Even Neve Campbell can't save controversy-laden Scream 7
CBC
What is there to say about the Scream movies that they haven’t already said about themselves?
As a meta-textual, self-referential genre-takedown vehicle, that’s always been more or less its suit of armour. From the seminal slasher that started the franchise in 1996, the Wes Craven series has always framed itself as a subversion machine that both identified the cliches of other slasher movies, then either engaged with them or ignored them to make the jump scares more difficult to predict.
It did this by rehashing the same plot time and time again. And now it's doing the same thing in Scream 7, the OK-but-not-great sequel to the sequel of the "requel," — that would be a reboot sequel for those not in the know.
That plot usually follows a tough-as-nails final girl (virtually always Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott) who sees her friends and family picked off by a mysterious, mask-wearing serial killer. While this version jumps forward in time — positioning Prescott as an understandably overprotective mom to rebellious teen Tatum (Isabel May) — the rest is similar.
The knife-wielding maniac Ghostface is once again supposedly someone close to Prescott. And acting like a psychic extension of a culture that both covets and dehumanizes its women, the killer attempts to punish her for some innocuous transgression from her past.
Like always, Prescott and her friends (including the second biggest box-office draw, Courteney Cox's cutthroat reporter Gale Weathers) only have two tools to defend themselves: the magical power of friendship, and an encyclopedic knowledge of how, when, and which people tend to die in horror movies.
It's a formula that has, surprisingly, led to one of the best-received horror franchises of all time. With the exception of the unfortunate Scream 3 and now (foreshadowing) Scream 7, every entry currently holds a fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes — a near-impossible task for a 30-year-old series of any kind, let alone the low-brow slasher.
But of course, it also makes them somewhat impervious to criticism. How do you deride the cheesy murder movie for being cheesy, when every character points out how cheesy it is? How do you say Scream 4 doesn’t understand how hackneyed and predictable its “masked killer calls young girls before killing them” setup has become, when its opening sequence features Kristen Bell murdering a pedantic critic for saying just that?
That makes the way the series' writer and director (Guy Busick and Kevin Williamson) approached this entry all the more bizarre.
Campbell's return to the franchise — after a much-publicized salary dispute led to her absence in Scream VI — is clearly a draw for fans. But in terms of "return-to-form," there's not much form on offer. Sure, there's a veritable cavalcade of nostalgia-bait via cameos and quips — and more blood than a Stephen King prom night — but the heart of this brand is notably, and bafflingly absent.
That would be Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera, the stars of Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) and director Christopher Landon.
Barrera was infamously dropped from the series after making social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war that the production company deemed antisemitic. Landon soon followed, as did Ortega, who told The Cut that all the departures made it feel as if Scream 7 was "kind of falling apart."
Outside the theatre, these staffing changes resulted in last-minute rewrites, then protests and calls for a boycott over what some have deemed a sort of neo-McCarthyism. And inside the theatre, the results aren't much better.
While abandoning the new characters that somehow made a story structure rooted in the past feel new, Scream 7 also ditches what was the entire point of the movies in the first place.
