Scream 7 (2026)

Rated R for typical bloody murder.  I know that this is splitting hairs at this point, but Scream 7, while brutal, lacks some of the truly mean violence that the previous two entries had embraced.  Still, there are some pretty gnarly and gory murders throughout.  Once again, there's commentary about sex, but no actual sex in the film itself.  There's language and I think some mild references to drug use.  Tonally, it matches the Wes Craven entries.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Kevin Williamson

DISCLAIMER:  I watched a library DVD copy of this movie.  I protested watching it in the theater both because of Paramount's approaching merger with Warner Brothers and because of Paramount's treatment of both Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega for speaking out in defense of Palestine.  I ensured that none of my money went towards Paramount.  

Yeah, I waited on this one.  I didn't care that it made a ton of money at the box office.  I also was secretly glad that the reviews of this movie were pretty rough.  Yeah, I got spiteful.  This is a bit of a SCAB film (or, a Stab film?  I'm also mad at myself for writing that.)  So, here I am, trying to write a blog about a movie that I hate got made for a franchise that I really like.  It's a weird time and a lot of people are probably super annoyed that I won't shut up about my political bent.  But things are honestly pretty terrible and I'm floored when people don't say anything about the constantly growing hellscape around us.  *sigh*

So how do I write a review about a movie that is so entrenched in scandal and bad faith that it actually affects the plot?  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.  Scream 7 was never supposed to happen in the way that we see it.  Scream 7 was supposed to be a sequel to the reboot of Scream and Scream VI.  It was supposed to be the close of a trilogy that was supposed to close up the Sam and Tara Carpenter story, tying into the lineage of Billy Loomis.  Yeah, I get it.  It was already a stretch to make this franchise about Billy's legacy.  But the movies asked us to invest in this storyline and --I don't think I'm crazy for saying this --those movies were so good that it got me to get past the overmythologizing of a too-long-running franchise.  

So when Scream 7 came out, we're now looking at something that is actively interrupting storytelling.  It's not that stories need to be trilogies.  We technically don't need a Sam and Tara story to round out the events of the previous two films.  If we had to pretend that the Scream movies were at least somewhat based in reality, it is entirely possible that Sam and Tara have nothing else to do with the Ghostface killers and that they get therapy to lead quasi-normal lives.  But it all feels...off?  In a weird way, I'm still harping on the fact that Scream 7 is such an aggressive cash-grab.  So not only do I have to put my politics aside to actually watch Scream 7 as a movie, I also have to ignore that there was a storyline in place before this that seems to be derailed by the fact that Paramount, as a company, kind of sucks.

Okay, that means the next step I have to watch is to either watch Scream 7 as a standalone film or as a legacy sequel to either Scream 1-4 and part of 5 or a movie by itself.  I don't think it works as a movie by itself.  I don't think Scream 7 even wants to be considered a standalone film.  A lot of Scream 7 is going for the nostalgia grab.  (If you think I keep bringing in studio suits as a dodge for talking about the movie itself, the Scream franchise was built on meta storytelling.  It's all fair game.) This is a Scream movie written and directed by Kevin Williamson.  It must be weird to be Kevin Williamson, by the way.  (Mr. Williamson, big fan.  Not necessarily of this movie, but I also acknowledge that it is hard making a movie and this movie looks pretty solid.  There's wins here, just not from a fan perspective.)  Williamson rose to a place of mild celebrity in the '90s with the first Scream film.  Like, that movie changed the game.  Dimension Films owed so much to that guy because it made horror cool.  And even though I think that the original film is as good as the franchise gets, he made some absolute bangers in that series.  But he was always a screenwriter.  

Then, every so often, we get a nostalgic pang for the '90s horror and Williamson (for the most part) comes out of retirement and pens another film.  Well, with the late Wes Craven being unable to make more of these movies and the other directors at odds with the studio, I can't help but Paramount's logic to have Williamson direct is an example of a return to basics.  It's not the worst way you could go, by the way.  Even though I am incredibly frustrated with this movie, the back-to-basics approach to Scream kind of works.  Heck, even with all of the moral hangups I have with this movie, I don't want to see Williamson fail.  And do you know what Williamson does for this movie?  He makes it really seem like a Wes Craven entry in the series.

Even though Wes Craven directed Scream 4, Scream 7 feels more like a Wes Craven entry than Scream 4.  This honestly has more of the tone of the first three movies and I can't think that was an accident.  Ironically, this movie as a commentary on AI filmmaking might have that extra meta attempt because Williamson is straight up borrowing vibes off of the first three films.  (Sure, he wrote them, but the visuals were all Wes Craven.) Now, normally I'd complain.  After all, I'm all about innovation.  But I do have a nostaglic fan-service guy in me.  I don't deny it.  When the Enterprise-D comes out at the end of Picard season 3, I lost my mind.  I even have to say that I'm a big Matthew Lillard fan, especially when it comes to Stu.  Billy may be the more interesting character, but I dug Lillard's performance as Stu back in the day.  

But, man alive, is this getting blood from a stone?  Stu...wasn't ever meant to be deep.  He's the idiot buddy.  Having this weird conspiracy theory that Stu Macher survived the events of the first film when he had a TV dropped on his head?  Yeah, I know.  It doesn't play out that way.  But the fact that Williamson considered putting an after-credits sequence showing that Stu was actually alive means that it was considered a plausible ending for this character.  I know!  I know!  The world of Scream is a heightened world where people know each other and the notion of becoming a serial killer is only a thought away from anyone joining the Ghostface club.  But there has to be a bridge too far before we completely suspend disbelief.  If anything, the fact that Williamson considered it means that is how open this series is to just embracing outright silliness as a means of storytelling.

I'm torn on this movie.  Like, it sucks.  It sucks real hard.  But the meat is there.  Let's talk about why it sucks.  I've heavily hinted at the fact that this is functionally a Scream story.  Heck, it embraces the Sydney story aggressively hard.  It ties Stu Macher back into the story.  The very look of the film is something out of the early Scream movies.  But what it doesn't do is make me care.  Horror movies, especially slasher movies, have a real burden on them to make me care about the characters.  We know that a lot of them are going to be picked off before the end of the film.  But a well-developed character makes us want to see them survive.  There is none of that in this movie.  I don't think I've ever seen a movie treat the extended cast as cannon fodder more than the cast of Scream 7.  Golly, Chloe Parker is painfully shoehorned into the story.  She has almost no tie to the main characters.  When we watched the original Scream, these were all friends.  When we thought that one of them was the killer, it actually mattered.  Friendships fell apart.  Trust was broken.  Not so much here.  It's all wildly artificial because none of those people mattered outside of Sydney's family.

Also, I call real shannigans that Mark survived.  Let's talk about Mark and cop-aganda in this movie.  I know that I said that I would divorce myself politically from this, but it feels like Paramount really wanted a perfect police force.  "But, Tim, you didn't complain about this before with the other movies?"  1) I wasn't as socially conscious before and 2) Dewey seemed like he kind of fell into the job and was more concerned about Sydney than being a deputy.  Sure, sure.  Dewey may have been problematic, but Sydney is deeply cool with her husband being a cop.  Now, if we're looking at someone who is ingrained with trauma, a'la Sydney, I can see that she might be cooler with some of the ethical conundrums with being married to a law enforcement officer...especially considering that cops carry guns and should stand up to a background check.  But, man alive, they made Joel McHale supercop.  We're miles away from Dewey, outside of the fact that they both can apparently take a hilarious amount of knife wounds.

I'm going to close this up as quickly as I can because I've invested so much time into this and I keep getting interrupted.  My actual life is falling behind right now and I need to shut up on this.  But I do want to talk a little bit about two more things: 1) empathy and 2) how stupid the killer reveal is.   1)  Empathy:  It may have taken a bad Scream movie to show how insane the people inside the Scream universe really are.  Man, there is this idea that cleverness is just having people saying what they are thinking.  Almost everyone in this movie is obsessed with their own self-interests.  The next door neighbor kid keeps asking Sydney questions about her time in Woodsboro.  Sydney's daughter, Tatum, is wildly obsessed with having Sydney teach her about being a survivor.  But the insane thing of it all is the notion that no one talks to each other that way.  There's something I can be flippant about and claim that teenagers are jerks.  But across the board, people treat each other as commodities to be used.  I thought we've been through enough Scream movies with Gale Weathers that she would have learned her lesson at this point about how people actually talk to each other when they are friends.

And now the real reason that everyone hates this movie:  (Okay, why I hate this movie.  I know a lot of people enjoyed it.)  The killers are dumb.  That revelation, it was stupid.  Sure, we expect --at this point --that the killers have a direct tie to Sydney or her family.  (Note:  Besides being disappointed that we got three stupid cameos for a paycheck, I don't know how Marco got the raw data to recreate killers from the past.)  Jessica Bowden's motivation was insane.  Okay, Williamson writes her off as insane, which I think is pretty thin.  But I like the idea that Jessica was inspired by Sydney to take her power back, even if that meant killing her husband.  But I can't, for the life of me, believe that she would become a serial killer of randos with that motivation.  She's mad that Sydney didn't go to New York?  That...doesn't align with anything.  How does becoming Ghostface balance that idea out?  Coupled with the notion that she casually killed her own kid?  That's...straight up dumb. Like, it makes zero sense.

I hated it before I watched it.  I started to like it when watching it.  Then I sincerely dislike the movie because it got crazy lazy in the final act.  Disappointed.