Scream 7
The screaming continues for a seventh outing in a pointless, ludicrous and mechanical slash-fest from the writer of the 1996 original.
Costume foolery: Ghostface returns with an axe to grind, embed, slash, disembowel…
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Horror films don’t have to be bad. Even sequels to bad horror films can be worth the price of admission. We live in hope. Scream 7 is perhaps only marginally better than the execrable sequel called Scream (2022), if only for a particularly horrific killing near the start, which should haunt many filmgoers for years to come. The horrible is, after all, what horror films are all about. They are cathartic. We know they are not real, etc. However, for most of its running time Scream 7 is a pretty tedious affair, where its attempts to join a multitude of dots across the series, and its efforts to introduce some kind of cod psychology, is for naught. The franchise just gets sillier and sillier.
Each time the screenwriters have to come up with a fresh reason to find an athletic serial killer with a motive to dispose of a chorus of horror film buffs while dressed in a cumbersome costume that renders him or her virtually indestructible. This killer – or killers – is also required to have supernatural hearing and remarkable spatial awareness so that he or she can dispatch the requisite supply of healthy, horror-savvy teenagers.
Neve Campbell is back for her sixth outing as Sidney Prescott, this time proving even more vulnerable as she now has a daughter who is the age that she was when all this killing started. She and her husband Mark (Joel McHale), a police officer, have settled in the leafy environs of Pine Grove, Indiana, where Sidney is trying to build a new life and put her gruesome past and trauma behind her. She runs a coffee shop – The Little Latte Coffee Co. – and shares an enormous house with Mark and their daughter Tatum (Isabel May), whom she has named after her best friend Tatum Riley, who was murdered in the first film, Scream (1996). “Why would you name me after a girl who got her head crushed in a garage door?” the new Tatum wants to know, and so the divide between mother and teenage daughter widens. Meanwhile, the new ‘Ghostface’, who eviscerates a couple of loved-up Scream fans in the prologue just for the hell of it, zeroes in on Pine Grove with the express intention of slicing up Tatum in front of her mother’s eyes. It might just be the bonding experience that Tatum and Sidney need…
Some franchises are built to run and run, but Scream hasn’t made sense for a while now. If one is to be remotely drawn to a set of new characters, the director and co-writer Kevin Williamson needed to come up with some more interesting dialogue and plausible teenagers. There are good turns from Jasmin Savoy Brown and Celeste O’Connor as potential victims and the students’ knowledge of advanced tech gives the film a little freshness as the world of deepfake turns up as a new threat. But the clichés persist – along with the annoying sound effect of the killer’s knife (as a rule, most knives are actually silent) – resulting in a rather senseless and unbelievable hodgepodge of nastiness. Horror films don’t have to be boring.
Cast: Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, David Arquette, Laurie Metcalf, Scott Foley, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Ethan Embry, Tim Simons, Mark Consuelos, Matthew Lillard, Joel McHale, Courteney Cox, and the voice of Roger L. Jackson.
Dir Kevin Williamson, Pro William Sherak, James Vanderbilt and Paul Neinstein, Screenplay Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick, from a story by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, Ph Ramsey Nickell, Pro Des John Collins, Ed Jim Page, Music Marco Beltrami, Costumes Leigh Leverett, Sound Ethan Van der Ryn, Erik Aadahl and Jon Greasley.
Spyglass Media Group/Project X Entertainment-Paramount Pictures.
113 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 27 February 2026. Cert. 18.
