Damn it all. Scream 7 was gonna be the Scream for me. I’ve spent some years advocating for the Happy Death Day series as the Scream of our day, and for its director, Christopher Landon, to get the respect and filmmaking projects that ought to come from making a generational horror movie. Imagine my enthusiasm, then, when he signed on to direct Scream 7, and the internal panic that came from production company Spyglass firing Melissa Barerra for her hundreds of activism-centered posts about the Israel-Hamas war. Then, Jenny Ortega, the film’s other lead, stepped aside “due to scheduling conflicts,” and facing death threats from the ugliest sides of the internet, Christopher Landon kindly withdrew from the project and processed the fallout and anxiety of the project in last year’s under-rated Drop. All this after Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who directed the prior two films, had already previously dropped out, to direct Melissa Barerra in their original horror film Abigail — which is also worthy of further critical consideration.
This left the seventh film of the franchise in a difficult position. There was no good way to proceed. There is too much money in Scream to leave it alone, so what would’ve been the third entry in a planned trilogy about the generationally-forward “Core Four” then became a wishy-washy Legacy Sequel, the kind of thing the Scream franchise has spent literally every movie before this one dissecting.
They had one fun trick left in the bag, hiring Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first, second, and fourth Scream movies (and Dawson’s Creek, concurrently, which is fun to point out, how Scream is a product of and reaction to the same ’90s MTVized culture), but Kevin Williamson is predominantly a more clever screenwriter than he is a filmmaker, although perhaps this entry will be the start of another stage in his career.
So, Scream 7 was a production and rewrite nightmare. We know this. It has to effect our outcomes, because we have six other Scream movies and a television series to compare it to, which each say something meta textual about what it means to make long-running horror franchises. Over the scope of the series, Scream has cut up the corporate cynicism at the heart of the franchise machine. The films have critiqued themselves for existing, have critiqued their audiences for wanting them, and most importantly, have moved the needle in terms of what horror films can properly capture, while also just being good, bloody fun.
The seventh film in the franchise is, sadly, just like all the other Legacy Sequels of once-innovative horror properties. It’s Blumhouseified, in that way, reveling in its IP as a clever and cute bag of references to pull from, rather than as an actionable series of horror tropes to eviscerate by cutting open the bag and seeing what’s really inside. It’s such a shame, because it starts out pretty fun and in Scream fashion, has a good hook of an opening.
A couple arrive at Stu Macher’s house, where some particularly grisly events have transpired in prior films. The home has been co-opted into a Houseshare Experience, and the horror-obsessed boyfriend has dragged his permissive girlfriend along to celebrate his special interest in franchise horror movies. Then a call comes from within the house. He must answer some trivia questions about what happened in some key horror movies. Upon getting the last question wrong, a series of events is set off where the couple are murdered in some pretty inventive ways. This is Scream! A movie within the movie. A “short film” which shows that characters in this world are smarter than the average Final Girl, and are not just aware of Horror Tropes, but are going to be responsive and thoughtful when those concepts play out in front of them.
Perhaps this was a remnant of the film we could have had, because then, the film returns to Woodsboro and is yet another recursive horror movie, which tries to handle another generational passing of the baton, after the last one resulted in the threat of not being able to make money from these movies.
So, we return to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) as our central characters, immediately after the last movie seemed to have the strength to move forward. But, these are great characters portrayed by actors who embody those characters so deeply, that it always works. It works again, this time, even under the weight of a script which forgets that Scream is satire, and mostly plays it down-the-middle as straight-up horror.
So, it’s a Stab film, the series stand-in for the junky Slashers that had finally run their course in the ’90s, to which Scream provided a course-correction for, an essential step in the maturation of the genre. And now Scream has become the very thing it once set out to satire.
There is still good news. The returning cast are still welcome and their characters get several moments which will mean something to folks who have been invested the last 30 years. Something new is also developed here, as Scream becomes a generational family genre, which is what most Legacy Sequel projects play with, but Scream hasn’t really gotten to, until now. The thought would be, oh that’s good news, now Scream can totally dissect what those movies are doing, but it plays it with a straight face.
This is marketable horror made in a marketable way to save a franchise that was so much fun because it was that rare project which gets to exist within the very space its resisting. That was always an interesting tension for Scream. It’s gone now. There’s nothing new to hang a new Scary Movie type response to, although one of those is coming soon anyway. And yet, the new Scream has set sales records for the franchise because of course it has, the movie has finally accepted the market, and the market has embraced it back, as it always has.
A piece of good news is that the generational passing of the baton goes over nicely enough. Sidney’s daughter is portrayed by Isabel May, who does well to suggest the series might continue on the strength of her character, and how well she fits into the dynamics of the pre-existing characters. The new film gives her new generational trauma, as she fiercely fights back, and discovers the strength in her name, Tatum, named after Sidney’s best friend who was killed in the first movie.
The real Final Girl has become the franchise itself. While Scream is politically compromised by its production company and has turned into a bit of a mess of misunderstanding what these movies are about, or more specifically, how they are about their themes, there’s still a survival story with Ghostface, and a likable cast as the backbone behind it. The success of the film has given the production team at least one more chance, which surely they prefer to having just ended the highly bankable franchise.
The only justice, though, would be in continuing the story that was going on before this movie, to provide closure to better movies than this one. What we’ll get, probably, is a continuation on this film, perhaps forming a new trilogy in what would have been the closing piece to the last one. What we learn from Scream is that the real killer is the machine itself. It’s always been right in front of us. But the systems of oppression always overcome more pure and sustainable ideas, because there’s a lot of money in making more basic Stab movies, and less money in moving horror movies forward in a meaningful way, without leaning so fully on nostalgia bait.
That’s Scream 7: the franchise relenting to the machine, and finally facing the fate of all the movie franchises it once stood as a meaningful alternative for. We can only hope that everyone involved continues to go on and make meaningful work outside the franchise. Because the call is coming from inside the house and it’s time to run.