Scream 7 is officially out in theaters after a long, painful, and controversial journey. Scream is, or perhaps I should say was, the best horror franchise out there. Long able to cleverly critique its own genre and provide real commentary on the film industry, the latest entry is a sad, pathetic attempt at reminding everyone how good it used to be.

Scream 7 Review

This movie is extremely disappointing on so many levels. I will never watch Scream 7 again, and I honestly would prefer to give it the Toy Story 4 treatment. In my mind, that franchise ended after the perfect capper in Toy Story 3. Now, in my mind, Scream VI is the final entry, barring an unexpected reversal of course for an improbable eighth entry.

It feels almost impossible that Kevin Williamson wrote and directed this. How can this be the man behind the script for the first four Scream movies? It feels like a laughably cheap impression of those movies. They weren’t all masterpieces like the original, but they didn’t hit rock bottom like this.

The worst part is that there’s a good concept here. Scream has always been about poking fun at horror movies while being a meta horror movie itself. The ingredients for something critiquing legacy sequels and nostalgia bait, not just in horror but in film, were there.

The characters in Scream 7 even try to use nostalgia bait on Sidney Prescott, but all it does is forcefully remind everyone how good the other movies were. The script is reduced to jingling keys in front of the audience and telling them, “Hey, remember Stu? Remember Dewey? What about Roman? Mrs. Loomis?”

The end of this movie is apallingly bad. Everything leading up to that was at least somewhat interesting, but it completely falls apart after that. There’s AI usage by characters in the movie to deepfake and try to convince Sidney that her past is back to haunt her. It’s done without any commentary on AI usage in movies, though.

The old Kevin Williamson, the one who wrote the original Scream, would have had something biting to say and used it in the script. He could’ve written a movie that took critical aim at bad legacy sequels, nostalgia bait, AI, and more. Much like this iteration of the franchise, though, he appears to be a shell of himself.

It cannot be overstated how awful the Ghostface reveal is. Even in the less outstanding Scream entries, the Ghostface reveal is always good and interesting. It’s always difficult to predict who is behind the mask, and it’s usually a pretty clever twist.

This “twist” and reveal is mind-numbingly stupid. Two characters who have almost nothing to do with any of the characters, but especially Sidney and her daughter Tatum, are the killers? With a third who was killed and revealed who also has literally nothing to do with anyone?

Their motivations are so poorly conceived, too. That also could’ve been done better, because a better script could’ve done a good job poking fun at the fact that, 30 years later, Sidney Prescott is still a final girl. The pieces were there, but they’re so horribly put together that the entire product is a mess.

Now, Williamson had one hand tied behind his back here. Originally, it was supposed to follow Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega’s Tara and Sam Carpenter, along with Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin. Of course, the Carpenters had to essentially be written out, though there’s literally no mention of them. Williamson had to rewrite the script partway through, which is an impossible task.

This, of course, circles back to a reason most moviegoers are planning to skip Scream 7. Spyglass Media fired Barrera for her pro-Palestine tweets, and Ortega essentially stepped down once Barrera had been removed from the project. Plenty of moviegoers aren’t even bothering with this one as a result.

It should go without saying that that was a huge mistake. Barrera posted something on social media about Palestine, and it cost her her job. That is ridiculous, and good on Ortega for essentially standing in solidarity with her.

That decision, however, doesn’t reflect the artists who worked on this. Studio malarkey happens all the time, and I’m not sure it should always negate the work of artists or the message and artistic merit of the project. In this case, plenty of people who had nothing to do with Barrera’s firing worked on this film.

It’s like Paramount releasing The Running Man. It flies in the face of their ownership and leadership’s politics, so it’s incredibly ironic and reflects poorly on them. Does that make the movie invalid or worth skipping? In that case, the art itself had a message that is appropriate for today and valuable.

Unfortunately, in Scream 7‘s case, there is no message here. There’s hardly any artistic merit here, either. There are a few excellent shots of Ghostface lurking in the shadows behind an unsuspecting soon-to-be victim that showcase a talent with the camera.

Those stills will likely be the only lasting thing anyone takes away from this film. There are some wickedly clever kill sequences, as has become a staple of this franchise. However, the opening kill was revealed in the trailer, taking the steam out of it.

The rest of the kills, for the most part, happen to characters it’s hard to care about. Most of them are brand-new and are written so thinly that their exits hardly feel impactful. We’re supposed to care about the boyfriend, who is not a great person nor a good character, getting gutted in the street?

I have always been a proponent of bringing back Stu Macher, who remains the best Ghostface. There’s always been the underlying question of whether or not he survived, and characters in the movies even question his death. There was an opportunity to bring him back, and they sort of, through AI deepfakes, did it.

It was the laziest way of getting Matthew Lillard back as perhaps his most iconic character. It’s pure, horrendous nostalgia bait that even someone who is very nostalgic for the original Scream (one of my four favorites on Letterboxd) can see right through.

That alone is bad enough, but cycling through other former characters at the end to try to up the emotional stakes for Sidney is worse. It felt like Williamson trying to do his own greatest hits of characters, which may actually be the case since no one from Scream (2022) or Scream VI shows up in this AI deepfake montage of nostalgia.

Given what transpired with the production of this movie and the generally awful reviews, it is difficult to see the franchise surviving this. And if it does, where will it turn? It has become a shallow, hollow series that has sadly morphed into the thing it used to mock: a cheap, awful horror movie.

If that’s the case, then a titan of the genre has fallen and gone out with a whimper. Scream VI was genuinely very good, and it set the series up to go a new direction with totally new characters, giving it the genuine chance at evolving and continuing in the modern era. Now, that likely isn’t happening, and it’s probably for the best.

Conclusion

As mentioned, there will be plenty of movie lovers who refuse to even see Scream 7. It’s one thing to have political controversies in your production, but if you do, it’s a good idea to make a good film that will restore some goodwill or at least spark more interest. Unfortunately, the seventh entry in this legendary franchise is the worst, and it isn’t remotely good enough to convince anyone to forget about its horrific beginning.

Score: 1.5/5