There’s a particular sting when a Scream movie disappoints. This is, after all, the franchise that built its legacy on dissecting horror tropes while gleefully participating in them, skewering sequels, trilogies, reboots, and prestige horror with razor-sharp wit. With Kevin Williamson, the original architect of the 1996 classic, stepping into the director’s chair, Scream 7 should have been a triumphant recalibration.
While it has a solid young cast, a few great set pieces for kills, and the original Final Girl front and center once more, it’s the weakest installment in the series to date: derivative, dramatically inert, and curiously devoid of the meta-commentary that once defined it.
A Body Count Without Purpose
The opening kill to Scream remains one of, if not the, most iconic of all time. Subverting audience expectations, killing off your biggest star, a heart-breaking performance, the sinister voice from the other side of the phone call. Even many of the sequels do a great job of keeping it up, with Jada Pinkett-Smith, Liev Schreiber, Lucy Hale, Kristin Bell, Jenna Ortega, Samara Weaving, and many others appearing in the sequel’s opening scenes.
Scream 7’s opening shows a young couple, one of whom is obsessed with the Stab franchise, arrive at the house of Stu Macher for an overnight trip as it’s been made into a half-museum, half-AirBnB situation for fans to visit and stay at. Some chilling moments, some startling scares, but pretty much the entire thing was shown throughout trailers so there was no shock value left.
The central mystery, who is behind the Ghostface killings this time?, begins with promise. An early revelation of who is behind it, shown through a FaceTime call (which leads to Roger L. Jackson’s smallest amount of dialogue in the franchise) made my jaw drop that they went there so quickly, but we find out it’s a misdirect and are left disappointed. As the film barrels through half a dozen deaths, a new problem emerges: there are simply too many underdeveloped new characters and not enough plausible suspects left.
By the time the killers are revealed, the answer feels less like a clever twist and more like narrative math. After eliminating nearly everyone else, the culprits turn out to be the only two remaining new additions. It’s less a shocking unmasking than a shrug-inducing inevitability.
Past killers in the franchise had motive-driven identities: revenge, jealousy, fame, or the deliciously meta ambition of “saving” a flailing horror property of the in-universe Stab series. Here, the reveal is disappointingly senseless. There’s no sharp cultural critique, no commentary, just an obsessed fan trying to get some kind of payback against their idol. Just violence for violence’s sake.
It’s especially interesting since Neve Campbell said in interviews that her time on Scream 5, a scene in which Sam Carpenter stabs Richie over 20 times, that it felt too violent for the franchise and that they had steered too far from what made the originals work so well. Yet Scream 7 has some of the most gruesome kills we’ve seen, to the point of being cartoonish in their execution. Do we really need to see bloody beer spout out of a teenager’s mouth? Or another gutted wild suspended mid-air? No.
Tropes Played Straight
The franchise once treated horror clichés as punchlines and intellectual sparring partners. Now, Scream 7 runs through them like a checklist. The ominous phone calls. The suspicious boyfriend. The “don’t go in there” beats. The genre nerd rambling off a monologue on how everything is connected. They’re all present but stripped of irony, satire, or subversion.
The film gestures toward the self-awareness that made the series iconic, yet never commits to saying anything about the current horror landscape. In an era dominated by prestige terror, franchise fatigue, and the cultural obsession with real-life serial killers, the material is ripe. And yet, the script sidesteps it all. They touch on true-crime obsession with Lucas, but only to make him red herring rather than to say something about the recent spike in its popularity.
Even a handful of cameo appearances from long-deceased characters, achieved through deepfake technology, felt less like clever meta play and more like hollow nostalgia bait.
Neve Campbell’s Commanding Return
The saving grace is the cast.
Neve Campbell has the most substantial material she’s had since Scream 4, notably the final film directed by Wes Craven, and she attacks it with conviction. Sydney Prescott is now in full protective “Mama Bear” mode, determined not to let history repeat itself. There’s a grounded maturity to her performance that elevates even the film’s thinnest scenes.
Sydney now runs a small-town coffee shop, is happily married to police chief Mark, played by an ever-charming Joel McHale, who brings warmth and steadiness to what could have been a thankless role meant for cannon fodder.
Newcomer Isabel May plays Sydney’s daughter, Tatum, and proves herself a compelling mix of vulnerability and resilience — victim, fighter, and survivor in equal measure. She has the makings of a bona fide Scream Queen while working alongside a legendary one.
The younger ensemble is stacked with recognizable genre talent: McKenna Grace (The Haunting of Hill House and The Bad Seed) as Tatum’s best friend, Hannah. Sam Rechner (The Fabelmans) plays boyfriend Ben with understated charm and a hint of suspicion; Celeste O’Connor (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) and Asa Germann (Gen V, The Boys) round out the friend group, while Anna Camp (Pitch Perfect) adds a dose of adult-world perspective for Sydney.
Franchise staples return as well: the razor-sharp Gale Weathers and the Meeks-Martin twins, portrayed by Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown, all of whom do what they can with limited material, but even they feel sidelined, especially the latter two who are attacked and all but disappear from the film for its entire climax.
It’s a strong ensemble trapped in a film that doesn’t know what to do with them.
A Hollow Victory Lap
One could argue that Sydney finally gets her happy ending here. But we’ve seen variations of that before, at the end of Scream 3 and again, in passing, during Scream VI. Repeating that beat doesn’t feel triumphant; it feels redundant.
With a returning icon, a capable cast, and the original franchise writer at the helm, Scream 7 had every ingredient for reinvention. Instead, it plays like a franchise going through the motions — more concerned with maintaining the IP than interrogating it.
It’s hard not to wonder how different this film might have been before the very public creative upheavals surrounding its cast. But speculation aside, what’s on screen is what matters. And what’s on screen lacks the bite, irreverence, and cultural savvy that once made Scream essential viewing.
Perhaps it’s time to let Ghostface rest… at least until someone has something new to say.