The seventh entry in the “Scream” franchise arrived on Friday, Feb. 27, under a cloud that has hovered over it from the moment production began. In late 2023, a star of the fifth and sixth films, Melissa Barrera, was removed from the movie after publicly expressing support for Palestinian liberation, igniting a controversy that quickly eclipsed discussion of the film itself. Months of online discourse and think pieces followed, leaving the film with an uneasy cultural shadow long before audiences ever saw it.
“Scream 7” follows Sidney Prescott as she attempts to live a quiet life with her teenage daughter, Tatum, far removed from the violence that has defined her past. When a new Ghostface killer targets a true-crime obsessive staying at a “Stab”-themed Airbnb modeled after Stu Macher’s house, the murders inevitably drag Sidney back into the nightmare she thought she had escaped. Sidney and Tatum are forced to confront how the legacy of Ghostface has shaped a generation obsessed with real-life horror stories.
This is a series that once thrived on self-awareness, using its meta-sensibility to dissect the horror tropes it exploited. Seven films in, however, the cleverness that once defined the franchise has calcified into stale routine. What once felt sharp now feels exhausted, and the film’s attempts to revive the formula only reveal how worn out it has become.
This awkwardness intensifies once Tatum enters the story. Early scenes revolve around her interrogating a reluctant Sidney about the trauma of her past, but none of it feels like genuine curiosity from a teenager raised in the shadow of trauma. Instead, it plays like a checklist of references to better movies.
The script rarely finds a moment that doesn’t feel engineered, with dialogue that exists solely to move the plot forward. At one point, one member of the teenage ensemble proclaims, “I’m a crime junkie, mom, it’s my thing,” a line so painfully forced it’s hard to believe it survived multiple drafts.
Part of the issue is that the franchise’s original cultural framework no longer fits the present moment. The first “Scream” captured a very specific era of youth culture, where media literacy and horror fandom flowed naturally through teenage conversation. “Scream 7” tries to replicate that energy in a hyper-digital world, but has little understanding of how young people actually interact now.
Ironically, this misguided attempt at youthfulness clashes with the film’s relentless nostalgia bait. The narrative constantly circles back to old characters and mythology, leaving the movie caught between the desire to feel modern and the compulsion to endlessly revisit the past.
The filmmaking doesn’t help. For a major studio horror film, “Scream 7” often looks shockingly cheap, bordering on a fan film’s production quality. Scenes unfold across small, dimly lit sets that rarely feel like real spaces.
The central mystery fares even worse. The franchise has always relied on its climactic Ghostface reveal, but this installment delivers perhaps the weakest twist in the series’ history, with random killers and their unclear motivations. Even the film’s flirtation with ideas about AI and deepfakes, concepts that could have provided meaningful commentary, is quickly abandoned.
In many ways, the film feels like the logical endpoint of the franchise’s meta sensibility. The original films mocked horror’s endless sequels and commercial cynicism. Seven entries later, “Scream” has become exactly the kind of franchise it once satirised.
The result is embarrassing. A series that once revitalised the slasher genre now feels like a soulless imitation of itself. An uninspired, lazy and deeply pointless sequel – easily the worst entry in the franchise and one of the worst films of the decade so far. 2/10.
