Do You Like Boring Movies? Scream 7 Fails To Bring Back The Franchise’s Meta-Magic
Here’s the good, the bad, and the meh about the latest Scream flick.
Every so often, rumors hit the blogosphere about some mythical, lengthier edit of a famous movie, like the 4-hour version of Black Panther. This is usually an assembly cut: industry parlance for a rough draft containing every scene at length before the film is actually shaped. There was allegedly one of these floating around for Wes Craven’s Scream 3, though this turned out to be a workprint from much later in the process. However, if you exist in the overlap of Scream fans and people curious about assemblies (what they look and feel like, and why they’re never shown to the public), then I have a mixed blessing: Scream 7 is for you.
A film of scattered ideas that may as well be no ideas at all, it began as a troubled production owing to two sets of directors exiting the project, the unjust firing of one series lead, the swift exit of another, and rewrites from scratch, leading to its awkward final form. You might assume that Scream 1, 2, and 4 writer Kevin Williamson taking the director’s chair might be able to salvage things, but the film’s half-baked script (which Williamson co-wrote with Guy Busick & James Vanderbilt of the last two entries) lends itself to little intrigue. Spoilers ahead.
The result is often an audio-visual chore; this is, after all, only Williamson’s second directorial effort after the poorly-received Teaching Mrs. Tingle in 1999. Scream 7 is among the most lethargic slashers you’re likely to see, both because its scene construction is devoid of drama, laughs, or thrills, and because its structure features little momentum guiding the characters and plot. It’s also bog-standard for the genre, rather than any kind of deconstruction; at this point, there’s not much separating Scream from its far less beloved, Williamson-penned imitator, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The seventh film begins in intriguing territory, with a cold open involving a young couple (Jimmy Tatro, Michelle Randolph), fans of the in-world Stab series, visiting the Macher household from the original film, now a bawdy tourist attraction. It’s a fun little intro, but it feels pulled from an entirely different script, and ends up with exactly zero bearing on the rest of the movie, thematically or otherwise. It’s hard to know if the main characters even hear about these events.
The rest of the film follows a returning Sydney Evans, née Prescott (Neve Campbell), now a mother to a teenage girl, Tatum (Isabel May), named after Sydney’s slain best friend from the first film (Rose McGowan). Sydney lives a quiet, if mildly paranoid, life with her jovial police chief husband Mark (Joel McHale), in an Indiana town far away from Woodsboro, CA, with a few extra locks on her front door and the occasional curious teen inquiring into the original film’s events. She’s usually tight-lipped about them, even to her daughter. This causes some distance between them, allowing Campbell an incredibly genuine performance as a middle-aged woman caught between keeping her guard up and leaving the past behind. She is, however, the only performer allowed any real humanity.
Kevin Williamson, longtime Scream writer and now the director of this installment, at the premiere of Scream 7.
Where Wes Craven’s Scream 2 thoroughly engaged with the idea of living with trauma, Scream 7 expresses similar themes through rote dialogue alone, insisting it has something poignant to say when this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Before long, a resurgent Ghostface begins targeting Tatum, her broadly-sketched high school friends (McKenna Grace, Celeste O’Connor), and her shifty boyfriend Ben (Sam Rechner). A new cycle of murders plays out in lengthy scenes that are far more observational than visceral, as Williamson paints all information — be it vital or frivolous — with the same unobtrusive brush. This is where the film most feels like an unfinished product; the pieces all exist, but they’re rarely carved with exciting artistry. Dead air seldom holds tension, and here, it’s a defining feature, resulting in action that isn’t so much anticipated but passively tolerated.
The masked murderer also begins FaceTiming Sydney in the hyperactive visage of an unmasked, older, facially scarred Stu Macher (portrayed by a present-day Matthew Lillard), one of the original teenage perpetrators who Sydney believes is dead. Regardless of what the answer ends up being, there’s not much mystery to Stu’s appearance as and when it plays out, since every character readily blames A.I. deep faking as an accomplice in his resurrection.
What’s more, at no point does Scream 7 actually comment on the technology or its ghoulish use in the modern world. As for the actual murderer, well, the series has always played fast and loose with red herrings, but this is a film where no one ever really feels like a suspect, despite everyone being mentioned as such. This is because everyone outside of Sydney and Tatum is presented in a perfunctory fashion, with merely a line or two introducing them before they fade into obscurity. For instance, one of Tatum’s classmates, Lucas (Asa Germann), a wannabe True Crime podcaster, has barely a single scene fawning over Sydney’s past before he’s rendered inert; even if he turns out to be the baddie, who cares? In the writing, as in the editing, function supersedes form and genre at every turn, resulting in a mere checklist of horror-flavored concepts.
Ready for more Ghostface?
That Scream 7 even slightly hints towards parasocial fandom proves that someone, somewhere along the way, had a lightbulb go off, but this is also a topic previous films have covered with panache, while this latest entry offers only scraps. Apart from verbose declarations of theme — some characters mention that this story is ostensibly about what we pass down; sure — the movie says nothing about the series at large (whether as a fictional text or in-world events), let alone the contemporary horror landscape. Add to this its numerous jabs at the previous film not mattering due to Sydney’s absence (Campbell may as well turn to the camera and tell us about her contract disputes), and the self-referential continuity that made Scream so smart and charming gets tossed out the window.
There are, thankfully, a handful of moments that just about work in isolation. A couple of slashy moments are kind of fun, and border on vicious; Sydney and her daughter escaping through a crawl space approaches gripping; and a group of supporting characters — namely, ace reporter Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox), now working alongside sibling horror aficionados Brad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown) — make a rip-roaring vehicular entrance. However, from that point on, they disappear for too long to really matter, despite their supposed importance.
A very Scream reunion.
Gail is the only character who’s survived as long as Sydney, but while she should bear the emotional scars of at least the previous entry, the film fails to make her a mirror to her long-time friend. Similarly, the Meeks twins are legacy characters who bridge both generations of the series, and they’re the only remaining horror geeks capable of imbuing Scream 7 with anything resembling the smart meta-text that once set these films apart. But despite the actors’ delightful chemistry, they aren’t allowed to fulfill this role. Perhaps it’s too soon for a postmortem, but it’s hard to shake the sense that this stems from the movie not quite knowing what it is, or what it’s really about.
Is it a case of too many cooks? Perhaps, but from a top-down perspective, it plays like a hollow, rushed, corporate-mandated replacement for something that may have been more interesting and worthwhile. Despite clocking in at under two hours, Scream 7 feels far too long, and plays out sans intensity or rhythm, let alone a rhyme or reason to prolong the series’ life after 30 years. Unless someone can jolt it with lightning, it might be time to take it off life support.
