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‘You were lucky to sit out New York. It was brutal.’ Yes, Scream queen Neve Campbell is back after passing on 2023’s Manhattan slasher Scream VI and not even the franchise thinks she missed much.
If it’s not reading too much into that one knowing aside, series creator Kevin Williamson has been wrestling with how Scream VI turned out too. The fallout was pretty brutal: star Melissa Barrera was fired over remarks the studio deemed antisemitic, Jenna Ortega left and director Christopher Landon also departed, dealing with an online doxxing.
It’s a relief, then, to get back to the fictional kind of death threats. But for all the best efforts of Campbell and Williamson, who directs the series he created for the first time, the bar is not much raised. The seventh outing offers fleeting gory thrills for fans but dissolves in a messy second half that prioritises fan-service casting (the presence of Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers has minimal impact) and brutal kills over meta cleverness.
Campbell’s jaded final girl is now a final mum to daughter Tatum (Isabel May), living in a new generic suburb after fleeing Woodsboro with her cop husband (Joel McHale). There’s some mother-daughter tension: Tatum wants to know why she’s named after someone who was brutally murdered (see: Scream); mum, gnarled up by past trauma, wants to shield her from all that. But when Ghostface returns to haunt her and her family afresh, Tatum needs to step up to survive.
Neve Campbell’s jaded final girl is now a final mum
There’s early promise, including a fun opening with a couple checking into the Macher Mansion for an Airbnb stay where the horror happened – what could go wrong? – and a crawl space sequence that gets the blood flowing. But Williamson and co-writer Guy Busick’s screenplay hits its midpoint and takes the easy option: a nighttime curfew and a town-wide game of hide-and-seek between our heroes and their stabby nemesis. It’s all very Halloween Ends.
And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.
Scream 7 is in cinemas worldwide Fri Feb 27.