Directed by: Kevin Williamson

4 out of 5

Scream 7, in the reviews I read, was rather derided for doing nothing new. That’s not incorrect, I suppose, at a macro level: as the Scream series has, from the start, been about poking fun at horror’s / slashers’ inconsistencies while also leaning into / manipulating those same tropes to craft fun genre flicks, part of its ongoing juggling act has been about how much to recycle and how much to iterate, and even those iterations are necessarily based on the recycling. That naturally – though I suppose unfortunately – means that quality will come in waves, because the movies are eating themselves and there are dwindling resources until new ones are made in some way or another, and depending on how quickly you’re trying to turn around on those resources…

But there’s no grand theory here: sometimes the fast follows have been great; sometimes not; though we may not agree on which are which. My overall point is just that this whole series’ premise is on the genre never doing anything really net new, and finding ways to subvert that can be tough. My general take is that when whichever sequel’s filmmakers just have fun with it – which can include nostalgia nods – things turn out for the best, and when you go too far afield by, say, trying to be overly clever, well, at some point, is it a Scream movie anymore?

There’s also the background of this entry, of course: main cast dropouts / firings over politics (to boil it down) meant we couldn’t directly follow up on 5 and 6‘s new generation storyline, and the departure of those films’ directors – prior to the actors’ happenstance, but who knows – and replacement by, eventually, franchise all-star Kevin Williamson, alongside bringing back Neve Campbell once more (after skipping… one movie) and some additional old school Screamers (which has been done in… every Scream film) all suggested production panic to some folks. Which I’m sure was the story! But also, if my tone isn’t already clear, I don’t think that puts us anywhere near out of the running for delivering a good entry.

Finally, regarding which: Scream 7 flips us to Pine Grove, Indiana, where Sidney Prescott (Campbell) – now Sidney Prescott-Evans – is depicted living the mother-of-three life she escaped back to during her absence in the previous flick. Though in “hiding,” she’s written a book; her story has been depicted in multiple Stab movies; people know who she is, much to the chagrin of her daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), who can’t quite live up to the badass rep of her mum, but also gets shut down by Sidney when trying to ask questions of her past. Williamson and co-writer Guy Busick smartly slot Sidney’s other two children with hubby and police chief Mark (Joel McHale) at a relative’s home for the duration of the flick, so we don’t have to juggle too many younguns running around.

Our cold open murder tells us there’s still a Ghostface operating in Woodsboro – the classic Scream setting – and it’s only a matter of time before Sidney starts getting threatening “I’m coming to get you” calls from Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), who should be quite dead. But we’re in a world of AI by now, so she brushes it off like one of the many crank calls she gets. …Until Ghostface shows up in Pine Grove, and the who’s-the-killer chase begins anew.

So, yeah, the reviewers are correct: this is the same plot we’ve been doing. But, er, exactly: this is the same plot we’ve been doing in most of the former films that we also liked. Scream 7 doesn’t try to go up its own butt with being “about” anything, or doing layer upon layer of interconnected gotchas; yes, Williamson may lean a bit much into 90s-styled music and the classic teen groupings of that era of slashers, but it’s far from being the kind of slavish nostalgia of, say, Ti West, or anything from the Stranger Things side of horror – he just happens to think the Scream-verse is exclusively flannel-clad kids who listen to screamy rock music. At the same time, I don’t think this comes across as out of touch; the move to a small town is admittedly a nice way to avoid the modern splashes of the Bettinelli-Olpin / Gillett entries, but the movie is shot with verve, Ramsey Nickell’s cinematography getting us the sharp colors of 5 and 6 but with some softened lighting that doesn’t make everyone look so severe and the violence so garish; Jim Page’s editing keeps the 114-minute runtime chugging along smoothly and understandably – though there are some gaps with inevitable teleporting killers and some logic bloops, but nothing that took me out of the movie – and Marco Beltrami and Williamson deliver some great themes without relying on jump scare stings.

The passing-of-the-torch and generational-trauma that had been explored are still here; all of the things I feel we’ve liked about Scream – the careful blending of self-awareness with satisfactory tropes – are here; and the nostalgia nods are kind of appropriately shoehorned in a way that the film calls itself on, while giving us the actual nostalgia of Sidney’s full-starring return in a way that maybe doesn’t easily give us a Scream 8 throughline, but gives this entry a lot more weight.

I think / my hope is that the production troubles set a pall upon Scream 7 that was undeserved; it’s up there, for me, with some of the most fun entries of the franchise, and is one of a small handful of horror flicks to have legitimately held my interest from start to finish.