Scream 7 – the latest film in the 30 year franchise
Thirty years later we have Scream 7 that sees the return of Neve Campbell, one of the franchises original stars, and one of the few original cast members to have survived the blade of Ghostface the masked killer whose slaughter in Woodsboro continued for years before moving to New York and now follows Sidney Prescott (now Evans) to the small town where she has built a new life as a coffee shop owner with her student daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and cop husband.
That Scream 7 story
In keeping with the tradition of the franchise there’s a prologue that sees a couple of college kids sneak into a house that’s a museum to where the original films cast met their end and of course they receive the phone call from the croaky voiced creep asking them if they want to play a game (it’s never Ker-plunk or Buck-a-roo) with resultant carnage and a particularly gruesome kill. But it’s not long before the good people of Sidney’s town start getting bumped off that the town goes into lockdown and she finds herself and more specifically her daughter on Ghostface’s kill list.
Screenwriter turned director
For the first time screenwriter Kevin Williamson (who scripted the previous films) now goes behind the camera and directs from his own script. A promising opening scene demonstrates a flare for keeping you on the edge of your seat with a mechanical Ghostface display model always lurking in the back of shot and throughout there are several decent set pieces with some especially savage kills.
The script
The script for the first film back in 1996 eviscerated the tropes of horror films expertly pulled apart and inverted to chilling effect. But maintaining that inventiveness has been difficult if not impossible to maintain and those clever twists have gotten far less albeit there have been the occasional decent digs at the rise of social media in previous films – the use of crime scenes as Instagram photo ops is suitably ironic for characters destined for death. But the guessing of who the killer is in Scream 7 ( much like the previous films) remains firmly in Scooby Doo league and the usual self-reverential script wrong foots audiences with red herrings galore that there’s no real hope of being able to work out just who is behind the mask and why.
Does Scream 7 kill it?
Several of the kill set pieces are inventive, very gory and what horror fans will want but in an era where knife crime amongst young victims is rife it’s a little uncomfortable watching it as entertainment. Like previous films, except the original, the franchise has lost its cutting edge to play with horror tropes and even the scripts throwback surprises might have modern audiences, who were not even born when the first film landed, scratching their heads. Scream 7 will give the loyal fans what they want and essentially at is core this is Sidney v Ghostface but future films would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes and a return to the subversive nature that made the original film so ground breaking.
related feature : scream queen Barbara Crampton talks acting, producing & nudity in vampire film, ‘Jakob’s Wife’
related feature : Scream VI – REVIEW
Here’s the Scream 7 trailer……
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