A hollow nostalgia trip

I’ll be honest: I have mixed feelings about Scream 7.

On its face, it’s a nostalgic trip to the past, but over the 30 years since the original came out, it hasn’t changed much. And that’s not a positive.

First, let me say that I watched Scream 7 without having seen the preceding movies recently. I went into it not remembering a lot about who some of these characters were. (The recent ones, not the OGs—I’m old.)

The movie opens in Stu Macher’s house (for some reason, I thought it was Sidney’s), which you’ll recognize from the original. It’s now a rental; a shrine to the in-movie “Stab.” It copies the opening scene of the original in terms of method. Which is kinda cool, but that scene was never about the murder. It was the shock that the face of the movie was killed off in the first 10 minutes (Drew Barrymore for you youngins).

Scream 7 mirrors its original in other ways that seem more forced than natural. We get it, Sidney’s back. Of course, there are a ton of references to the absence of Sidney, an acknowledgment of her disappearance in-movie and out. But after a while, they feel stale. I mean, the movie makers wouldn’t pay Neve Campbell enough, so really, the joke is YOU.

Stu’s appearance was what I, as a huge Scream OG fan, was waiting for. I really wanted him to “be back,” but the idea of deepfakes was introduced immediately, and I knew it was too good to be true. Still, one of the things I liked best was that he appeared throughout.

Most of the movie is Sidney trying to rescue her kid from Ghostface. In some ways, we see Sidney teaching Tatum the ways of horror: always shoot the killer in the head. Have a panic room. That scene where Sidney is coaching Tatum shooting Ghostface via phone. It’s a passing of the baton that needed to happen a decade ago.

There was something about the relationships in this movie that seemed very inauthentic to me. I didn’t buy Joel McHale as Sidney’s husband, and maybe that’s just my own brain pigeon-holing McHale as a comedian. Tatum’s friends felt more like MacGuffins, which is fucked up, because one of them is the child of Ghostface. (I didn’t buy that part, either—the death of Ghostface’s kid was basically glossed over with a short line of dialogue.)

Then there’s Sidney and Gale Weathers, who trend more toward besties than frenemies. Gale lacked her usual bite, and that’s not to say the performance was bad. The plot just lacked its typical humor.

There were bright spots. Stu, of course, despite being AI-generated. I appreciated the casting of Ethan Embry, a regular in ’90s horror movies. My favorite characters were the Meeks-Martin duo, kin of the one and only Randy Meeks, who have meta discussions on who might be the killer (or note) based on their horror knowledge. (They really did a disservice by killing off the comedic relief in the original.)

Though it tried to emphasize how it skirted genre rules (“there are always two killers,” surprise! There are three), it really focused on the gore. Example: the kid whose head hung on the beer tap. That scene was too long and felt gratuitous. Sure, people get stabbed—it’s a slasher—but Scream, to me, was always about doing the unexpected. It was breaking free of horror tropes to create something new.

There was nothing new or original about Scream 7.

It banked on ’90s nostalgia and delivered a formulaic story that felt hollow.