When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the quiet town where Sidney Prescott has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target. Determined to protect her f...
Yeah, 2023 was the wrong time for me to become a Scream fan. I had every reason to walk away from watching “Scream 7” following the disastrous behind-the-scenes turmoil that lead to it being trapped in its own meta-nightmare—a production cursed by real-world horrors that make Ghostface’s antics seem quaint by comparison and a promising albeit derivative requel refresher for the series thrown away and revamped again due to circumstances that are somehow more messy than what caused Scream 3 to be rewritten. Yet, due to some sickening sense of tradition or bio-fascination, I needed to see if they screwed the pooch.
And SCREW IT THEY DID! This is easily the worst Scream film by a country mile and its not even fucking close.
Believe it or not, this is only Kevin Williamson’s second Stab (no pun intended) behind the directors chair after the catastrophic mishap that was 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle—and you will pray to every horror deity out there that it is the last. Shoddy, stale and with a glaring lack of focus that borders on amateur-hour indecision, the man who once wrote the razor-sharp rules of this slasher franchise now waddles through them like a drunk mall-Santa rehearsing lines in an off-brand photo grotto. How Williamson maneuvers through every scene makes his direction so craven, so boring, so corporatized and bankrupt it hardly feels like he’s even in control.
Nearly all the set pieces, hell the entire production design from John Collins just screams anemic. I know I’ve spoken about how underutilized NYC was as a location in Scream VI but I can tell that they were trying to infuse the environment with enough depth, breadth and spatial creativity for the geography to create actual kill boxes to some success. Pine Grove as a setting just comes off like another dime-a-dozen generic placeholder with lackluster staging and a maze of nigh-identical unmemorable suburban orientation straight out of a Hallmark Christmas movie; it is visual Ambien, literal window dressing that blurs together in this beige haze of forgettability.
The film’s presentation just feels like the law of diminishing returns in action—now bearing the form of the generic, formulaic slasher the original movie was designed to subvert the rules of, trucking along with hardly a sense of purpose. It has literally lived long enough to see itself become STAB and Ramsey Nickell’s best efforts as cinematographer don’t exactly bolster that. He cranes the camera, meaning for it to feel kinetic and atmospheric but while it does its job, let’s not pretend it makes what we’re seeing enticing to look at. The visual aesthetic cribs from the flat, desaturated look of a thousand other obscure streaming films you scroll past and the low lighting certainly doesn't help matters.
Jim Page’s editing feels the most algorithmic of the franchise, functionally compact but spliced together with enough halting, stilted rhythm that you can just feel something is off.
Pacing-wise, it’s bloody paradoxical; exhaustingly rushed and interminably long with how scenes whip by in a blur, yet each minute stretches into eternity to an obscene degree because nothing of any substance really happens to anchor them; how do you explain that? Keep in mind, the runtime is over 110 minutes—almost identical to every other Scream film—and it carries itself with the least amount of spunk and gusto out of all the installments. Visual effects at least maintain the franchise’s consistently modest standard, there is absolutely no tension whatsoever (every attempt at it lands with all the impact of a deflated balloon getting sucked into a vacuum) and the tone is a real nothing burger. That calamitous tonal tightrope between guffawing self-aware humor and primal terror from before has all but evaporated away into something heavier and melodramatic but with no bite behind it.
Marco Beltrami returns to compose the score for the first time since Scre4m….and it pretty much goes nowhere. The creepy and eargasmic bells-and-whistles or overbearing orchestral flourishes that defined earlier entries are gone, replaced with functional but forgettable musical cues that do little more than respond to what’s happening on screen with no lasting impression; the score simply exists. Sound design is a lot more flimsy this time around compared to previous entries, costume design is also pretty unremarkable unless you count what the killer wears long before the reveal happens (looking back on it now, it’s a blatant dead giveaway even without leaning into the plaid shirt theory), there is only ONE, count ‘em, ONE interesting kill that manages to raise a single eyebrow while the rest flatline on arrival and….yeah, go figure, it fulfills the MMPA rating it sets out for; it definitely feels like an R-rating but like, what else do you expect by this point?
Labeling the acting strictly as hollow and punitive isn’t fair; they’re mostly fine in taking what they’re given and making it work despite the dialogue being a crime scene of its own with every self-aware wink landing with the grace of a brick hurled through stained glass. But what really drags them down are the characters they’re stuck with….or lack thereof. With the exception of our legacy duo, Tatum and maybe the killer, this film’s roster might as well be wearing “Hello My Name Is: EXPENDABLE” tags and I dare you to name one of them on your own without straining yourself. Each new face amounts to little more than a walking punchline or death scene waiting to happen; even the Meeks-Martin twins aren’t safe. Hell, Sidney’s own daughter Tatum—named after a franchise favorite, for crying out loud—registers as nothing more than a plot device with a pulse despite technically being the main protagonist; It’s like they didn’t even try.
By sheer default, Neve Campbell and Isabel May deliver the only memorable performances, while Cox, Brown, and Gooding struggle with the scraps they’re given; the script wastes their talents so thoroughly you can see the resignation in their eyes. And for how brief Anna Camp and Matthew Lillard appear and then disappear, they are determined to command the screen for however long they can and more often than not, briefly overshadow the leads via charisma alone.
Narratives in Scream movies had always been a proud stickler for broadcasting the rules of horror movies only to then make and/or break them but we always came back for more because at least it looked good while flashing its shit all over town like it was Sharon Stone. Seven installments in, and the well has finally dried up; the script is straightforward to the point of stultification with every facet of rudimentary storytelling being half assed to oblivion. It runs like a cheap made-for-TV movie made strictly out of contractual obligation with only the bare minimum elements required for functionality and no effort to be made fun or balanced. Putting aside how obvious the seams of the costly rewrite are, scenes meant to convey fondness and dramatic weight flatten into thoughtless repetition, its odd indifference to highlighting any emotion cripples the already strained connective tissue to characters who should already know each other and what makes it all the more frustrating is how self-indulgent it acts when it has next to nothing to show for it. All this narrative is is congested bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping for half-hearted ideas while having the sheer arrogance to look down its nose at us for wanting something deeper; it outright refuses to joke about itself and for a franchise built around constant confrontation around uncomfortable truths, that’s downright inexcusable.
It uses nostalgia as a shield and the shield breaks long before the reveals do because it meanders about so much in its bid to follow a formula it doesn’t have the nuance to piggyback off of anymore. This vapid skeleton’s plot boils down ONLY to “Who is Ghostface?” so most of the loosely connected scenes rinse-and-repeat like a first draft. No awards are gonna be given out for going back to the well for something this remedial and done-to-death that you barely get credit for it anymore, but given what the original trilogy collectively did for Sidney as a character, I guess I understand the route taken with her. The one noose that was held over Sidney’s head constantly in those early films was how one wrong decision from her mother lead to this giant avalanche that fucked up her life so monumentally that she’d be lucky to get a minute’s peace, and now she’s in her exact same position—only ten times worse—but nothing comes of it. Neither do any other particular theories, feelings, or playfully satiric ideas or themes about AI, deepfakes, fandom, horror movies or the constant need to revive old icons for a quick buck.
The irony also isn’t lost on me that a movie like this intending to speak out about the dangerous expansive possibilities of A.I was using A.I to promote itself but even THAT doesn’t get brought up and utilized nearly enough for it to matter; its basically a cheap gimmick that ridicules the audience they tried so hard to win back by bringing legacy characters up from the dead undeservedly.
And then if that wasn't irritating enough for you, they SOME-FUCKING-HOW made a Ghostface killer reveal and motive worse than Roman and the Kirsches. The more we rolled down the suspect list, the quicker it became to suss out who the actual culprit was and then we get to the dumb motivation ripped straight out of a Scooby-Doo episode. Ok, sure, the motivation itself is an interesting idea that I maybe would’ve been able to make heads-or-tails with, if everything that came before it wasn't interminably boring or if the final fight lasted longer than 2 minutes. Yes, I know bringing Stu back for real would’ve been too stupid and farfetched but given all the breadcrumbs the last 30 years of Scream movies have given us, it would’ve been TEN TIMES more interesting than this and open the door for actual new avenues for Scream to go down, guaranteed. Plus they still allude to him maybe still being alive at the end of the day anyways; if you’re gonna commit to an idea, FUCKING COMMIT TO IT.
This is literally reminiscent of the Deathstroke expansion from Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. They panicked so badly after shit went wrong from the departures of Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega and Radio Silence and their desperation to shove this out the door led to them literally taking out everything even remotely fun, inventive or cheekily pleasurable from there franchise’s DNA just to have something doable to sell. And that’s just damning.
Plastered together by gaffer tape, dull knives and Zionist prayers, Scream 7 is an offensively bland and blandly offensive cinematic wasteland so devoid of character, atmosphere and general love for the very genre it helped revitalize that it genuinely left me with a sense of blistering fury I haven't felt for a legacy sequel since Halloween Ends. It’s just this black hole of fatigued, weaponized self-destruction, and it is legitimate second-hand embarrassment.
