A brand new Ghostface for the new next generation, that is to say Sydney Prescott’s daughter, rises to terrorize victims old and new! 

This is a tough one, folks. The OG Scream from the beloved RIP Wes Craven way back in 1996 became a smash hit, an instant classic, known the world over, and somehow the creepy stretched-out ghost-face masked killer with a Buck hunting knife silhouette took its place among icons such as Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger. But subsequent sequels have been going down in quality, so much so that Scream 5 and Scream 6 had entirely different Final Girls and so little of the OG cast which is, in theory, the major draw of the franchise, that it often feels like those two films are fan-made desperate-to-keep-the-franchise-going films that have no actual place in the Scream-iverse. The films aren’t poorly made by any means, but the villain reveals are much less family-trauma-related and more fandom-turned-fanatic. Basically, aside from shoe-horning in two characters and an apology for her absence in there into this film, Scream 5 & 6 pretty much didn’t happen. At least as far as Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is concerned. 

For fun, and also a fast crash course, a lightning round of who the killers turned out to be in the first few Scream films. Of course the first film had Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, taking revenge for the crime of Sidney Prescott’s mother having an affair with Loomis’ father. Scream 2 had a very misguided film student and a very made-over Mrs. Loomis, out for revenge on Sid. Scream 3 gave us Roman, Sidney’s half-brother from an assault on Maureen Prescott, out for revenge on, you guessed it, Sidney. And finally in Scream 4 we had Sidney’s cousin Jill and her dumbass little boyfriend Trevor, taking the Ghostface mantle on to attack Sid and company for the crime of, wait for it, too much popularity. This is more or less where we left off Sidney Prescott, self-help book author and survivor, Final Girl who simply wants to be left the hell alone. 

When Scream 7 opens, we are treated to yet another remake of an OG Scream scene, where the boyfriend the overprotective parental unit disapproves of climbs through the girls window for some illicit frisky business, and is inevitably caught at it. Only this time the disapproving parental unit is Sidney Prescott herself, now a head-in-the-sand mom who goes by the name Mrs. Evans from her police officer husband Mark (Joel McHale), grimly escorting her daughter Tatum’s (Isabel May) boyfriend Ben Brown (Sam Rechner) out the house. 

Here in the present, Sidney refuses to talk about her Ghostface-related past to anyone, but most especially her daughter Tatum, despite the girl being named after her best friend from the OG Scream movie. It seems Sid doesn’t want Tatum to be burdened with her families’ dark legacy, and despite a wealth of information being out there in the form of multiple Stab films, true-crime novels, exposes and other cash grabs, plus so much internet hearsay, Sid just assumes Tatum will, like most teenagers of a screen-riddled now, get her Ghostface questions answered that way. But Tatum would just as soon talk to her mother, who was, y’know, actually there and survived all of it. And then when some new Ghostface killings begin to tear the veil off of the supposedly safe life Sid built for herself and her family out there in Pine Grove, Indiana, Tatum is of course a prime target! 

(Honestly, it’s amazing to this writer how any child of Sidney Prescott was raised by a survivor mother and a cop father and still has almost no idea of how to actively defend herself. No martial arts, no weapons training, almost nothing at all; it boggles the mind. This lack is personally addressed by Tatum toward the end of the film, so that’s something at least.) 

So a new round of Ghostface killings have begun, and an aged countenance of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) on the cellphone screen is taking credit for them, despite having been dead since getting his head crushed by a TV way back in 1996. Or, was he? While the Scream films have long used a combination of modern technology and good old-fashioned bloody mayhem to terrorize their subjects, this use of AI and deepfakes to revive the character of Stu Macher for the film just seems desperate, and aging. The film also strongly implies that these days damn near anyone with a working knowledge of computer coding could make the Stu Macher deepfake, likely to keep the pool of suspects wide-open, but seriously, anyone Sidney’s age would had to have been into computers since the very beginning to be able to pull that nonsense off. 

Just as soon as the bodies begin to drop and rumors of a new Ghostface emerge, inevitably comes the arrival of Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), former TV reporter and author, now a reluctant mentor to the new hungry generation of would-be investigative reporters, always a force of nature herself. And when Gale sees Sid’s reaction to the very real danger her daughter is in, her first impulse being to flee and hide them all away, she is amazed and dismayed by the changes motherhood seems to have wrought in everyones favorite Final Girl. It seems Mrs. Evans the coffee-shop owner is a coward no-one wants on their survival team, whereas Sidney Prescott is a scrappy fighter to the final bitter double-tapped end, and she is whom Tatum needs now. 

Gale brings with her two walking ties to the events of Scream 5 and 6, Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown), survivors of the fanatical Ghostface events that happened in New York. The two have now decided to continue the trend of reporter as part of the gang trope by shadowing Gale Weathers, her very own bad self, and as Mindy puts it herself, make way for their new generation on the bonfire of ashes that is Gales career. The Meeks-Martin siblings do well in nudging the limp story along, as the good reporter characters should, and are some of the few bright spots of cheerful, unrelenting honesty in the whole film.  Both Meeks-Martin siblings take over the job of announcing this films’ Rules, and though they do a perfectly serviceable job as jaded Gen Zers, it really makes one truly miss the original rantings of Randy Meeks, played by Jamie Kennedy, when he announced the Rules so many years before. 

Then we have Sid’s good friend and neighbor Jessica Bowden (Anna Camp) and her creepy son Lucas (Asa Germann), both of whom seem to have a distinct fascination with Sid and her family. Jessica helps at Sid’s coffee shop and sympathizes over the trials of motherhood raising a difficult teen, though Jess’ troubled teen Lucas is genuinely just an oddball still looking for his tribe, as opposed to a Dahmer in the making. Sid somehow seems perfectly self-aware that she is doing Tatum a complete disservice by not telling her a damn thing about Sid’s terribly troubled past, but both she and her police officer husband seem perfectly willing to sand-ostrich themselves until it really is all but too late! 

It takes a few more nasty deaths of Tatum’s friends and peripheral Sidney pals, plus a lecture from Gale Weathers, still a boss bitch after literal years of this nonsense, to finally convince Sid to get her head out of her ass and fight back. This means going to investigate supposed sightings of Stu Macher in the much older anonymous flesh, and one Karl Gibbs (Kraig Dane) as his purported roommate, at inevitably, a mental hospital. 

Plot tangents meander off in several different directions, a few of which are entirely unneeded and basically pander to gaining newer Gens as Scream fans. And when they try to comb the threads all back together into a coherent plot, via mostly a clueX4 explanation from both new Ghostfaces at the end, it all becomes a little too meta and we are reluctant to swallow any of it. We all remember Sid was always reluctant to be that Final Girl, but embraced it when she had to, which was most of the time – not practically the end of the movie. It’s hard to believe any child of Sidney Prescott, plus a cop daddy, would be gibbering in terror at the thought of shooting an enemy that’s actively trying to kill her. Or that that was the very first time Tatum had picked up a gun, but that’s a separate rant. Even the actions and motivations of this films’ Ghostface pair is a sad and blatantly plastic attempt at connection between the old and the new, and kind of failing at both. Sorry, honey. 

There is a kind of payoff at the very end though, after the Ghostfaces got their chance to rant, Sid and her family got to fight back together, and the old generation makes way for the new, both bemused and apologetic, hoping that they will be better, at the very least smarter, than their predecessors. We all want that, right? 

Take a tour down deepfake memory lane, and watch Scream 7, in theaters now! 

Reviewed by Alicia Glass