Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Scream 7’ on VOD, the inevitable movie in every horror franchise where the filmmakers are obviously out of ideas

I expected Scream 7 (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) to test my capacity for meta-movie references, but it ended up testing my patience. To the breaking point. Neve Campbell (back after sitting out Scream VI due to a salary dispute) and Courteney Cox return to the franchise that broke fresh new ground 30 years ago, and has been content to churn out increasingly stale variations on that formula since. The two O.G. Screamers were nudged from supporting to headlining status in the wake of losing the stars of the previous two films, Melissa Barrera, who was fired (unjustly, it sure seems) for making public statements in support of Palestine, and Jenna Ortega, who bailed after Barrera’s ousting and the departure of directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin. That opened the door for Kevin Williamson to direct and rework the script, having written the first, second and fourth Scream movies, and the result is… probably the worst Scream yet.  

SCREAM 7: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: The signature Scream cold open takes place in the classic murder house that inspired the Stab movies, which are the movies-within-the-movies that reflect the cliches of real-life horror movies. No spoilers of course, but people die and we’re not impressed by any of this, not that it matters, since it has no bearing whatsoever on the story that follows. Which makes today’s word of the day perfunctory. Can you say “perfunctory”? I knew you could! 

Next, we shift to the bedroom of teenage Tatum, and no, this isn’t a flashback to Rose McGowan. This Tatum is Tatum Evans (Isabel May), the daughter of Sidney Prescott-Evans (Campbell), who named her kid after her long-dead friend. A little ghoulish? Especially considering the OG Tatum’s grisly fate? Yeah. Definitely ghoulish. These days Sidney – long past her past Scream nonsense, or so she thinks/hopes – runs a fancy coffeehouse in a small town, is married to police chief Mark (Joel McHale) and fights with Tatum. The kid wants to know more about her mom’s troublesome past than what she read in her bestselling memoir about surviving the Ghostface Killer. But Sidney just can’t do it. Sidney bristles when Tatum pulls her mom’s old 1990s leather jacket out of the attic. Sidney brushes away Tatum’s queries and walks out of the room and sighs, “F—ing motherhood.” I dunno. I think the issue here is f—ing daughterhood.

Around about now is when Ghostface returns to stab people until they bleed so much blood that they just can’t live no more. Pandemonium! Then Sidney starts getting creepy facetime calls from Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). Yes, the same Stu Macher who was a previous Ghostface but is supposed to be dead now. Curious. Was that AI slop on Sidney’s phone? Oh god – WELCOME TO 2026, SCREAM FRANCHISE! Meanwhile, who screeches onto the scene but reporter Gale Weathers (Cox), still yearning for the big scoop of a Sidney TV interview, and her two sidekick holdovers from the previous two Screams, sibling horror-movie knowitalls Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), who are given the thankless task of being comic relief in a movie that’s never funny.

And so we eye potential Ghostface suspects among the 600, maybe 700, supporting characters: Tatum’s boyfriend (Sam Rechner), a gaggle of her friends (most recognizable among them, Mckenna Grace), the nextdoor neighbor (Anna Camp) and her true crime-obsessed son (Asa Germann), a local TV-news doofus (Mark Consuelos), a butthole theater adviser at Tatum’s school, an orderly at the local insane asylum, random people on the street who find themselves looking 18-to-42 percent suspicious, that dog over there, or maybe even the long-thought-dead people from past movies. Who could it be? And more pertinently, why should we care?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Someone openly compares Sidney to Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween films since neither of them – the movie characters, not the actors – seems to have gotten over any of their past slasher trauma. 

Performance Worth Watching: Kudos to Campbell for powering through this drivel to get to the paycheck on the other side. 

Sex And Skin: No time for any of that. 

Our Take: At one point, Gale drops a doozy of a meta-joke when she says to Sidney about the events of Scream VI, “You’re lucky you sat that one out.” Allow me to retort: She should’ve sat Scream 7 out too. We all should sit it out. It’s lifeless and witless, a slapped-together collection of scenes showing every seam of its problematic making. It clunks and stumbles along until it gets to a highly regrettable conclusion that grinds to a halt so the killer can deliver a weekslong monologue justifying their donning of the Ghostface mask and cloak. It bears very little dramatic impact on the scenes that came before it, then insists that Sidney and Tatum’s relationship is in a better place now that they’ve shared a Ghostface incident. Who needs family therapy when you can be chased all over town by a psycho killer f—ed-up butcher? 

Wait, did I just imply that they live to be dreadfully boring in another movie? Well, in These Types Of Movies, the Final Girls are identifiable throughout the narrative as possessing the fortitude, that certain je ne sais quoi, to survive the slasher’s merciless onslaught. You can usually tell by where they’re billed in the cast list – Campbell and May are right up top, so good money says they’re safe. Nobody in the movie makes this obeservation, despite these movies being positively loaded, like a diaper, with such self-aware dialogue. The best Scream 7 gives us is a character pointing out the difference between movies and reality: “But this is real life!”, they retort. Yes, real life within fake life making fun of the fake life within our real lives. It’s funny because it leaves you crosseyed!

This mess drops the needle on the same Nick Cave track that’s helped define this increasingly creatively bankrupt series, which I can’t argue – Nick Cave is a good one to turn to when one needs some inspiration, not that it worked with Williamson or anyone involved with Scream 7. The film offers up two good kills, a disembowelment and a ditty with a beer tap, but they’re wasted in this crushingly mediocre slop pile; someone airlift them into a Ti West movie, pleas. I’m not sure any of us is quite in on the joke here, because we’re wondering the whole time, Where the hell is the joke? We look for the joke, but the joke is, there is no joke, which, irony within irony, makes the entire movie a joke. 

Our Call: None of the characters in Scream 7 has the balls to say, “And this is the part in horror movies where it’s depressingly obvious that the filmmakers ran out of ideas.” SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.