0 — Why This Franchise Needs a Final Chapter

As any fan of the Scream franchise will tell you, it’s a tradition to kick each movie off with a self-contained preamble. Scream 7 is no different. Really, why would it be? Horror-movie series thrive on familiarity, tweaked just enough to stave off contempt but similar enough to push the same thrill-seeking buttons. The only thing that’s changed is we’re back to using Arabic instead of Roman numerals in the title again. You expect to see Ghostface, the slasher-flick hall-of-famer with the iconic mask, off a few unlucky youngsters before the credits. Gotta give the people what they want.

This time, it’s a couple in their twenties, played by American Vandal‘s Jimmy Tatro and Landman‘s Michelle Randolph, traveling to an Air BnB. Not just any Air BnB, however — this one’s a replica of the old Prescott house, designed as an immersive experience for true-crime tourists. Check out the kitchen, where Amber Freeman once caught fire. Walk through the living room, and you’ll see where Stu Macher had an unfortunate encounter involving a television set and gravity. The foray is filled with posters of the Stab movies, the cinematic universe-within-a-cinematic-universe that dramatizes the “real” massacres that took place in the fictional town of Woodsboro. Pick up the phone, and a creepy voice will ask if you, too, like scary movies before testing your slasher-trivia knowledge. Don’t forget to sign the guestbook and take a selfie with the animatronic Ghostface during your stay!

It’s not a spoiler to say that things don’t end well for our disposable heroes; a sacrificial killing or two is always needed to get the main story moving. Neve Campbell‘s Sidney Prescott, back after a one-film hiatus, will start getting calls again from someone using that telltale voice soon enough. The mask will reappear, teens will ignore warnings until it’s too late, and bodies will drop. Courteney Cox‘s dogged reporter-slash-stand-in for media immorality Gale Weathers will naturally be on the scene once again, as well a host of recurring characters, fan favorites, and old faces from all six of the previous entries. Ghostface’s gonna Ghostface.

But let’s go back to that opening set piece for a second. The immersive-experience rental is part tourist trap, part museum; like the theater in the climax of Scream VI (2023), which was filled with items from the Woodsboro killings that IRL moviegoers also recognize as props as from the Scream movies and now double as murder weapons to be used against the characters (or in self-defense against the killer), the hall-of-mirrors vibe is strong here. But it’s not long before you recognize what this Air BnB actually is. It’s not just a dig at the whole True Crime Entertainment Industrial Complex. The house is really a reflection of Scream 7 itself. This latest chapter doesn’t care about giving you a story, or even adding much to the series’ overall mythology other than dozens of fresh pretzel-logic plot twists. It simply wants to separate fans from their cash and lure them into another cheap ode to the franchise itself. The fake Woodsboro house exists inside a Scream movie that feels like it’s a simulacrum of a Scream movie. Or, to put it in less pretentious, Baudrillardian terms: This is a fucking scam.

Has any horror-movie series simultaneously expressed passive-aggressive disdain for, and outright pandered to, horror-movie fans as much as the Scream films? When Wes Craven’s O.G. Scream first hit theaters in 1996, we were removed enough from the Golden Age of Slasher Flicks to genuinely miss those grindhouse staples while being deeply video-store–schooled in them to get the references. And yet you didn’t need to have seen Psycho, the Rosetta Stone of cinéma du stab, to gasp when the movie dispatched of its A-list celebrity before the first act had barely started. The rules of the genre and the standard conventions (don’t go in the basement, there’s always a final girl, et al.) were used by survivors as well as the killer(s) in the genre movie you were watching. The more the sequels piled up, the more those Ghostfaces were usually unmasked as different variations of people who loved scary movies not wisely but too well. Yes, vengeance for dead loved ones was a recurring motif as well. But go back and count how many times someone donned the mask in the name of toxic fandom. We’ll wait.

Screenwriter and series creator Kevin Williamson knew what he was doing by leaning into winking, nudging meta-commentary while letting a director who got in on the genre’s ground floor display real craft and care. There’s a reason Scream is a first-round classic. And like so many franchises before it, an endless amount of follow-ups with numbers after the titles chased easy money and diminishing returns. What could be more on-brand in terms of honoring the slasher movies of yore, really, than beating a great central concept into the ground with infinite final chapters and new beginnings? We’re surprised they haven’t gone to space or made Ghostface team up with Chucky yet.

The fact that Williamson is back, doing double duty as cowriter and director this time around, should be instant cause for celebration. It is not. That this sequel got made at all is, of course, a miracle unto itself. But the fun, the frights, and the sense of being among fellow enthusiasts fluent in Slasher 101 and in on the jokes, has been bled out of this. The villain is technically Ghostface per usual, but the real killer is nostalgia, which has metastasized into something terminal this time around. We realize that a bad Scream movie should not have to die for a whole industry’s sins, yet you can definitely hate the player and the game in this instance.

We should say that Campbell understands why she’s here and what purpose Sidney Prescott has to serve, especially when the killer shows up in her new locale, i.e. a quaint bastion of small-town Americana named Pine Grove, and starts going after her daughter Tatum (Isabel May, best known for her work on the Yellowstone spin-off 1883; you can’t say that Paramount, who’s releasing this film, doesn’t understand the benefits of synergy). Her scenes with Joel McHale, who plays Sidney’s cop husband Mark, actually have a nice crackle to them before the stabbings and the disembowelings and the Fangoria-friendly gorefests start up in earnest. She respects the legacy. Cox is present enough to play off whatever is happening, especially once she and Campbell team up. Other veterans, notably Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown reprising their twin-sibling double act, earn their checks. Many of the Scream newbies bear an uncanny resemblance to past Scream actors; you’d swear May was actually a younger Hayden Pantierre, who played survivor-turned-Fed Kirby Reed in parts four and six, respectively.

There are some creative kills involving a theatrical production’s high wires and a beer tap, as well as the usual recitations of horror-movie rules and references to other horror movies, other Scream entries, and many other things you’d much rather be watching. Talking about the predictable clichés in horror movies has now become its own cliché. Several ghost(face)s of Sidney’s past drop by for cameos, thanks to a highly convenient plot surprise involving AI. No, seriously — it’s even worse and more wait-really? than it sounds. Virtually every previous Scream film has revealed whole new branches of the various characters’ family trees, and this one is no exception. Much like Ghostface himself, Scream 7 basically defaults to phoning it in.

The bummer of it all is that, once the franchise rebooted itself with the belated fifth entry, a.k.a. 2022’s Scream, there was a real transfusion of fresh blood that suggested this 1990s throwback series — which used our love of the 1970s and 1980s horror heyday as a foundation — could thrive in the era of “requels” and empowered fandom. This seventh chapter just seems to be exploiting our affection for the Scream team’s history and thinking die-hards will simply go see anything with the name slapped on it. “I thought it would be cool when we got here,” Michelle Randolph’s reluctant visitor to the Air BnB says in that first part. “But it’s kind of cheesy.” Preach it, sister. You have no idea. It’s enough to make you wanna open your mouth wide and you-know-what in anger.