Scream 7 (2026)

I don’t know, either I am the right audience for Scream 7 or the wrong one.  I think either might apply.

I saw Wes Craven’s original Scream back in 1996 and I, more or less, wrote it off as just another horror movie with aspirations of being another unworthy long-running series that would run out of gas by the time the second sequel rolled around.  I still don’t know if I was right.  I disliked the first; I kinda liked the second and never found time for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth or the TV series.  I don’t know, either I had other things to do or my mental maturity just landed on the idea that after far too many entries in the legacy of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, maybe I figured I’d had enough.

Some would agree, but paying customers apparently did not – they made it a phenomenon.  For myself, I was indifferent.  Scream was just another gut-bucket horror movie to me.  Yes, it tipped a hat to the generation that had subsisted on a steady diet of easily digestible stalk-and-slash horror movies – we were the VCR generation, after all.  I appreciated the effort.  The characters in the movie understood the rules, but I reasonably asked: If they’re so smart, how come they’re still dying?  Armed with that, I didn’t exactly drag myself to this sixth sequel with a song in my heart.

But back to the point.  Either I am the right audience for this or the wrong one.  Having only a vague understanding of its universe, I can perhaps act as the test case for the uninitiated.  That’s good.  However, now in my mid-50s, my meter for generic horror movies is stronger and thereby less tolerant than a movie this weak-in-the-knees can probably withstand.  That’s bad.  For whatever the creators of Scream 7 are trying to accomplish here –  beyond yet another joyless Post-COVID cash grab propped up on a familiar name – the results never rise above call-backs and reveals that feel shopworn and tired.

The movie opens with a pre-credit sequence that starts off kinda cute, then goes on far too long and then dips into that aggravating lack of logic based on the character’s apparent lack of common sense (“Just leave the house, Morons!!” I said more than once.)  A teenage couple (Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph) enter the house of the original killer, Stu Macher, which has become a museum.  The boy nerds out, but the girl (as these things go) wants make use of the Little Girls’ Room and then leave.  There’s a cute bit involving an animatronic mock-up of Ghostface, which director Kevin Williamson nicely keeps visible in the background

.  I just wish that the rest of the scene could be that creative.  From the moment this scene starts, you know exactly how it will end.  The problem is, it takes a very long time to get there.  Worse, this is largely disconnected from the rest of the movie.  It is never mentioned or dealt with again, perhaps revealing some of the film’s constant rewrites.

In the fall of that scene’s predictability, we catch up with Sidney (Neve Campbell, again) whose real life middle-aged horror show currently resides with daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and her budding sex life – which she claims not to have.  Life is calm and generally normal until Sidney gets a video chat from the last person on Earth that she ever expected to see. Spoiler Alert. This potentially shocking reveal is undone by our real life awareness of A.I., which the movie uses judiciously and then desperately.

Anyhoo, Sidney and Tatum go on the run from the person in the Ghostface costume while the movie lobs recall after recall into the plot just the maintain a reason for the film to exist. Mostly, and perhaps inevitably, there are the same routine stalk and stab moments as the characters are picked off one by one by whomever is under that mask.  As with the first movie, I am dismayed by the fact that a perhaps clever concept is wasted on characters too lacking in self-preservation to keep them from happening for real.  Yes, the kills are effectively gruesome, but the characters are so shallow and their fate so inevitable that it renders their deaths pointless.

There is one effective scene where Sidney has to guide Tatum via cell phone on how to get away from GhostFace.  Unfortunately, that leads to a climax that it not only unconvincing but kinda stupid.  Its all based on callbacks and recalls and cheap rehashes of long-dead characters through the use of A.I. in a manner that isn’t creative, it just feels desperate – particularly since whomever is creating the A.I. is apparently aging those people to what they would look like now.  Why? Wouldn’t you make them look like they did then?  What’s the point?

I might imagine that the ending would mean more to those who have a vested interest in this series, but the threads are so damned obvious that one has to accept a lot of nonsense for it to work.  The reveal of the person under the mask is, to say the least, also kind of stupid if you don’t think about it for more than a few seconds.  And the payoff – the idea of why Sidney’s daughter is named after her late BFF is just as obvious.  We’re setting up Scream 8, that’s what its all about.

This was my third Scream movie, and it didn’t make me want to do a marathon of this series.  My takeaway is this: If the point is to create characters that know they’re in a horror movie, then I feel free to invoke my understanding that if I’m not all that impressed by the source materials, why go after the sequels?  If I didn’t like Scream, why go forward in the series? 

Unlike the characters in these movies, I know when to get up and leave.