REVIEW: SCREAM 7

I've been trying hard to find to see if I can't find a way to talk around the Scream 7 situation with all its associated turmoil. On the one hand, congrats to Neve Campbell for holding her ground until Paramount recognized her contributions to the franchise. On the other hand, it's a shame they had to drown Melissa Barrera in order to welcome her back into the fold.

But these kinds of contradictions, they follow both the slasher genre as a whole as well as this franchise specifically. I definitely have mixed feelings about the delight that comes with watching this movie in the theater as the audience all winces in unison while Ghostface delivers a particular nasty cut to a young girl who certainly did not deserve to be vivisected this way. The franchise itself has mixed feelings about the fandom it engenders, punishing the mania that springs up in the wake of humans being hacked to death--while also very much depending on it. So it's perhaps not actually so heretical for me to admit that, yes, my feelings around this outing were delightfully mixed.

Thirty years after Ghostface marked her as his target, Sidney finds her oldest daughter, Tatum, approaching many of the same thresholds where she first faced off against her predator. Her worst fears are confirmed when Ghostface emerges once again. Only this time, he seems happy to pull off his mask and reveal exactly who it is threatening to destroy her family, and the person underneath may be even more terrifying than any mask she's ever faced.

Neve Campbell's great revelation back in 1996 was the ability to convey wisdom beyond her years. Thirty years on, she's fully inherited that depth of soul without having lost that vitality. Isabel May is key to giving this movie real stakes. She makes you forget how vapid and detestable slasher targets are supposed to be, and she holds her ground against a legend like Neve Campbell. I'd be okay to see her around more. I actually really enjoyed this new generation of teen characters and looked forward to seeing what they'd bring to the terrain, only to feel they had been underused by the film's climactic bloodbath. Joel McHale, he's no Patrick Dempsey, but I guess we'll keep him.

One of the problems with slasher franchises is that they've always carved out this problem for themselves of deifying murderers--even after they're dead. Scream 6 had a literal shrine to the saga's lineup of killers. The Scream saga has been carried by a strong cast of champions and survivors, and this has helped offset the worship around literal killers. Even so, the most important people in the franchise wind up being the people murdering kids. After their targets have been mutilated, the identities of the victims are basically erased, except insofar as they can be hailed as trophies for the killer.

This movie took a crucial step to returning some of the power to the victims. Mind you, I don't even know what the kill tally is across seven films, and some of the murders were definitely more distressing than others. But the movie dials into the emotions our survivor, Sidney, holds for her friend who was gruesomely killed all the way back in that first movie, Tatum, for whom her daughter is named. "She was the last friend I ever trusted," Sidney explains.

How interesting can you make a seventh movie? Turns out, there are still ways to make Ghostface mysterious. This movie finds a new way to tease out the intentions of Ghostface beyond just "who is the person wearing the mask." And it's partly for that reason why I can't give too much grace to voices who are content to write off this movie for being the sixth sequel to a 30-year-old franchise. I don't think that was ever the climb this movie faced.

The "face your past" tagline (which could have been applied to any of the last five Scream movies) winds up grilling Sidney for seeking out a happy ending. "I wanted to show that there was life after trauma." The film supposes this to be some kind of unresolved issue within her when really, she has every right to live her life. And frankly, that's the more interesting question at hand. Anyone under contract can survive the murderous designs of any given movie. But how do you depict the battlefield of real life?

And the movies already gave a more intelligent answer to that question back in 2022 when we saw that Sidney had an abundant life so far removed from her darkness that her family couldn't even be seen onscreen. Sidney herself would get to foray back into Ghostface's domain, yes, but that all happened on her terms when she chose to return to the battlefield to make the world safer for other would-be victims. Yet this film really puts Sidney on trial over electing not to help Sam and the others in the last Scream movie--when we all know exactly why we didn't see Sidney in New York back in 2023.

I wound up being validated for my foresight, yet nonetheless conflicted about whether it was fair to subject her and her family to this nightmare just to prove what most of had already suspected--and what was already much better articulated in the subtext two whole movies ago.

I say that this film makes Ghostface mysterious, and it does. (And give me credit, I actually correctly identified the person behind the mask.) But once that mask comes off, and they start monologuing, Ghostface's motives wind up sounding distinctly less compelling than they've ever been.

So, I suppose in a roundabout way ... this ratifies Sidney's final victory over her masked menace. Sidney herself is as fresh as ever while Ghostface ... just needs to move on. She has truly outlived him once and for all.

And maybe now that we've resolved this, we can decide that if Ghostface must be sated with more targets to pursue, he needs to find new territory in which to hunt. By all means, let's keep Sidney and Gale and the other survivors around (at whatever wages they deem appropriate) to help train the new kids. But despite what this film wants us to believe, Sidney has absolutely earned the right to her happy ending.

So ... someone should tell Paramount just to make nice with Melissa Barrera and bring her and Jenna Ortega back.

Then again, Paramount is busy doing some slaughtering of its own at the moment ...

--The Professor

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