Scream 7
Directed by Kevin Williamson
by Chris Montanelli
Warning: this review discusses plot details, killer reveals, and the ending of Scream 7. Read at your own risk — or don’t, and let Ghostface spoil it for you instead.
The mask is still white, the robe still black, the knife still pointed at whoever dares to answer the phone. Thirty years have passed since Wes Craven stood the slasher genre on its own entrails and made it beg for mercy, and the franchise he built with Kevin Williamson has limped, lurched, and occasionally sprinted through six sequels to arrive here, at Scream 7, a movie that arrives at the screen not quite knowing what it wants from life. It is, in its best moments, a haunted house that knows it’s a haunted house and winks at you from the rafters. In its worst, it’s the gift shop downstairs, selling replicas of the haunted house to people who never went in.
The premise, at least, has the decency to announce itself with a certain mordant wit. Sidney Prescott — Neve Campbell, who understood all along that this character was worth fighting for — has settled into Pine Grove, Indiana, where she runs a coffeehouse, has married a police officer named Mark (Joel McHale, genuinely good in a role that might have been perfunctory), and has raised three daughters, the eldest of whom, a seventeen-year-old named Tatum, carries the name of Sidney’s best friend from the original massacre. The fact that Sidney has named her child after her murdered friend tells you everything about the unconscious architecture of this woman’s life: she cannot escape what happened to her, not even in the naming of things she loves. That’s a legitimate idea. Scream 7 occasionally knows what to do with it.
The film opens at the Macher house in Woodsboro, now converted into an experiential Airbnb for true-crime tourists. A couple visits for the weekend and find themselves navigating rooms memorialized for the wrong reasons — here is where Billy Loomis confessed, here is where Stu Macher died, here is the kitchen where Sidney fought back. The animatronic Ghostface in the foyer moves on a motion sensor, and when a real Ghostface starts mixing in with the décor, the movie flickers briefly with the kind of self-aware malice that made the original worth watching. The sequence burns the house to the ground — literally — and you feel, for a moment, that Williamson is burning down thirty years of accumulated mythology to start fresh. Two minutes later, Red Right Hand drops on the soundtrack and you understand that no, he is not.
What follows is a film in perpetual negotiation with its own nostalgia. Sidney gets a call from someone using Ghostface’s voice, but also, via video, using Ghostface’s face — specifically the aged and scarred face of Stu Macher, whose presumed survival has been a fan obsession since 1996. The film is clever enough to immediately foreground the possibility that this is deepfake technology, and Williamson wrings genuine suspense from the question: is Stu alive, or has someone rebuilt him digitally to torment Sidney? Matthew Lillard appears throughout these video calls, doing whatever Matthew Lillard does, which is to say, doing a great deal with very little structural support. The AI conceit is one of those ideas that sounds electric in a pitch meeting — of course deepfakes belong in a Scream movie, of course the franchise that invented postmodern horror would engage with the postmodern horror of synthetic identity — and then lands on screen with a thud, because the script never actually does anything interesting with it. The technology is a delivery mechanism for nostalgia and nothing more. At one point, Ghostface cycles through a hall of deepfake killers from previous films — Roman Bridger, Nancy Loomis, Dewey Riley, faces aged to how they might look now — and the effect is less haunting than it is embarrassing, a parade of green-screened ghosts that audiences in theaters greeted with applause, which tells you something about what we’ve agreed to accept from franchises in the year 2026.
The film’s most interesting claim on our attention is the relationship between Sidney and Tatum. Isabel May plays the daughter with a sullen restlessness that is at least recognizable as a human state; she is seventeen and she wants to know who her mother is, not as a legend, not as the subject of films and books, but as a woman who had an adolescence. Sidney has sealed off her past not just from the world but from her own children, and the film — whatever its other failures — understands that this is its true subject. Sidney’s survival has always come at a cost, and the cost here is the distance between herself and a daughter who carries a dead woman’s name without knowing why. When Sidney finally speaks Tatum’s name aloud to Tatum — the real Tatum, the one from 1996 — it is the film’s most unguarded moment, and Campbell makes it count.
But the film around this genuine feeling is a construction site with no blueprint. The new teenage characters — friends of Tatum’s, a boyfriend, the young man obsessed with true-crime podcasts — exist in a state of aggressive underdevelopment. They are functional furniture. They sit in scenes, they deliver lines, they die, and we feel nothing except a vague aesthetic recognition of scenes we have seen before. A sequence in a high school auditorium, where Tatum and her classmates are rehearsing a play involving stage harnesses, is telegraphed so far in advance that you could excuse yourself to use the restroom and return to find it unfolding exactly as predicted. The bar scene, where the young characters are convened under a kind of dramatic pretense while Ghostface closes in, has energy — the kills here are brutally physical, occasionally straying into a register closer to Terrifier than to the nimble slasher wit of the original — but even this energy dissipates once the movie has to explain itself.
And it cannot explain itself. The killer reveal, when it comes, is the least satisfying in the franchise’s history, and the franchise includes Scream 3, which was already a low bar nobody needed to clear. The Ghostfaces turn out to be Sidney’s next-door neighbor and a man from a mental institution who appears in the film for approximately two scenes before unmasking himself as one of the architects of the entire terror campaign. Audiences in theaters apparently struggled, in the moment of revelation, to remember who this person was. The motive — involving a woman who idolized Sidney through her autobiography, grew disillusioned when Sidney retreated from public life, and eventually decided to manufacture a new final girl from Sidney’s daughter — has a certain internal logic that the film never earns the right to deploy. It requires us to believe in a degree of psychological complexity that the screenplay has not built. The villain kills her own son, among her other crimes, and the movie handles this with the attentiveness of a footnote.
What the film cannot forgive in itself — what separates it from the better entries in this series — is the absence of anything real to say about horror, about genre, about the way we consume violence as entertainment. The original Scream was, among other things, a genuine argument. It made claims about slasher films and American suburban culture, about the complicity of the audience, about the difference between knowing the rules and surviving them. Scream 4 sharpened those claims into something about celebrity and fame and the social media desire to be spectacular. Even Scream 5 and Scream 6, whatever their faults, were in conversation with ideas about inherited trauma and toxic fandom. Scream 7 raises the specter of AI and deepfakes, holds it up briefly, and then sets it down to go answer the door. The film wants to be about the burden of being a final girl — about what it costs a woman to be defined, forever, by the night she survived — but it doesn’t trust this idea enough to follow it anywhere dangerous.
The irony at the film’s center is that it takes the form of nostalgia while being incapable of understanding what nostalgia actually is. The opening sequence burns the Macher house to the ground, a gesture toward liberation, toward the destruction of the past. And then the movie rebuilds the house room by room for the next hundred minutes — the same music, the same camera angles, the same dynamics, the same romantic notion that Sidney Prescott fighting back is, in itself, sufficient. It isn’t, not after seven films. Campbell understands this. She plays Sidney with a bone-deep weariness that is also, somehow, a form of grace; she is a woman who has survived so much that survival itself has become her character trait, and Campbell locates the sadness in that, the way a person can be so defined by what happened to them that they can no longer locate who they were before. This is, again, a genuine idea. It simply does not belong in this film, or rather, this film does not know how to be worthy of it.
Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers is deployed primarily as punctuation — arriving by car at convenient moments, delivering sardonic lines that the audience greets like old friends, vanishing when the plot doesn’t need her. The Meeks twins, Chad and Mindy, performed by Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown, return to absorb stab wounds and offer exposition; they are, at this point, the franchise’s most resilient objects, surviving everything thrown at them with the invulnerability of cartoon characters. Their presence here feels less like a creative choice than a contractual obligation, a way of maintaining the fiction that the events of the previous two films still matter, even as the film implicitly repudiates those films by never mentioning the characters at their center.
Kevin Williamson, directing for the first time in this franchise, brings to the material the competence of someone who knows what Scream looks like but has lost the instinct for what Scream feels like. The craft is adequate. The suspense sequences have rhythm, even when the outcomes are foregone. Marco Beltrami’s score, returning to the franchise after a long absence, does genuine work, threading Sidney’s classic musical motifs through new textures. But the direction never generates the sensation — particular to the best moments of the original, and to some moments in subsequent entries — that anything is truly at stake, that the movie could go anywhere it hasn’t been. The town of Pine Grove is shot with a flatness that makes it feel like a set, which perhaps it is, but Wes Craven always understood that even sets could be made to breathe.
The franchise has, over thirty years, become what it once anatomized. The first Scream demonstrated that slasher films run on formula, that formula can be exposed, and that exposing it changes the experience of watching it. Seven films later, the formula has calcified, and the exposure has calcified around it. When Mindy Meeks-Martin delivers a monologue explaining the rules of whatever subgenre they’re currently operating within, it’s not a revelation anymore; it’s a ritual, performed because the ritual is expected, because audiences have learned to expect it the way they expect Red Right Hand on the soundtrack. The franchise has become its own Stab movie — the fictional films-within-films that have always represented Scream‘s worst self, the commercialization and stupidification of genuine terror.
A Scream 8 is reportedly in development. Williamson has said he’s already working on ideas. Campbell seems willing. The box office — despite everything, despite the critical demolition, despite the production’s turbulent history, which includes the firing of Melissa Barrera over social media posts and the departure of Jenna Ortega and the exit of two directors before Williamson stepped in — suggests that audiences remain willing to buy a ticket to see Sidney Prescott answer the phone.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe Sidney’s endurance is the whole point, the series’ final and most honest argument: that a woman who survives everything becomes, herself, a kind of genre. That she cannot be killed because she is already a myth, and myths don’t bleed out in second-act kitchen scenes. But myths, if they’re going to justify the price of a seat, need to be asked harder questions than this movie is willing to ask. Sidney Prescott deserves a film that doesn’t know how it ends. Scream 7 knows exactly how it ends before it begins — and so, by now, does everyone else.
