Scream 7 review

2026 marks 30 years since the original Scream movie came out. The first two in particular are core texts for me as a film fan. I can not imagine the late 90s without them.

The franchise has mostly had ups. Scream 3, not so good, but also not unwatchable. Figured that was the end of things, but then Scream 4 came a decade or so later. It was very good, but it wasn't that successful, so you figured maybe that was the end of the line for the franchise. But then another decade passed (as did Wes Craven), and we got a new creative team who delivered a pair of really good new sequels, mixing old and new cast. Scream 6 even managed without Neve Campbell.

It's been a few years again, but now we get Scream 7, and boy has it arrived with people mad at it. The team behind 5 and 6 mostly bailed, and breakout star, the magnificent Melissa Barrera, was fired due to social media posts.

Even with Campbell back as Sidney, and original franchise creator Kevin Williamson also back as co-writer, and this time director, people are mad. They wanna boycott it, and I think that has spilled into the reviews, which have been savage.

Well, people need to calm the fuck down. Scream 7 is fine. It's not dethroning the originals, or even better than a couple of the other sequels, but it's markedly better than Scream 3, and stands as a pretty solid entry in the franchise.

There was all this talk of the movie bringing back Matthew Lillard's presumed dead character from Scream 1. Okay, that SORT OF happens, but not in a Fast and the Furious nobody stays dead anymore kind of way. It's a whole AI thing that is not quite the narrative cheat that the voice thing was in 3, but it's close.

Scream movies sometimes rise or fall based on their killer reveals. This movie has probably the worst such scene in the series, with characters who in one case are barely seen prior, and in the other are so poorly motivated that I'm still not quite sure why they did what they did.

Better is the opening sequence, which admittedly was shown in nearly its entirety in the trailer. There's certainly a brutality to Ghostface in this one that I appreciated.

Williamson's return to the franchise is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, the writing is still really solid, with maybe a little less of the meta commentary this time, but a strong job of setting up the new ensemble. And there's plenty of funny lines. 

The director side is less effective. Williamson made his career as a writer, and while he has done TV work as a director, he had not directed a film since Teaching Mrs. Tingle way back in 1999. I do like that movie (some prime Katie Holmes right there), but it's not a horror movie, and Williamson's lack of skill as a horror director is hard to miss. There are a few good jumps and moments, but the set pieces here don't really pop in a memorable way.

The franchise has had better ensembles, and surely the Barrera/Jenna Ortega pairing is missed here, but I did like some of the new batch. Isabel May is good as Sidney's teenage daughter. Celeste O'Connor is spunky. This is the best utilization of Gale Weathers since the early movies. Mindy from 5 and 6 is shoehorned in here, but I really enjoy that character. 

And as she did with Scream 3, Campbell papers over a lot of the cracks with a very good, committed performance. I'm still puzzled why she hasn't had a bigger non-Scream career in the last 25 years. She is IT.

My Scream franchise ranking