Director – Kevin Williamson – 2026 – US – Cert. 18 – 114m
****
A survivor from the original murder spree tries to protect her 17-year-old daughter from the recently reappeared killer – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 27th
This cleverly plays to both anyone who has followed the Scream franchise since its inception and anyone coming to it for the first time. It grabs you straight from the start with a clever little sequence, featured in the first quarter of the trailer, in which a young couple (Michelle Randolph and Jimmy Tatro) arrive for their stay at a Woodsboro house where the Stu Macher murders took place decades earlier, now done up as a short stay holiday home for crime thrill seekers. Since the trailer gives it away, it seems reasonable to point out that these two are about to become the latest victims of the so-called Ghostface killer, clad in his familiar mask that to this writer has always conjured Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893).
An additional conceit of the franchise is that the Ghostface killer’s trademark mask and cape can be worn by anyone, meaning that if you can disarm or kill them, you can then remove the mask and discover the identity of this particular Ghostface. Also meaning that, at any given time, two or more masked Ghostface killers might appear just when you think you have a handle on the first one. A clever twist in Scream 7’s opening sequence is that the first killer we encounter is in fact an animatronic, with a face that moves side to side with a motion sensor and a hand gripping a knife that raises up on cue to strike. That disarms the characters – and the audience – before another Ghostface turns up to wreak mayhem.
Following the opening sequence, the narrative moves to the sleepy town of Pine Grove, Indiana, where Sidney Prescott-Evans (Neve Campbell, who played the character in the first five films) is now married to local chief of police Mark Evans (Joel McHale) and has a 17-year-old daughter Tatum (Isabelle May), named after a friend of Sidney’s killed by Ghostface in the first film Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). 17 is the age Sidney was in the first film when the killings started. Tatum sneaks her boyfriend Ben (Sam Rechner) in through the bedroom window at night for a snog, but Sidney is wise to it and throws him out. Sidney is playing the overprotective mum, worried that Ben might be the next killer (despite his protests that he’s a decent guy), particularly given the two recent Ghostface slayings. When she talks about it with her husband, he sides with her daughter.
Sidney is not helped by video phone calls from Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), the second Ghostface killer from the first film who had apparently been killed. Does this mean his appearance on the phone is a deepfake, or did he somehow survive? Some light is thrown on this by a visit to the local asylum, which turns up information about a patient, name unknown, who the staff christened John Doe. And they have photographs…
Meanwhile, as Sidney works at the coffee shop she runs, the Little Latte, where customers include Lucas (Asa Germann), the boy next door obsessed with the Woodsboro murders that started the Scream franchise, and his mum Jessica (Anna Camp). Tatum gets on with teenage life, heading out to a play rehearsal with friends Hannah (Mckenna Grace from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Captain Marvel, I, Tonya, ) and Chloe (Celeste O’Connor from Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) in which Hannah, in a flying harness, is playing a fairy. Unfortunately, Ghostface also turns up…
The Evans family retreat to their home, which dad has fellow officers go over to make sure no-one else is hiding in the house. In a fairly unbelievable plot hole, the square ceiling door to the attic moves, suggesting some one is indeed hiding there. With Mark back out hunting for the killer, A cat and mouse game ensues as mother and daughter attempt to escape the killer, including a terrific sequence where they leave a panic room via a shaft and a narrow walkspace between two walls. Realising where they are, the killer starts stabbing first his knife, then a rather longer poker, through the walls…
There are several other impressive set pieces. Mark goes looking for the killer outside the family house, where there is lots of hanging polythene, used to great effect in preventing the audience from seeing what – or who- might (or might not) be lurking behind them. Sidney gets a phone call from Macher telling her he’s on his way to the Little Latte, to see the kids who are hiding out there, which allows for her to communicate with Tatum and watch CCTV footage of the premises’ interiors to see what plays out with her daughter and the killer, and offer advice which may or may not get correctly acted upon. This includes an effective sequence involving Chloe which is not entirely unlike the hiding in the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993).
Also on hand, from maybe a third of the way though, is Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), the tabloid TV journalist who covered the Woodsboro murders back in the first film, and is one of the few actors to have reprised her role in every film in the franchise to date (the other being the unseen Roger L. Jackson as the voice of Ghostface) to whom Sidney is more sympathetic with the passing of the years. She has in tow two unpaid interns, twins Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding) who previously appeared in Scream VI (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022), here upgraded to protégé hack and cameraman respectively.
Gale has been trying to secure an interview with Sidney about the murders through out the previous films; this time round, with Sidney’s phone linked in to the local TV station in case the killer calls in, she finally gets Sidney to agree. But then, the interview doesn’t go exactly as expected.
This brings us to Sidney’s phone and the videos which may or may not turn out to be deepfakes. Towards the end, these also briefly feature an array of key characters from earlier franchise entries, among them Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Roman Bridger (Scott Foley).
Writer-director Williamson (Teaching Mrs. Tingle, 1999) not only originated the franchise with Scream and its motley array of memorable characters, he also wrote it along with most of the subsequent Scream movies, so it’s interesting to see how he fares directing the material for the first time. The short answer is, extremely well.
Along with, as you might expect, making all the characters believable through a well-chosen cast, he has another ace up his sleeve – something Hitchcock was also very good it, and which looks easy when done well, but very few directors seem to pull off successfully. Williamson has a very good visual sense of the layout of the interiors in which he sets his scenes.
For instance, when mother and daughter leave the panic room, go down a vertical stairwell and must go through the narrow walkway between two walls, the audience knows exactly where they are in terms of the house. So too with the many other set pieces. You know what’s where physically, but you don’t know where the killer is until they appear. Yet you know they’re there through occasional glimpses and fleeting appearances, often seeing them before the characters on the screen do.
The whole thing is considerably more effective than the tiresome Scream VI.
As the audience of a Scream film, we want to be able to second guess the film and work out what’s happening, yet at the same time, we want to be startled, unsettled, and surprised. Scream 7 pulls all this off effortlessly, even if it isn’t quite as knowingly media-savvy as the first two Scream movies.
Scream 7 is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 27th.
Trailer: