‘Scream 7’ Is Good at Nostalgia, But Not Much Else [REVIEW]
3/5 slashings
When Melissa Barrera, star of the past two Scream reboot/sequels, was fired by production company Spyglass in 2023 for sharing pro-Palestinian sentiments on social media, Scream 7 should have been scrapped. When her costar and onscreen sister Jenna Ortega departed in solidarity, it should have been scrapped. When director Christopher Langdon left due to harassment and death threats over misconceptions about who fired Barrera, it should have definitely been scrapped.
However, it wasn’t, and now we’re here, in the wake of an empty, expensive ($500,000) rewrite. Kevin Williamson, who penned the first, second, and fourth installments of the original franchise, teams up with Scream V and VI co-writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, and what we were ultimately presented with doesn’t tell us really anything. But it is pretty fun to see in a theater.
Nostalgia does not a substantial plot make
Really, what this rewrite hinges on is nostalgia, mixed with heavy amounts of what ifs. Our favorite final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is a coffeeshop owner in a quiet little Indiana town, where she raises her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) with her husband Mark (Joel McHale), who’s chief of police. Pretty standard fare–but not for a Scream movie. Combined with a pretty basic cinematography lens, it feels more like a low-budget horror film than something in one of the biggest horror franchises in history.
The characters suffer from a nothingness–with the exception of returning twins Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) Meeks-Martin, this new cast of teenagers feels more drab and nondescript than the back wall of a Dillard’s petite section. Even Tatum, whose whole deal is struggling with not being as brave as her mom and dealing with Sidney being an (understandably) overprotective mom, doesn’t have much to give the viewer.
All of this could have been prevented if Sidney just declined her calls
The story itself has potential. While Sidney has been used to getting creepy calls from strangers using a voice modulator, there are ones that she begins to get that are different from all the others: FaceTimes from none other than Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). The theory is AI deepfake, but the film goes to great lengths to keep you guessing. Could Stu actually have survived all those years ago? And why wait until now to seek revenge?
Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) senses a story and makes her way into Woodsboro to be the one to break it. Oh, how she’s missed Sidney! It’s such a shame she wasn’t in New York! (Something the film repeats several times, like somebody trying desperately to land an unfunny joke.) We get it. We all know why Sidney was absent from Scream VI, and it wasn’t a plot choice.
While the original installations weren’t so much about the gore as they were about the mystery, Scream 7 does do a good job of marrying both. Its opening scene certainly wasn’t a bore, and some of the kills in the film are downright gruesome. But this momentum is very start-and-stop, and there’s no fluidity in how those aspects integrate with the plot.
Your generation is your reaction to this film
That being said, there will certainly be a divide amongst older and younger viewers. Those who grew up with the original Scream franchise will chew on those morsels of nostalgia like a mouse finding a crumb. The younger generation who didn’t experience the hype will find the stuffed-in cameos bland and boring. (Which…is not far off from the truth, though of course it was nice to see some familiar faces.)
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things about this is that this is what Scream has boiled down to. It’s a concept falling supine at the feet of capitalism, who is doing its best to suck the marrow dry. But isn’t truly awful. It just is, and that may be worse.
(featured image: Jessica Miglio/Jessica Miglio)
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