After missing Scream 6 (2023) due to contract disputes, Neve Campbell is back as Sidney Prescott in the seventh entry of the horror whodunnit series. We see her settled into a peaceful life with her husband and her daughter Tatum (Isabel May), but soon enough, she’s targeted by the Ghostface persona once again—albeit this time, a familiar face may be behind the mask.
Scream 7 follows the same trend as its preceding instalments, increasing the horror but diluting the intrigue of the murder mystery. Campbell is still reliable as the leading role, demonstrating good onscreen chemistry with May, and the kills are reaching new creative heights for the franchise (there’s a particularly inspired murder on a theatre stage). However, the movie lacks the legwork required when crafting a captivating set of suspects. Thus, the reveals incited questions of ‘Who?’ rather than ‘Why?’, while the justification behind the main villain’s motive left me utterly bored. Furthermore, while Scream 7 tries to be a mixing pot of imagery from across the series, the ways in which it implements these legacy aspects left me feeling like I had been baited rather than vindicated for being a devoted fan of the franchise.
The latest film does something arguably worse than being bad: it is old ground for the series. The themes of legacy and modern technology ironically already feel outdated since similar topics were tackled in prior entries like Scream 3 (2000) and Scream 4 (2011), rendering the movie repetitive, redundant, and unoriginal. This could possibly go down as the worst entry within the thirty years this series has spanned. Scream 7 forgot the one cardinal rule of slashers almost all others have fallen victim to: quit before you become a parody of yourself.
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