Jenna Ortega, a performer and actress with enough fortitude and sense of self to step up and give 110 percent to The Weeknd’s fascinating singularity of a film Hurry Up Tomorrow, recognized that Scream 7 was a no-win situation after the firing of Melissa Barrera. (Barrera was fired from the franchise due to her comments about Israel in 2023. Ortega ultimately left as well.) I have colleagues — as well as friends, alongside significant swaths of horror fandom — struggling with whether it’s even ethical to engage with any of Paramount’s output these days (and that was before it looked like they’ll be acquiring Warner Bros.). Louis Peitzman over at Vulture summarizes the situation going into this film comprehensively (and better than I could).
To be real, I approached this film and review with a great deal of dread. The opening sequence of 1997’s Scream 2 (mostly) eloquently posited the question to viewers: What do you want from this? What do you expect from this? That film approached these questions thematically, both in that sequence and its later hearkening to the classic sparagmos of ancient Greek tragedy. But stepping into Scream 7, that question becomes very literal, because to be aware of what all was going on in its making now ties directly to what’s been happening in Gaza. If this is something that concerns you, you don’t get to sidestep that or compartmentalize.
It shouldn’t be a problem to say, in the review of an uncharacteristically gory film — for mainstream, 21st-century, R-rated material — that murder is bad. You wouldn’t even think it a necessary statement to make. Under most circumstances. But there is a deep, bone-chilling irony at play here. You’d think that Paramount, the studio behind Star Trek, would understand a Kobayashi Maru situation before stepping into one.
The Scream series was elastic enough in 1997 to weather its script getting leaked on the internet, being rewritten and reconfigured and still making its release date. The 1999 installment of the series was about the sexual predator legacy of Hollywood — which was made for Harvey Weinstein’s studio — and pulled no punches. The Scream films have been telling us since 2011 to worry about (and for) the youths laser-focused on using fame and infamy interchangeably as rungs on the ladder to success, and what happens when weak minds learn the wrong lessons from things. But fuck: This may be too much for a franchise to bear.
There’s a set piece toward the end of the first third of Scream 7 that is a series all-timer. Like the transcendent Cassandra-in-Agamemnon sequence in Scream 2, it unfolds in a theater, but this high school production of something Peter Pan-adjacent (it’s unclear, except for a harness) isn’t about classical thematics. It's rather about the helplessness of committing to art when you have only your collaborators to count on. Is this a good Scream sequel? Yeah, it’s better than it has any right to be, putting aside the messy circumstances that led to it even existing. But can such a thing be done? More so, should it?
Ghostface is back in theaters now
There’s never a moment when you can get sure moral footing, because the world is too messed-up right now for anything to be just entertainment. And even before Scream 2 opened with its exegesis on what horror represents, there’s my mom not even making it through the Drew Barrymore sequence in the original as rented from the old Captain Video in White House — horrified by the Paul Dennis Reid murders fresh on everyone’s mind at the time and horrified that anyone could find such a film cathartic.
We prefer our violence fake, in theory. And there’s an ongoing subplot percolating on the back burner of this film about what’s real, what’s fake and how AI is collapsing things together and unmaking certainties of all sorts. (This is one of the aspects of the film that makes Scream 7's partnership with Meta AI feel extra queasy.)
With Barrera’s firing and Ortega’s dropping out, massive amounts of reconfiguration had to happen, including remedying part 6’s absence of Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott. And Campbell is genuinely good in this film. (She’s always been a great performer, and she’s triumphed in problematic productions before — see When Will I Be Loved.) She gets the character of Sidney Prescott Evans, and she delivers in a way that no one else in the film does, mostly because no one else is really allowed to.
We get the return of Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers, and it’s a missed opportunity that her character’s shifting moral compass is, for once, pretty much sidestepped. Every Scream film has to decide how disgusted it needs to be with Gale at its start, and it adjusts accordingly as the movie goes on. Not so here.
Barerra and Ortega’s Carpenter sisters were a really interesting evolution of the mythos, but all of that is chucked into the wind and left unaddressed in the actual text. We’ve got original screenwriter Kevin Williamson directing and co-writing here (he also wrote Scream 2 and 4), and it would be off-brand for me not to observe that the Carpenter sisters are very much the Audrey Liddell of the Scream series as far as his focus.
There are even more great set pieces here, but what honestly registers the most is how Campbell’s Sidney thrives on Williamson’s dialogue. (Although Williamson’s script for 2022’s Sick may be the most irresponsible and shameful bit of screenwriting of the COVID-19 era, and he should have to answer for that repeatedly.)
I miss Wes Craven. Going through the previous six entries in the series (as well as Craven’s film maudit My Soul to Take, which is absolutely the bridge between the Scream franchise and his own imaginative whatsit Shocker), you find a strength of will that the Radio Silence guys respectfully paid tribute to. But there’s a willingness to be weird and emotionally brutal that Craven never backed away from. He was never bound by the tyranny of taste or respectability. And he was also never afraid to be political — no major director was as gutsy as he was during the Dubya Bush years. (The 2007 film Hills Have Eyes 2, which he wrote and produced, ends with a dedication to the military, white-hot and furious, “May the missions they are given be worthy of the sacrifices they will make.” In case you were not around in the disgusting post-9/11 jingoism that very much laid the groundwork for where we are today, a statement like that in a mainstream film was unimaginable.)
The fifth installment in the meta-horror franchise opens wide today
It doesn’t serve any purpose to imagine what Craven would have done in this kind of situation, though you can bet things would have been properly lit. That’s not a knock specifically or exclusively on Scream 7’s look — more the fact that just because contemporary digital cinema can get a tolerable exposure in low-light environments doesn’t mean it should. Lighting is part of visually telling a story.
I was harsher on 5 (aka 2022’s Scream) than I probably should have been. It’s aged pleasantly enough, especially when reinforced by 2023’s Scream VI and its 3D/4DX ramp-up. (Whoever realized that approximating Steadicam stalking sequences with the uneasy glide of weightlessness unlocked a whole new level of visceral experience; maximum respect to them.)
Real talk: The original Scream and Scream 4 (and to a lesser extent, Scream ’22) are the only franchise entries in which it doesn’t feel like there’s a Mad Libs/plug-and-play approach to whomever the killer ends up being. You can draw a direct line from that aspect of the series to how it became de facto policy at studios all the way up to Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm’s current approach to make and unmake films left and right in the digital realm after they’ve been released.
There are all manner of reasons not to see just about any movie. And if Scream 7 serves any sort of grand purpose beyond being (narratively) a pretty good sequel, it’s that you have to engage in some serious thought before you can even watch it. In its own way, it has made the grand opening question of Scream 2 into something that is not rooted in the fictional or hypothetical, but something all too real. What do you want from this? What do you expect from this?
