The Tagline That Lies
“Burn it all down.” For a tagline so front and center of Paramount’s marketing for Scream 7, it has surprisingly little relationship to the actual ethos of the movie. Instead of the promised reinvention, Scream 7 feels like a deliberate return to roots for the venerable meta-slasher franchise—far more interested in and effective at propping up the more playful tone of Scream’s early days than the increasingly deconstructive tendencies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries.
It succeeds as yet another back-to-basics reset for Scream, delivering satisfying slasher thrills and some genuinely creative kills. But ironically for a story explicitly centered on how much a mother’s trauma will inevitably affect her daughter, living in the past in order to drive a franchise reset ultimately keeps Scream 7 from developing an identity of its own. It’s a competent, entertaining entry that will please longtime fans, but one that can’t help feeling like a greatest hits album when we were promised a bold new sound.
Kevin Williamson Takes the Director’s Chair
The two Radio Silence-directed installments which precede Scream 7—the confusingly titled Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023)—felt like very intentional attempts to recontextualize the franchise into a more modern sensibility, something really hammered home by Scream VI‘s unexpected but effective move to a bustling New York City. Kevin Williamson takes over directing and writing duties (the latter shared with Scream 5 and 6 co-writer Guy Busick) for Scream 7, and though he wrote the first, second, and fourth films in the franchise, it represents his first time in the director’s chair on a Scream movie and his first time directing any film since 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
Williamson’s approach veers hard back into more old-fashioned Scream territory, something communicated immediately by the opening scene set at the house of Stu Macher, the co-killer of the original Scream. Stu’s house is now being used as a “psycho killer BNB”—yes, really—decorated with chalk cutouts of the various victims and killers who’ve died there, posters from the fictional Stab movies, and even a motion-activated Ghostface decoration that you can be absolutely certain is going to get used for some spine-tingling purposes. That sequence may end with Stu’s iconic house literally in flames, but as the rest of Scream 7 plainly demonstrates, some foundations are just unshakable.
Back to Small Town Terror
That idea of unshakable foundations persists through Williamson’s choice to move the action back to a small town setting—not Woodsboro this time, but Pine Grove, Indiana. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has put down roots there with her police chief husband Mark (Joel McHale) and kids Tatum (Isabel May) and… the two younger ones who are conveniently visiting Mark’s parents out of town the week all the murder stuff kicks off. (Horror movies gonna horror movie, I guess.)
Campbell’s contract dispute that kept her out of Scream VI is now ancient history, and her return as Sidney is a constant highlight of Scream 7 that justifies the film’s existence almost single-handedly. Campbell takes the comfort and confidence that comes with playing a character for 30 years and translates it into a performance that shifts believably from dead serious to tongue-in-cheek and back, often within the same scene but never in a way that rings false or feels tonally out of step with her circumstances. Sidney has to balance the normal anxieties of parenting a teenager with how her bloody backstory is actively antagonizing her relationship with Tatum as news of the murders at Stu’s house reach them in Pine Grove.
Even though much of how Scream 7 goes on to dig up the bones of the first movie winds up being to its detriment in terms of originality, Campbell’s performance as Sidney benefits tremendously from the constant resurfacing of the Woodsboro murders. It’s as if Kevin Williamson saw how hard David Gordon Green threw the “traumatized killing machine” lever in one extreme direction for Laurie Strode in the recent Halloween trilogy and said “I like it, but maybe 80% less intense.” Sidney is haunted by her past, yes, but she’s also built a real life despite it—and that balance makes her more interesting than if she were either completely over it or completely consumed by it.
The Mother-Daughter Dynamic That Works (Mostly)
At 17, Tatum’s the same age Sidney was during the events of the first movie, which causes a tremendous amount of extra strife between the two once Ghostface comes calling again—that parallel also brings Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers back into the fold, though she’s mostly here to act as a sounding board for Sidney rather than being given her own substantial arc. Sidney can’t quite calibrate how much of her bloody past to share with Tatum, who’s grown to deeply resent Sidney for telling her story to the rest of the world through books and interviews, but never face-to-face to her own daughter.
Isabel May does solid work navigating that tension in Tatum’s interactions with Sidney, doing a good job conveying the hurt associated with these complicated feelings without straying into petulant territory. (Petulant characters don’t tend to do great in slashers, after all—audience sympathy matters when the knife comes out.)
But Tatum’s insecurity about finding her place in the circle of life (and death) ends up translating into a character without much definition beyond “Sidney’s daughter,” something not helped by her being surrounded almost exclusively by trope-fueled characters like “too-perfect boyfriend,” “popular blonde friend,” or my personal favorite designation, “weird kid.” Yes, Scream gets far more latitude than most other horror franchises when it comes to whipping these archetypes around like ill-fated marionettes—that’s literally part of the franchise’s DNA—but Scream 7 rarely finds surprising ways to use them, especially when we’ve already seen characters like these subverted again and again across seven films in this series.
Nostalgia as Both Strength and Weakness
Nostalgia is front and center from that opening scene set in Stu Macher’s house, where the bloody finale of the first Scream took place nearly 30 years ago—it’s even important enough to be the focus of a Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmine Savoy-Brown) breakdown on “the rules” for Tatum and her friends. It’s also the bedrock of much of Scream 7‘s comedy, which is heavily rooted in, you guessed it, clowning on both Scream lore and broader horror history. The franchise has always done this, of course, but here it feels less like commentary and more like comfortable references.
But the more Scream 7 goes on, the more it feels like all that hearkening back to “where it all began” is designed to open the door for nods to the franchise’s past that don’t wind up feeling justified on their own merits. Scream 7 swings for the ‘member berries hardest in its climactic sequence, which is largely a straightforward game of cat-and-mouse that builds nicely on the strength of Campbell and May’s intensity and teamwork, and even ends with a satisfying bang.
But the reveal of who’s behind Ghostface’s dastardly plot this time suffers greatly from the smoke and mirrors game the movie plays with that killer’s identity throughout. By the time they’ve revealed themselves, it feels like Scream 7 has run out of time to flesh out their motives, or how those motives connect back to the movie’s nostalgic themes in any meaningful way. It’s not that the reveal doesn’t make logical sense—it does—but it feels rushed and underdeveloped in ways that previous Scream killers’ motivations haven’t.
Where Scream 7 Truly Excels: The Kills
Scream 7 might be a little light on the deeper genre commentary that made the series famous and relevant beyond just being another slasher franchise, but as for how it functions as a pure, visceral slasher? The thing ticks like a perfectly wound clock. Williamson has a genuinely great sense of rhythm for building up, paying off, and cooling down from tension, which gives Scream 7 a lively pace that keeps many of its shortcomings from lingering long enough to feel fatal to the overall experience.
The director clearly has an affinity for the operatic when it comes to staging Ghostface kills, with a number of these sequences culminating in memorably grotesque tableaus that will stick with you. An early attack on one of Tatum’s friends leaves her dead body suspended above a stage in a way that’s both beautiful and horrifying. A long, unflinching shot of a knife going through one character’s skull lingers just long enough to really give you a secondhand migraine. And a kill involving a beer tap feels like an instant classic moment for the series—the kind of creative brutality that fans will be talking about and rewatching on YouTube for years.
All of these moments point towards Williamson having put a lot of care into crafting each and every Ghostface encounter, even if one or two end a little too abruptly for their own good. When Scream 7 is in full slasher mode, it absolutely works—it’s only when it tries to justify all that slashing with deeper meaning that things get shakier.
The Verdict: Satisfying But Safe
Rating: 6.5/10
Scream 7 packs in plenty of satisfying slasher action that will please fans looking for creative kills and that signature Ghostface phone voice, and it may even bring some lapsed fans back into the fold by focusing down the scope of that action after Scream VI‘s New York expansion. Neve Campbell’s return alone makes this worth watching, as she reminds us exactly why Sidney Prescott became a final girl icon in the first place.
But the new ideas Scream 7 does bring to the table—the mother-daughter trauma dynamic, the “psycho killer BNB” concept, the small-town setting outside Woodsboro—are either too thin to fully explore in meaningful ways or ill-advised enough to detract from the success the movie does find in playing the hits, the deep cuts, and the killer tracks from the franchise’s greatest moments.
It’s a perfectly competent entry in the Scream franchise that will entertain you for two hours without ever quite justifying its own existence beyond “people want to see Neve Campbell fight Ghostface again.” And you know what? Maybe that’s enough. Not every sequel needs to reinvent the wheel—sometimes you just need a well-oiled killing machine doing what it does best. Scream 7 is that machine, for better and worse.
