Scream 7 Stabs the Iconic Franchise in the Heart
For the first time in 30 years, I have encountered a Scream entry I wholly dislike.
Not that Scream 7 was dealt a fair hand to start with. Melissa Berrera, star of the 2022 Scream requel and its superior New York set follow-up Scream VI, was stupidly (and wrongly, in my opinion) fired from this latest enterprise before cameras even rolled. Co-star Jenna Ortega, whose career blew up into borderline superstardom between installments, declined to return as well in support of her fellow actor, citing “scheduling conflicts” as a convenient excuse to flee. This also led to the departure of Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon, who withdrew from the production after receiving online hate mail (including death threats) over the Berrera dismissal, even though that was a corporate decision he had nothing to do with.
Original Scream writer Kevin Williamson was quickly brought back onboard the franchise by producers to both step behind the camera and to also reengineer the screenplay (alongside Guy Busick, who helped craft the previous two, and the initial story for this one, with James Vanderbilt) for a seventh chapter in the Ghostface tale away from Berrera and Ortega’s characters and back to Neve Campbell’s Sydney Prescott. Campbell, who declined to appear in Scream VI due to a contract dispute, came back to the series for a reported $7 million, and while she is more than deserving of the pay increase, that doesn’t make this situation any less of a mess.
Taking full advantage of the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s original classic, the rejiggered storyline for Scream 7 involves Sydney, now living in the small community of Pine Grove, Indiana, with husband (and town sheriff) Mark Evans (Joel McHale), forced to protect her eldest, Tatum (Isabel May), from a new killer. The crazy bit is that this new monster announces who he is: the assumed-dead original Ghostface, Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). He’s ready to reacquaint himself with his old adversary now that her daughter is 17 years old, the same age they were during their original face-to-face showdown back in good old Woodsboro, California.
Williamson and Busick try to play fast and loose with their scenario, bringing in an atmosphere of uncertainty by introducing subplots involving deep fake and artificial intelligence technology. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) also returns to the fray to help Sydney discover if Stu is really Stu or is instead a demented impersonator. She’s joined by siblings Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding), survivors from the last two Ghostface killing sprees now working for the investigative journalist as her assistants.
In fairness to all involved, this could work. Even though the plot owes a massive inspirational debt to the David Gordon Green Halloween trilogy (which gets a semi-funny shoutout in one of this sequel’s sadly few meta commentary moments), having Sydney deal with the aftereffects of generational trauma while trying not to pass any of it down to Tatum isn’t a terrible idea. Throwing in hot-button technological elements suitable for debate and analysis, also a franchise trademark, is also laudable.
The issue is that the script rarely does even a passable job of making any of it resonate or, even worse, interesting. It’s clear all of this has been massively rejiggered on the fly, and repeated references to the prior two efforts are ham-fistedly twisted into the proceedings to maintain some semblance of consistency between the pictures (and to explain Sydney’s absence from the last one). This is also why Mindy and Chad are apparently around as well, but they have precious little to do other than to make a massive mess out of things and to give Williamson an excuse to write one of his patented “this is what happens in this type of horror sequel” monologues. Unfortunately, even though Brown’s delivery of the speech is perfectly fine, it’s as worthless as virtually everything else here is.
The newcomers who portray Tatum’s close-knit circle of friends are also problematic. Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor, and Sam Rechner look pretty enough, and they’re all fine actors, but they’re given nothing to do. Each is a one-dimensional stereotype that Jamie Kennedy’s Randy would have vitriolically ranted about in the original Scream if he’d had the opportunity, and it’s never a mystery what is going to happen to any of them. They all make impossibly stupid decisions for reasons of narrative necessity and not because it makes any sort of practical sense — good or bad, it doesn’t matter — for any of their characters to do so.
Are the deaths cool? Sure. But they’re so overly gruesome that they become borderline comical. One impaling reaches Monty Python and the Holy Grail levels of absurdity. Another first-act killing involving a victim’s free-floating disembowelment, while gorgeously shot by director of photography Ramsey Nickell (Shirley), happens more because the film needs a shock moment to keep the audience’s attention from waning than it does to propel events meaningfully forward.
The most annoying aspect is that, even with the behind-the-scenes drama and obvious studio interference, and although it did take a pay increase to get her back, Campbell remains excellent. She kept my interest, even if the remainder of the film had me rolling my eyes in frustration. The actor knows what makes Sydney tick. Campbell’s scenes with Cox have complex urgency, and the pair’s chemistry is as good as ever. She’s even better on her own. Whether wrestling with personal demons, worrying that she’s been a bad mother to Tatum, or triumphantly kicking Ghostface butt, the series’ unstoppable “final girl” still somehow makes a lot of this nonsense palatable.
Just not enough of it. Williamson inelegantly slips in callbacks to all of the previous features, Scream 2 for some inane reason more than any of the others, the is-it-or-is-it-not A.I. tangent goes nowhere, the nostalgia-bait insertions are lame, and most of the key set pieces are strangely forgettable. Attempting to figure out the core mystery is obnoxiously pointless, while it takes all of five minutes to guess the identities of the psychotics jumping on the Ghostface entrails in a murderous attempt to bring Sydney down. Far too little of it works. Even less is satisfying.
As big a fan as I’ve been of this series since the beginning, Scream 7 stabs this franchise in the heart and puts any chance for a triumphant resurrection on life support. Maybe, after 30 years of success, it’s finally time to pull the plug and let Sydney Prescott be.
Film Rating: 1½ (out of 4)
