I'm not going to suggest that Scream 7 is a return to form for the critically ailing yet commercially triumphant slasher franchise (I don't believe it had much form to begin with), but it's certainly a baby step up from the awfulness of the previous two instalments. That's a bit like saying a soccer team is showing signs of improvement because they only lost 3-0 against their local rivals as opposed to the 5-0 drubbing they suffered the previous season. But I'm a Spurs fan, so I'll take whatever crumb of comfort I can, and the crumb tossed to fans here is the return of Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, along with series creator Kevin Williamson, directing for the first time since 1999's Teaching Mrs Tingle, and co-writing with Guy Busick (with a story contribution by Zodiac scribe James Vanderbilt).
In her first scene here Sidney is seen cleaning up her teenage daughter's messy bedroom, an apt visual metaphor for how Williamson and Campbell clearly feel about the direction a new generation has recently taken their franchise. The adults are back to clean up this mess, but at best Scream 7 simply brushes the series' issues under the carpet. To continue with a football metaphor, Williamson is the pragmatic coach who comes in when a team has gotten derailed by a manager obsessed with tactics. Scream 7 is bad, but it's bad in a less taxing, less confusing way than its predecessors. There is something cosy about its uncomplicated awfulness.
Despite the script she's lumbered with, Campbell is so good here that it reflects badly on the series for failing to do anything interesting with its figurehead, and on the producers for failing to pay her what she's worth. Ala Halloween: H20, here we find Sidney living far from Woodsboro as she attempts to build a new life in small town Indiana. She's married to the local chief of police (Joel McHale), with whom she has a 17-year-old daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), and she runs a successful coffee shop on the town's Gilmore Girls-esque main street.
Inevitably, Sidney's past catches up with her in the form of another lunatic clad in a ghostface mask. Might it even be Stu Macher, the sociopath whose skull she crushed with a TV set 30 years ago (and that was the age of weighty CRT units kids, not your slimline flatscreens)? If not, someone is using some convincing AI to pose as Stu on a series of threatening video calls. It's a clever way to bring a dead character back, and Matthew Lillard is excellent at portraying an AI version of himself, all uncanny valley jerky movements like a modern day Max Headroom.
This series has always been dogged by characters reacting to situations in the dumbest way imaginable, but even Sidney is portrayed as an idiot here. Several times "Stu" lets her know he's about to kill Tatum, yet Sidney doesn't think to immediately call her daughter to alert her to the threat. Nonsense like this makes it all the more eye-rolling when the script has the gall to mock its previous entries. Yes, Scream 7 isn't as bad as Scream 5 or Scream 6 (because how could it be?) but it never earns the right to disparage another filmmaker's work in such a cheeky manner.
What keeps Scream 7 from being the outright disaster of those two previous instalments is how Williamson keeps things relatively simple. Thankfully this time out we don't constantly find ourselves scratching our heads over such details as how a character could possibly be at a certain location at a certain time or why someone doesn't pull the killer's bloody mask off when they have a chance. This is a bad horror movie in the manner of the bad '80s horror movies it references, one that doesn't require you to keep track of characters as though you were reading a Tolstoy novel. It's unambitious certainly, but I'll take unambitious mediocrity over convoluted atrocity any day.
There's little to recommend here, but if you're a horror completist you at least get a couple of fun kills (death by beer tap!); the occasional set-piece (a crawlspace!) that could have been genuinely thrilling in the hands of a better director; and a neat way to reintroduce Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers. And ingenue du jour McKenna Grace is always an affable presence, even if she is only present for a fleeting cameo here.
Given her limited screen time, it would have made more sense to cast Grace in the movie's prologue, continuing the series' tradition of killing off a recognisable movie star before the opening credits. Instead we get Michelle Randolph (who?) and Jimmy Tatro (no, me neither). Maybe the kids know who they are, but I'm betting Williamson doesn't. He's firmly stuck in the '90s, still referencing Friday the 13th movies, which in 2026 is like if the 1996 original saw its killer quiz their victims on the trivia of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
But for the most part Scream 7 doesn't reference horror history so much as its own lore, even whipping out Sidney's old leather coat as though it were Axel Foley's letterman jacket (you can tell this movie was made by a gay man because it's full of catty insults and expects us to remember an innocuous item of clothing from 30 years ago). In the prologue we see the Stu Macher house has been turned into a museum/Air BnB, a reflection of how the series has fallen back on past glories. In 1996 Williamson poked fun at horror fans who were stuck in the past; now he's simply pandering to them.
Directed by: Kevin Williamson
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Joel McHale, McKenna Grace, Ethan Embry
