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Of all the slasher franchises, Scream is arguably the one best suited for a true anthology approach. Because each film features a different killer, it never needed the same recurring villain in the way franchises built around Jason or Freddy do. That alone could have freed the series to tell completely standalone stories every time.
But instead, Scream locked itself into an inverted formula: rather than the killer being the constant, it’s the protagonists—Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers—who keep returning. It’s a clever twist on slasher tradition, though it also limits the very flexibility the premise naturally offers.
Three decades after the original murders, Sidney Prescott has built a quiet life with her family—until a new wave of Ghostface attacks drags her back into the nightmare. This time, the threat feels eerily intimate, as she begins receiving unsettling video calls from what appears to be Stu Macher, long believed dead, raising the question of whether he’s somehow returned or if someone is weaponizing deepfake technology to torment her. As the body count rises and suspicion shifts among a new cast of potential victims and suspects, Sidney is forced to confront both her past and the possibility that the rules she once relied on no longer apply, culminating in a drawn-out unmasking that tests her resilience one final time.
In Die Hard 2, Bruce Willis quips, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”—and that sentiment fits Sidney Prescott a little too well. Once again she finds herself in the crosshairs of Ghostface killers. This time it’s framed as more personal, with the threat aimed directly at her and her family, rather than something like the cast and crew of a Stab movie production.
But that escalation comes at a cost. The more the films insist on making it “all about Sidney”, the more strained the killers’ motivations start to feel. The series has always leaned toward the convoluted—Mrs. Loomis in Scream 2 being one of the few exceptions that lands cleanly—but by now, with nearly everyone close to Sidney long gone, the reveal feels like a cheat. The killers end up being people with only the thinnest, most contrived ties to her, which undercuts the emotional weight the story is trying to build.
The defining hook of the Scream movies has always been their meta angle. Each entry latches onto something current—trilogies, remakes, legacy sequels—and builds its horror around that framework. Scream 7, though, feels like it’s reaching a bit. There isn’t an obvious trend to skewer, so returning writer-director Kevin Williamson leans into deepfakes and AI as the central gimmick. That idea manifests through the apparent return of Stu Macher, who repeatedly video-calls Sidney Prescott—raising the question: is it really him, or just a digital ghost conjured through manipulation?
It’s a clever concept on paper, but it also underscores how thin the “rules” aspect has become. Characters still gesture toward laying out new guidelines, yet by this point the franchise has already exhausted that playbook. There’s not much left to codify that doesn’t feel like a retread.
The AI angle does open the door for the return of familiar faces, offering a more tactful approach to digital resurrection than the likes of Grand Moff Tarkin, Princess Leia, or even Ian Holm’s posthumous appearances. These moments are amusing and occasionally eerie, but they’re ultimately little more than novelty cameos—they don’t carry much narrative weight, and they don’t quite justify the film’s reliance on the gimmick.
If there’s one unwritten rule horror movies tend to follow, it’s that the gore escalates with each installment—and Scream 7 mostly obliges. There are still a few relatively tame kills built around quick stabbings, but it also delivers at least one genuinely nasty moment, with a disemboweling that’s far more visceral than the series usually goes for.
Visually, the film is slick, and at times it still knows how to generate suspense. One standout sequence has Sidney Prescott and her daughter squeezing through a narrow gap between walls to escape—a tense set piece, even if it echoes similar (and better) moments in films like The Matrix.
The problem is that all of this craftsmanship builds toward an ending that simply doesn’t land. The big question—whether Stu Macher is actually behind it all—drags out into what might be the most prolonged killer reveal in the entire franchise. And instead of paying off, it fizzles. By the time the mask finally comes off, the reveal feels less like a clever twist and more like a shrug, tipping the series into self-parody. It lands with the same arbitrary, “pull-the-mask-off-the-culprit” energy as an episode of Scooby-Doo—and not in a good way.
Scream 7 ultimately turns the series into what it always tried to rise above: a fairly basic slasher. It’s still a decent watch—there’s something oddly comforting about seeing Sidney Prescott dealing with Ghostface attacks 30 years on—but it also highlights a bigger issue. As a franchise, Scream feels like it’s finally running out of steam.
