Scream 7
Directed by Kevin Williamson
★★★
This franchise is my franchise. Has been since I was a kid. I have defended every entry in this series at some point, including things that probably didn't deserve defending, and I will likely watch every installment they make until either they stop or I do. That context matters, because what follows is not a review from someone who came in skeptical. This is a review from someone who genuinely wanted this to be great and is sitting with something considerably more complicated.
Scream 7 is the low point of the series. I hate typing that. But here we are.
The behind-the-scenes chaos is well documented — the firing of Melissa Barrera, the exit of Jenna Ortega, Christopher Landon walking, Kevin Williamson being handed the keys with the engine already on fire. Given all of that, pivoting back to Sidney and her family isn't just understandable, it's actually the right call. I was never fully sold on the Sam Carpenter storyline anyway. There was something slightly off about that anchor from the beginning, and Neve Campbell coming home to the center of the franchise feels correct. Her maternal performance here is genuinely one of her best in the series — quieter, heavier, a woman who has tried very hard to build a normal life and feels it crumbling in real time. Isabel May as her daughter Tatum earns her place too, which is no small thing when you're being asked to carry a franchise legacy on your first entry.
And Courteney Cox is great, as she always is, and as always there is not nearly enough of her. This is a note I have been writing in the margins of these reviews from the beginning. More Gale Weathers. Always more Gale Weathers. This is not a negotiable position.
The kill sequences have some genuine muscle to them. There are moments in this film that remind you exactly why this franchise built the template everyone else has been copying ever since. When it works, it works.
But the script — and this is where it genuinely stings, because this is Kevin Williamson, the man who invented the entire grammar of this franchise — is weak in ways that are hard to excuse. The side characters are empty. Completely, stubbornly hollow, which matters enormously in a Scream film because part of the original genius was making you feel something when the kills landed. Here you're watching the clock instead. There is also no discussion of the opening sequence fallout, which this franchise essentially invented as its own signature move, and the absence of it feels like a strange amnesia.
The character decisions are rough throughout, including, frustratingly, Sidney's — and I say that as someone who has been in her corner unconditionally for seven films. I can make excuses for it. I've tried. She's overwhelmed, she's protecting her kids, she's operating in a state of sustained panic. But even those excuses feel like I'm doing the work the script was supposed to do.
And the killer reveal. I knew. I knew the moment they appeared on screen for the first time. There was no rug pull, no pivot, no Scream 4 moment where the floor drops out from under you and you genuinely didn't see it coming. The reveal hits like a phone call you already knew was coming, and it's wearing the same cheap mask as Scream 3.
The franchise has the pieces. Campbell and Cox are irreplaceable, Isabel May is a worthy heir, and Williamson still understands this world better than anyone alive. But Scream 8 needs reinvigoration from the ground up — characters worth grieving, a mystery that actually breathes, and a killer reveal that earns it. We've seen what this franchise is capable of. It knows how to be great. It just wasn't this time.
