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In the realm of horror cinema, there’s an unspoken rule that often gets overlooked by both characters and filmmakers alike, especially within the self-aware Scream franchise: the seventh installment in a slasher series can be a surprising pivot point. While it’s not as defined as the sequel rules laid out by Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) in Scream 2, or the trilogy concepts he toyed with in Scream 3, the evidence is there if you know where to look.
Take Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, for instance. The filmmakers attempted a bold move by introducing a telekinetic teenager to face off against Jason, aiming for a more ambitious narrative than previous sequels. Although it wasn’t celebrated critically, the effort was notable. Similarly, Halloween: H20 ditched its numerical sequence and erased all movies post-Halloween II, bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis in a precursor to the modern legacy sequel. Meanwhile, the seventh entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, New Nightmare, saw Wes Craven return to his roots with a meta twist, setting the stage for the self-referential style he and screenwriter Kevin Williamson would later explore in the original Scream.
In comparison, the Scream franchise has proven more enduring than many of its inspirations. While it hasn’t yet hit double digits like Jason, the franchise has managed to reach seven films within a single continuity, only stumbling once with 2011’s Scream 4. Scream 7 is poised to continue this trend of box office success, at least initially, and holds the potential for further sequels. However, the real turning point may lie not in the storyline but in behind-the-scenes changes, particularly the influence of corporate stakeholders.
Spyglass Entertainment, the current rightsholders, exemplify this corporate impact. Neve Campbell’s absence from Scream 6 due to a salary dispute was creatively justifiable; after all, the series had fixated on Sidney despite its versatile premise and her character’s satisfying conclusion in Scream 3. Although Scream 6 was thematically jumbled, it proved the series could thrive without its original stars, achieving a franchise high in revenue. Yet, the subsequent ousting of Melissa Barrera over her comments regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza, a sentiment echoed by a UN commission, disrupted this momentum. Jenna Ortega, arguably the most recognized among the new cast, soon followed suit, citing Barrera’s absence and a negative atmosphere as her reasons for departing. The departure of director Christopher Landon, who had signed on for the new installment, further compounded the chaos.
Faced with the loss of its leading stars from the fifth and sixth films, Spyglass turned back to Neve Campbell, rebranding Scream 7 as a nostalgic return to the series’ roots. They sought to rekindle the franchise’s past glory by bringing back Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of the first, second, and fourth films, to direct and co-write. However, curiously, he was handed a pre-existing script penned by the writers of the recent films. Instead of embracing new talent, the series has doubled down on legacy, crafting a narrative where Neve Campbell is once again the centerpiece and Williamson, whose only other directorial effort was the 1999 flop Teaching Mrs. Tingle, is hailed as a creative leader.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive of Campbell, who is fine in Scream 7, or Williamson, whose knack for slasher-literate patter was never quite replicated in the Scream movies he didn’t write. But it seems like such a massive unforced error, all for the sake of disciplining Barrera for entirely mainstream humanitarian views. This stubbornness leaves Scream 7 in the uncomfortable position of having to pretend like the well-reviewed hit Scream 6 was in fact a bizarre aberration in the movie’s history simply because Sidney wasn’t in it – no matter how much sense it actually made for her character to not rush to attention when Ghostface took Manhattan. On top of which, almost everything Sidney says to her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) runs in direct contradiction to what she tells Barrera’s Sam Carpenter in the fifth movie, so Sidney can re-learn a lesson she already taught to re-center her character.
Now, retcons are no stranger to horror fans, who have largely learned to roll with the punches. But Scream 7 seems to expect its audience to not just roll with some inconsistencies, logic leaps, and retcons, but actively welcome them, all for the sake of bringing back Sid (who was gone for exactly one movie) and Gail Weathers (Courteney Cox, who for all of the back-to-OG-basics hype, has about as much screen time here as she has in the previous film). The murder mystery they find themselves in is entirely rote – I’m a bona fide dum-dum and nonetheless made several correct guesses about the mystery before the halfway mark – but we’re supposed to be excited not because of the trenchant horror commentary, or exciting stalk-and-kill scenes (there are a couple, granted), or the filmmaking (this is one underlit movie) but because it has Sidney and Gail, characters who have never really been fully absent from the series.
It’s especially baffling because so many slasher movies have failed to execute a torch-passing or chapter-closing moment. Friday the 13th tried A New Beginning with part five sans Jason, only to hastily bring him back for part six. Jamie Lee Curtis made her triumphant return with H20, only to be brought back and unceremoniously killed off in Halloween: Resurrection. The fifth and sixth Scream movies actually pulled it off: The original cast was there for the fifth, and the new kids introduced there largely took over for the sixth, with some assistance from Cox in a supporting role. Legacy characters could still potentially come and go as they pleased. New horror trends could be referred to and satirized. The series seemed well-positioned to continue in any number of directions.
But Scream 7 has almost no interest in the world of horror, which feels like an admission of defeat. It brings in a few barely-there ideas about A.I. (if you’ve heard anything about old cast member cameos, well, you can probably put that together) and the line between true crime and entertainment (which feels pretty musty at this point). Odds and ends, in other words, lacking the giddy propulsion that carried previous entries through even if they weren’t as tightly executed as the first film. It makes sense that there isn’t much actual dialogue about horror movies in Scream 7 – easily less than ever before. It’s because anything the characters would talk about would have to be related to late-stage franchise stagnation, bad decisions, and corporate cowardice. At this point, it would hit too close to home.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.