Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.
Horror movies like “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” have cemented themselves in cinematic history under one specific subgenre of horror: slashers. Slashers lean into the idea that humans are the true evil in this world, typically following masked killers rather than monsters like Frankenstein and Dracula from classic horror decades before.
The original “Scream,” directed by Wes Craven, came out in 1996 and follows high school student Sydney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) and her friends as a masked killer, Ghostface, begins killing teens in their town of Woodsboro.
In many ways, it’s a typical slasher film, but the genius twist is that it’s also a meta commentary on the genre, meaning that it refers to the conventions of the genre within the work. Movies like “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Halloween” are referenced, and the characters even talk about “rules of horror movies.”
The filmmakers delivered a sequel a year later and it eventually became a franchise. The newest installment, “Scream 7,” came out on Feb. 27.
Directed by Kevin Williamson, it takes place 30 years after the Woodsboro Murders, with the story centered around Sydney’s daughter, Tatum Evans.
I enjoyed the exploration of Sydney and Tatum’s mother-daughter relationship. Sydney is still struggling with all the horrors she’s faced and because of this, she struggles to communicate with Tatum. In turn, Tatum is frustrated by how closed off her mother is about her past.
The focus is returned to Sydney after she took the sidelines in “Scream” (2022) and “Scream VI.” While “Scream 7” continues to explore her trauma, there’s now the added element of motherhood and her daughter’s own struggles.
As usual, the movie succeeded in delivering horror. Suspense is one of the most important parts of a horror movie, and the franchise has never failed at achieving it for filmgoers. Even when characters were making poor decisions in true horror movie fashion, I still found myself praying for their safety every scene Ghostface was on the screen.
Its setting plays a huge part in creating suspense, with certain scenes still burned into my mind — one in particular being an attack at the Evans’ under-construction house, where plastic translucent sheets hide Ghostface at every turn.
Despite the good scares in the movie, my biggest problem with “Scream 7” is that it has the worst killer reveal I have ever seen. One of the staples of the Scream franchise is that there is always more than one killer. While “Scream 7” remains faithful to this pattern, it fails to establish a proper connection between the killers and the main character like its predecessors.
I spent the entire movie trying to guess who the killers were — from Sydney’s husband to Tatum’s boyfriend — but when the reveal finally happens, I barely recognized one of them, I knew less than three things about the other, and with the last, I just looked at my friend and said, “Who is that?”
What made the reveals in the original “Scream” so shocking was the betrayal in it. With many of the Scream movies, the killers end up being people that the main characters are close with and trust. In “Scream 7,” though, that connection doesn’t exist. The killers have so little screentime out of their masks that I knew next to nothing about them.
With the film’s serious flaws, I give it 3 out of 5 Falcons. It’s a fun slasher, but it can’t compare to any of its predecessors.
