Living in the small town of Pine Grove, Sidney (Neve Campbell) craves a normal life for her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May). Ghostface has other plans…
At the start of the 2022 ‘requel’ Scream, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) names The Babadook as her favourite scary movie. “It’s an amazing meditation on motherhood and grief,” she says. “Elevated horror… with complex emotional and dramatic underpinnings.” Killer Ghostface dismisses such concerns as “fancy pants”: the in-universe ‘Stab’ movies, based on the Woodsboro killings, favour gory deaths and high-energy meta-twists.
Scream 7, directed by original scribe Kevin Williamson (who also wrote the second and fourth movies), at times comes dangerously close to forgetting just what it is that the fans of the ‘Stab’/Scream franchise want. Largely taking place in the Woodsboro-alike town of Pine Grove, Indiana, it focuses on the fractious relationship between original Final Girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) — now Sidney Evans, having married cop Mark (Joel McHale) — and her daughter Tatum (Isabel May). Trauma weighs heavy in this, yes, meditation on motherhood and grief, and it’s reflected in the autumnal setting, muted palette and deserted night streets.
The slasher set-pieces are none-too-shabby at whipping up suspense.
But then, 2022’s Scream also commented on toxic fandom, so maybe it’s better to simply revel in the return of the ever-excellent Campbell as Sidney after a pay dispute saw her pass on the New York-based Scream VI (“You’re lucky you sat that one out, it was brutal,” says Courteney Cox’s reporter Gale Weathers, the only character to appear in all seven instalments).
It’s one of several pleasures to be had, starting with a belting opening sequence set in the Macher House that homed the climax of the original 1996 Scream. Now available for tours (as it is in real life), this creepy museum of horrors emits pure menace as a visiting couple get the actual whole experience, ending up in no condition to leave a five-star review. Other highlights include a high-wire evisceration, death by beer tap and the stabbing-through-walls malarkey glimpsed in the trailer. No-one does stalk-’n’-slash sequences quite like Wes Craven (_Scream_s 1 to 4), but these set-pieces are none-too-shabby at whipping up suspense.
Less successful is the return of Chad and Mindy (Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown) from the last two instalments. Already feeling extraneous in a movie that had to reconfigure itself to cope with the loss of main players Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega), Mindy this time has little to offer when it comes to explaining the evolving genre rules. Williamson gets more mileage out of developments in AI, with suspense over whether OG Ghostface Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) has actually returned from the grave or is a deep-fake fake-out. But the final unmasking is likely to disappoint; there’s more drama in the last-act reveals of Scooby-Doo.
It’s no Scream. Or, indeed, The Babadook. But Kevin Williamson’s meta-slasher has solid emotional underpinning and a handful of ace scenes. And Sidney-fucking-Prescott.