Still, even that imagined smugness seems better than something as flavorless and banal as Scream 7, an off-the-shelf, stock-itemed legacy sequel that previous Screams would’ve skewered for its timidity. A carbon copy of the original 1996 movie except where it counts, Scream 7 ultimately plays closer to other ‘90s knockoffs that faded into obscurity. It’s the Halloween H20 of Scream movies, a heartless cash-grab sequel that brings back a genre legend in something that wants so badly to be Scream that it bleeds itself dry.
That becomes clear during an opening sequence which returns for the fourth time to Woodsboro, and the third time to the Murder House used by Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) in ‘96. Previous reprises had a wink and nudge that this is what fans and studios want in their legacy sequels, or “requels.” This time, however, it’s really just pro forma as we watch a pair of generic Stab fans get, uh, stabbed by a killer who promises he’s going to be different by burning down the old haunt for good.
And yet, 30 seconds later we are in another small, privileged Californian suburb, following a new group of teens with a presumable serial killer in their midst—this one likewise fixated on Sidney Prescott (Campbell). After only having hints of what her home life is in recent installments, we get a real good sense in Scream 7 of what Sid has been up to in the 15 years since Scream 4. She’s a happy wife to the local sheriff Mark (Joel McHale) and mother to Tatum (Isabel May), her moody 17-year-old daughter with a boyfriend who likes to come in through the window. You’re probably not supposed to dwell on the math with a daughterless Sid in Scream 4.
She also is keeping things low-key as a small business owner who doesn’t talk about her past when a phone inevitably rings. It’s Ghostface. And he promises he’s changing the game by using FaceTime and MAYBE deep-fake AI tech since he looks a whole lot like someone who died a long time ago. This has the potential of being a canny twist on the formula, but the setup ultimately is window-dressing, an affectation while Campbell runs around interchangeable houses with creaky garage doors, and Courteney Cox returns—this time with Scream 5 and 6’s Mindy and Chad (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) as her assistants—to point the finger at the usual suspects of sketchy teens.
Scream has never been a saga above formula. It’s in fact famous for broadcasting it, beginning in the original movie when Mindy and Chad’s long-departed uncle screamed about it while discussing “the rules” of surviving a slasher movie. Yet in that film, it looked damn good while both making and breaking those rules under Wes Craven’s direction. In the running for the greatest filmmaker to play in the slasher sandbox, Craven made the original Scream a sleek, charming little studio daydream that could at times resemble a John Hughes teen comedy.
The two more recent installments, directed by the Radio Silence wunderkinds behind Ready or Notab and Abigail, had a slightly darker and more sinister presentation (as well as amount of bloodletting), but that also meant they could feel incredibly fresh when they put Ghostface in a Harlem bodega, wielding a shotgun.
