Mommy Issues

To say that my expectations for Scream 7 were low would be an understatement. While one would think the return of the series’ main star, Neve Campbell, as well as the original writer that effectively launched the series, Kevin Williamson, would lead to a high point for the franchise, that would only really be the case if the series was in desperate need of resetting. If we were looking at the series through the lens of Scream 4, the last low point for the franchise when it felt like the series should go away and take some time to think about what it had just done, then sure, I could see that argument.

Well, except for the fact that Scream 4 was also the last time we saw the return of series star Campbell and star writer Williamson, and together, along with returning director Wes Craven, they managed to make one of the worst films in the series up to that point (and that’s even counting the much derided Scream 3, which I feel gets something of a bad rap). It was a film that went back to the well and didn’t really know what to do with its lead characters, or all the continuity up to that point, making for something of a mess of a film without a clear message about the state of the slasher genre… or its own series.

That’s an issue any ScreamWhat started as a meta-commentary on slasher media became just another slasher series in its own right, the Scream series then reinvented itself as a meta-commentary on meta-commentary. film has to tackle: it can’t just be a slasher, it has to comment on the genre as well. 1996’s Scream started it all by being a meta-commentary on the concept of slashers themselves, while Scream 2 and Scream 3 then toyed with the concepts of making a slasher sequel and then what it means to conclude a trilogy, respectively. Scream 4 tried (and failed) to be a commentary of reboots, while Scream ‘20 actually did a much better job at commenting on legacy sequels before Scream VI took on the perspective of the whole franchise. Had the series continued exploring Melissa Barrera's Sam Carpenter, seeing what it was like for her to be the new final girl of the franchise while having a connection to (one of) the original film’s killers, that might have led to even more interesting commentary about the series.

But Scream 7 doesn’t have that. It has Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott ne Evans back in the lead, with a family to protect and a new set of Ghostface killers to fight off and, well, that’s it. It doesn’t really have anything to say. It’s not a commentary on a returning scream queen defending her place in the world. It’s not a passing of the torch legacy sequel (especially since we already got that). It’s, functionally, just a slasher film trying to be a slasher film, which would be fine if this were any other series. This is Scream, though, and if you aren’t commenting on the concept of slashers while doing a slasher then you’ve missed the whole point of the franchise.

Things start decently well with an opening sequence at the Macher household where the climactic series of killings in the original film took place. A couple goes there to rent it (as it’s been turned into something of a museum-slash-AirBnB) only to get sliced up by Ghostface before the killer (or killers) burns the whole place down. As an intro to the film it says something: everything you know will come down as we burn down the past to build a new future for the franchise. Unfortunately nothing that comes after lives up to the promise of this introduction.

We’re then brought back over to Sidney (Campbell), married to cop husband Mark Evans (Joel McHale), and mother to teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Sidney and Tatum are in a rough patch as Tatum wants to know more about her mother’s past while Sidney struggles to talk about anything that happened to her when she was a teen in high school and in college. The years she’s fought murderers and psychopaths has taken its toll and Sidney just can’t deal with it. But when a new Ghostface (or two, or more) show up to start the killings again, this time targeting Sidney and her family, it might just be time for Sidney to open up and really talk to her daughter about her legacy as a final girl…

Scream 7 would work better if Scream 4, Scream ‘20, and Scream VI didn’t exist. Each of these films, in their own ways, commented on the legacy of the franchise and potential torch passing that could happen. If we’d gotten Scream 3 and then skipped right to the story of Scream 7 decades later, it might feel like a fresh and interesting take on the whole series. Years later we meet up with Sidney, now a mother and long-term survivor, as the films gear up to let her pass the torch on to the next generation. That all would make sense.

Except we’ve already dissected all of that in this series, and in better ways, in the sequels that came between. We even passed the torch, quite effectively, with Scream VI not even featuring Sidney Prescott at all. Sure, that was because Campbell was in a pay dispute with Spyglass Entertainment, but while the actress was right to fight for her fair pay, it did also lead to a pretty solid outing without her. Sam (and her sister Tara) were the future of this franchise, and then Spyglass fired Barrera over comments in support of Palestine, and a legitimately solid future for the franchise was snuffed out (at this point seemingly forever). So now this film can’t do any better than warm over the same idea again for no real reason.

I get it: Scream VI made a lot of money so Spyglass was going to make a sequel one way or another. You just wish they could make something more inspired than this. After the opening of the film, Scream 7 feels like it’s just going through the motions. It introduces a bunch of new teen characters so they can all get killed off. None of them actually matter to the story, nor do they matter to Sidney. Her daughter, Tatum, might be a player in the film but she’s not the lead. All of the teens are important to Tatum but we don’t really learn anything except simple, rote descriptors (one’s the boyfriend, one’s the diva, one’s the creepy guy, etc.) about them, making them little more than cookie-cutter characters. No one in the original Scream was cookie-cutter because Scream was avoiding all the tropes of the genre. Scream 7 is nothing more than the tropes of the genre.

And things really get bad once we move into the last act. This is the point where the killings ramp up and we should be building to a climax. Instead, though, it all fizzles out. The killings happen, but we don’t care about them. Characters we barely know die while characters that have had plot armor for years now survive for no reason. Meanwhile new killers are brought in but they’re so easy to guess (we won’t spoil it, but they really were the most obvious killers of the whole series) that it drains all the mystery out of the film. Nothing here matters, and very little of it clicks in any meaningful way.

The best I can say about the film is that there are some decent jump scares and some of the killings are pretty brutal. But for a franchise that was about more than just the slaughter, there’s surprisingly little more here than rote, repetitive killing over and over again. Scream is supposed to be better than this. The reason fans love this series is because it’s not just killing, it’s commentary on the genre as well. Despite being written by the mastermind that launched this meta franchise, Scream 7 has nothing to say about itself, the series, or the genre as a whole. It boils Scream down into the very thing the first film actively fought against: it turns the franchise into just another slasher. It’s sad to see it happen.