Scream 7 Review: Is the Scare Finally Gone?

In Scream 7, Sidney Prescott squares off against the franchise's scariest villains yet: her rebellious teenage daughter and the threat of A.I. Without a doubt, Kevin Williamson's return to the franchise is the laziest of the bunch, utterly disconnected from what made his and Wes Craven's creation so interesting in the first place, reliant on the exact same horror tropes that they once parodied and commented on so profoundly in 1996. For fans of the franchise - hell, for fans of horror writ large - Scream 7 may feel like nothing but a waste of time.

Vaguely, Williamson, who co-wrote Scream 7 with Guy Busick from a story co-written with James Vanderbilt, gestures lazily towards Sidney's legacy of trauma and how our collective cultural obsession with true crime might be perpetuating a cycle of violence. But, crucially, he misses the opportunity its premise creates to say anything real about that, the series' ongoing exploration of toxic fandom or the more timely question of what A.I.'s incursion into our daily lives actually means. Instead, the film falls into the exact kinds of narrative knots the franchise seeks to untangle. With far too many characters to service, a strange insistence on apologizing for Scream VI, killers that are telegraphed from a mile away, and a pace so slow it'll make you long for bumper-to-bumper traffic (at least you're going somewhere!), Scream 7 is so bad that the franchise might deserve to be killed as brutally as Ghostface does his victims.

Look, seven movies into this franchise that has featured Sidney (Neve Campbell) losing everyone she knows to the brutal whims of a rubber-masked killer, and you have to eventually acknowledge that Sid's life is, well, comically unfortunate. Except that Scream 7 is woefully self-serious. With the reasonable insistence she moves to a small town to escape the trail of blood, Sidney finds herself in Pine Grove, a town with Hallmark levels of bucolic artificiality. Here, Sid runs a coffee shop called "A Little Latte," and before you ask, yes, there is a chalkboard with the menu in cutesy writing.

Sid seems relatively well-adjusted (which is a bit of a head-scratcher in its own right), and has married, predictably, a police officer. Mark (Joel McHale) is mostly a nothingburger of a character, though McHale lends him the same smarmy charm that made him famous on Community. The two have three kids: a pair of twin infants that are never seen, and Tatum (Isabel May), a seventeen-year-old named after Tatum from the first film (Rose McGowan).

This Tatum has a creepy boyfriend, Ben (Sam Rechner), just like her mother once did, but is a good kid. She acts in the school theater, and the only source of genuine tension between her and her mother seems to be that Sid refuses to open up about her past being stalked by a gazillion killers. Williamson and Busick hit this beat so hard that the repeated scenes of the two arguing over essentially nothing starts to sound like nails on a chalkboard.

Nothing really happens in Scream 7 until Sidney gets a call from someone claiming to be Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), who was one of the first film's killers and very much died. But, the FaceTime calls she gets from a scarred face are rather convincing, which makes Sid assume she's being pranked by someone with especially good deepfake skills.

After a reasonably tense chase and fight with Ghostface in Sidney and Mark's home, Gale (Courteney Cox) arrives to help figure out who has resurrected the mask. With her are Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin (Jasmine Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding, respectively), from the last two Scream films, who are her interns, which is the kind of character development that makes little sense except as a lackluster bridge between films. Notably absent, of course, are Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega. Barrera was fired for speaking in support of Palestine. Ortega left the project in solidarity.

However they got here, Scream 7 has its new bunch of heroes. Some old, some new, all of them sketched thin, none of whom are serviced well at all. And that includes Sidney, whose entire character now is just: a person who has trauma. It's very frustrating to watch streams of characters hurl guilt trips onto Sid simply for surviving, or else just being a mother, in ways that reach such a fever pitch of insensitivity it makes one wonder if Williamson even likes his heroine.

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