Directed By: Kevin Williamson

Written By: Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick

Story By: James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick 

Cinematography: Ramsey Nickell

Editor: Jim Page

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Joel Michael, Anna Camp, McKenna Grace, Ethan Embry, Celeste O’Connor, Jimmy Tatro 

Sidney Prescott has built a quiet life in Pine Grove, Indiana, running a coffeehouse with her husband, Mark, and raising their teenage daughter, Tatum. That fragile peace shatters when a new Ghostface begins targeting Tatum and her friends, first attacking during a school theater rehearsal and then turning the family’s home and Sidney’s business into killing grounds. The threat becomes more personal when Ghostface contacts Sidney through video calls, appearing as an aged and scarred Stu Macher. As Sidney tries to protect Tatum, the attacks spread through the town, forcing her to confront the possibility that Stu survived and that someone is using her traumatic past to manipulate her family. With Gale Weathers, Chad Meeks-Martin, and Mindy Meeks-Martin drawn into the crisis, Sidney must uncover the killer’s identity before Tatum becomes the next chapter in her mother’s history of violence.

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Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t seen Scream 7, I wouldn’t recommend reading this review. Then again, after watching the movie, you might wish somebody had warned you about that, too.

First things first: I love the original Scream. I like Scream 2, too. And for whatever reason, I’ve generally found myself enjoying the even-numbered entries in this franchise more than the odd ones. Honestly, they could have ended things with Scream 4, which I think more than makes up for the shortcomings of Scream 3.

At some point, I would have liked to imagine Sidney Prescott finally getting to live a normal adult life. You know, maybe raise a family, enjoy a quiet afternoon, and go grocery shopping without having to worry about some masked lunatic turning her errands into a crime scene.

But money talks, bullshit walks, and apparently, Ghostface never retires. So the franchise kept going, and I kept showing up.

Unfortunately, the plans for another trilogy centered on Melissa Barrera’s character fell apart after Barrera was fired following her public comments about Palestine. Jenna Ortega subsequently exited, and director Christopher Landon also departed the project. With the original plans in disarray, the franchise returned to Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott, bringing her back into the spotlight after the salary dispute that kept her out of Scream VI.

I wasn’t particularly interested in paying to see Scream 7 in theaters, but I was curious enough to check it out once it became available on streaming. 

This is a pale imitation of the movies that came before it. For a franchise that once felt clever, personal, and genuinely interested in playing games with its audience, this installment feels strangely disposable. It could have been any modern slasher or mystery horror movie, just with the SCREAM name slapped on the poster.

What makes that especially disappointing is the involvement of Kevin Williamson, the man who wrote the original Scream and helped establish what made this franchise so special in the first place.

You would think that having the guy who helped create the magic back in the director’s chair would be a good thing. Instead, the movie feels like a reminder that knowing the ingredients to a successful recipe doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll make a good meal.

Perhaps the last-minute changes and rewrites are partly to blame. Whatever the reason, the movie never feels as though it has much of a personal identity. It feels like a franchise trying to keep itself alive rather than a story that genuinely needs to be told. And that’s a shame, because there was a time when Scream felt like it had something to say.

One of my biggest problems is that the movie seems to think more gore automatically means more impact.

There’s certainly plenty of blood, guts, and gruesome business to go around. Apparently, every victim needs a mandatory serving of extra violence before they’re allowed to leave the movie.

The problem is that you barely get to know most of these people. They become little more than targets waiting to be crossed off the list. When somebody dies, you’re less likely to feel sad than to wonder whether they were the killer, a red herring, or simply another body to decorate the floor.

I find it ironic that when the original SCREAM came out, the filmmakers had to cut back on Drew Barrymore’s opening death to secure the R rating. Here, the gore is practically flying everywhere. We’ve certainly come a long way from the days when a little blood was enough to get the ratings board reaching for its scissors.

And while I can give the film some credit for its willingness to get nasty, there’s a difference between being shocking and simply being excessive. 

There’s also a particularly uncomfortable death involving a teenage Black girl that feels unnecessarily brutal. The violence is already clear, and the extra punishment adds nothing meaningful to the scene. It comes across less as effective horror than gratuitous overkill. And speaking of overkill, the movie has another annoying habit: refusing to let certain deaths remain deaths.

Characters who appear to have been killed turn out to be alive, sometimes after what should have been fatal encounters. The film wants to be coldhearted, but then seems to get nervous about following through.  You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to play rough, at least commit to the game.

I understand Sidney wanting to protect her daughter from the horrors of her past. That’s a perfectly reasonable instinct for a mother.

But considering that Ghostface has repeatedly turned Sidney’s life into a never-ending episode of Who Wants to Be Murdered Next?, you would think she’d have given her daughter a little more information about the danger she might face.

There’s a difference between shielding a child and leaving them completely unprepared for a family history that practically comes with its own true-crime documentary series.

Still, one of the film’s better aspects is Sidney herself. Neve Campbell remains the heart of this franchise, and it’s nice to see her back on the big screen.

I appreciate that Sidney isn’t reduced to a shrieking victim waiting for somebody else to save her. She fights back, takes action, and tries to teach her daughter how to defend herself. That’s the Sidney Prescott I remember: a survivor who refuses to go down without a fight. But even that comes with a bittersweet feeling. How many times does this woman have to do this? At what point does she get to enjoy the life she’s fought so hard to preserve?

I know horror franchises thrive on bringing their survivors back for another round. But I would have liked to see Sidney get something resembling a happy ending. Maybe a peaceful family dinner. A vacation. A few years without a phone call from somebody wearing a Halloween costume and carrying a knife. Is that really too much to ask?

Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown are the other returning cast members from the newer generation, and at this point, they feel like the franchise’s attempt to create another Dewey.

The difference is that Dewey generally had a stronger purpose in the story. Here, these characters sometimes feel like human pincushions, repeatedly getting attacked, somehow surviving, and then wandering right back into danger.

You’d think after everything they’ve experienced, they’d have considered moving somewhere with better security and fewer suspicious phone calls.

But they’re among the few links to the previous installments, so their presence at least gives longtime fans something familiar to hold on to.

Unfortunately, familiarity is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

When the killers are finally revealed, the whole thing feels less like a clever mystery and more like an episode of SCOOBY-DOO. You can practically hear somebody pulling off a mask and announcing that they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling survivors.

The motivations are even more disappointing. Previous SCREAM movies understood that the killer’s identity was only half the fun. The motive needed to add something to the story, whether it was a commentary on fame, fandom, revenge, or the horror industry’s obsession with recycling itself.

Here, the explanations feel weak, impersonal, and downright silly. The reveal doesn’t make you reconsider what you’ve watched. It makes you wonder why you spent so much time trying to solve the mystery in the first place.

Even one of the killers feels so inconsequential for much of the movie that their eventual involvement in the big reveal barely registers.And the opening sequence, which should be one of the franchise’s signature moments, isn’t particularly effective either. It tries to make you suspect that the killings might be connected to one of the characters we’re meant to question, but the setup ultimately feels like much ado about nothing.

The opening victims may be recognizable to a few particularly devoted film fans, but they don’t have quite the star power or cultural recognition that might make their deaths especially memorable.

There’s nothing wrong with the actors themselves. The problem is that the sequence never quite achieves the impact of the franchise’s best opening scenes.

The movie does deserve a little credit for finding a way to bring back familiar faces from the past, much as the previous installments kept finding ways to incorporate Billy Loomis. It’s a fun idea in principle, but there are only so many times you can revisit the same tricks before they stop feeling inventive.

It’s not all bad news. There are very few savi g graces 

Gale Weathers gets a memorable entrance, and it’s refreshing to see her make it through the movie without getting repeatedly beaten, stabbed, or otherwise treated like a punching bag. For once, she seems to have figured out that self-preservation is a perfectly respectable career choice. And Neve Campbell is still a welcome presence. There’s something comforting about seeing her return to the role that helped define the franchise. She brings a familiarity and strength that the film desperately needs.

The gore is another point in its favor if that’s what you’re looking for. There’s an undeniable enthusiasm for practical nastiness, even if the movie occasionally mistakes excess for effectiveness. But these are small victories in a film that never quite comes together.

What’s especially strange is that this installment comes from Kevin Williamson, whose original screenplay helped make SCREAM, such a refreshing horror movie in the first place. Perhaps this is a case of the material needing a different perspective, or perhaps the franchise has simply run out of fresh ideas to say about itself.

I still like certain aspects of SCREAM 3, despite its flaws, because at least it felt as though it was trying something different. Its Hollywood setting and comedic elements gave it a distinct identity, while its commentary on the movie business and the people who control it offered more to chew on than simply guessing who was behind the mask. In retrospect, the film’s satire of Hollywood’s abuse of power also takes on an uglier dimension. which also seemed to be taking shots at DIMENSION FILMS and Harvey Weinstein in particular. 

SCREAM 7, by comparison, feels like a repeat performance in a different town, with fewer interesting things to say.

What makes this disappointing isn’t simply that it’s a bad sequel. Bad sequels are practically a horror tradition. It’s that SCREAM was once a franchise that made you feel as though you were in on the joke.

It understood horror movies, their clichés, their audiences, and the people who loved them. It could be funny without becoming silly, violent without losing its personality, and self-aware without making you feel as though the filmmakers were congratulating themselves for being clever.

The original movie helped make horror feel exciting again. It was sharp, entertaining, and genuinely surprising. It’s a movie that helped me

To take a greater Interest In horror films. Even when the sequels stumbled, there was usually something to appreciate, whether it was a new setting, an interesting idea, or another memorable performance from the returning cast.

With SCREAM 7, I mostly felt the absence of any of that 

It feels like filler masquerading as a full-fledged sequel, a movie that exists because the franchise is still profitable rather than because anyone has a particularly compelling story to tell. And given how much money these films can make, I doubt Ghostface will be hanging up the mask anytime soon. Another sequel seems inevitable, even if we don’t know when it’ll arrive.

If that happens, I hope the filmmakers take a step back and figure out what makes this series worth revisiting. Give us characters worth caring about, a mystery worth solving, a motive worth remembering, and something to say beyond the fact that people keep getting murdered.

For longtime fans, SCREAM 7 might be worth watching just to complete the collection. It’s nice to see Neve Campbell again, and there are a few moments that remind you why this franchise mattered in the first place.

But for me, this is one of the least memorable entries in the series, right down there with SCREAM 3, though that film at least had a personality of its own.

I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point for new horror fans, either. It’s the seventh movie in a franchise, after all. There are better places to begin, including the very film that made all of this possible.

Ultimately, the saddest thing about SCREAM 7 is that it leaves me feeling less excited about the next installment than nostalgic for the first one.

I remember when seeing a new SCREAM meant looking forward to a clever new mystery, memorable characters, and the possibility that the franchise might surprise me all over again.

I wouldn’t be upset if this was the last in the franchise and they finally let it rest in peace but then again I said the same thing at the end of three and the force one ended up being spectaculat so We’ll see.

Grade: C-