Sidney and her daughter are frequently grating, and it also strains credulity that someone who’s been through all that Sidney has would know how to properly raise a child, especially when she still finds herself beset by carnage.

The “Scream” movies have always seen Sidney haunted by the ghosts of her past and all the trauma she’s accumulated throughout her brushes with death. It’s hard not to feel, especially when coupled with her daughter and her circle of friends, that it frequently recalls Sidney’s own journey going all the way back to the first film. 

With Barerra’s character in the prior two films, we were watching a new kind of arc within the series of what being tied to all this violence might do to a person’s psyche, and how it may draw them closer to being the next masked killer. 

Even in Tatum and her friends, you can just barely see a glimmer of these movies’ future, but that’s dimmed as soon as we pivot away from them or they’re promptly done away with almost as soon as they arrive. It’s not much of a passing of the torch when it keeps getting pulled away. Returning to Sidney makes it abundantly clear she is now the spectre these movies just don’t know how to leave alone.

As I feared, “Scream 7” has no tricks up its sleeve. I’m not sure what the next step is in the evolution of these movies, but this is not the path to travel. It seems best that those behind the franchise take their own advice and make sure it’s dead, lest it spring back up for the attack, like various Ghostfaces tend to do.