Crew
Director – Kevin Williamson, Screenplay – Guy Busick & Kevin Williamson, Story – Guy Busick & James Vanderbilt, Producers – Paul Neinstein, William Sherak & James Vanderbilt, Photography – Ramsey Nickell, Music – Marco Beltrami, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Christian Wood) & Opsis (Supervisor – Justin Jones), Special Effects Supervisor – Wayne Rowe, Production Design – John Collins. Production Company – Project X Entertainment.
Cast
Neve Campbell (Sidney Evans), Isabel May (Tatum Evans), Courteney Cox (Gale Weathers), Joel McHale (Mark Evans), Jasmine Savoy Brown (Mindy Meeks-Martin), Mason Gooding (Chad Meeks-Martin), Anna Camp (Jessica Bowden), Sam Rechner (Ben Brown), Matthew Lillard (Stu Macher), Roger L. Jackson (The Voice), Celeste O’Connor (Chloe Parker), Asa Germann (Lucas Bowden), Ethan Embry (Marco), Michelle Randolph (Madison), Jimmy Tatro (Scott), Tim Simons (George Willis), Mark Consuelos (Robbie Rivers), McKenna Grace (Hannah Thurman), Laurie Metcalf (Debbie Salt), David Arquette (Dewey Riley), Scott Foley (Roman Bridger), Kraig Dane (Karl Gibbs)
Plot
Sidney Prescott has settled down in the town of Pine Grove where she is now married to local police captain Mark Evans, has a teenage daughter Tatum and runs a coffee shop. Tatum rebels against her mother’s control and distrust of her boyfriend Ben. She also finds her mother’s unwillingness to talk about her past upsetting. Sidney then begins to receive video calls from Stu Macher who appears to be alive again, although cannot be sure if it is an A.I. Deepfake or whether Stu somehow managed to survive. The Ghostface killer reappears, targeting Tatum and others around the town. Gale Weathers also arrives and Sidney agrees to an on-air interview with her in the hope of luring the killer out.
As the Scream franchise releases its seventh entry here and has well settled into being just another horror franchise, it is worth noting that it started out as a parody of the 1980s Slasher Film. The first Scream (1996), directed by Wes Craven from a script by Kevin Williamson, was a witty play of homage to favourites that came with clever play with characters recognising they are in a slasher movie and following its conventions. This extended through the sequels Scream 2 (1997), the Williamson-less Scream 3 (2000) and Sce4m (2011), which made much out of the fact that they were sequels to the original. However, by the time of the series revival with Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023), under directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and with scripts by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, all of whom are hovering around Scream 7 in various capacities, the Scream series started to slip over into something like the recent revival of Halloween (2018) and its sequels, of just another IP revived to wring more life from it.
Scream 7 had a number of teething problems. It would have continued with the characters from the revival series. But there was the firing of Melissa Barrera over her support for the Palestinian cause against the Israeli genocide, while Jenna Ortega dropped out due to commitments to tv’s Wednesday (2025- ), followed by Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. Re-enter Kevin Williamson, screenwriter of the original, who made a determination to bring back actors from the rest of the series, in particular Neve Campbell who had elected not to appear in Scream VI due to the insulting amount of pay she was offered.
Whether such was intentional or not, Kevin Williamson’s involvement serves as a course correction for the Scream franchise after the Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett entries. It brings back Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox and places them centre stage in the roles we know them. It brings back a host of other actors from the franchise too, despite most of them having been killed off, and invokes the dubious notion of A.I. Deepfakes to do so. Meanwhile, the stars of the revival franchise are written out and largely forgotten. We still get Jasmine Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding from the revival films, but as characters they are largely sidelined.
We get Sidney and Gale Weathers back doing what they do best and Kevin Williamson writes both characters with solid and substantial arcs. Courteney Cox is looking long in the tooth and showing the influence of Botox, while Neve Campbell looks like she has hardly aged a day. The main issue for the film is that after six previous films the idea of a new killer stretches believability waaaaay out beyond anything approaching plausibility of character motivation. At one point, the film pours scorn on the idea of Stu still being alive: “Nobody recognized him for three decades? That’s a ridiculous retcon for any franchise.” At the same time, the film brushes aside the equally ridiculous motivation we are given about people from an asylum creating Deepfakes to torment Sidney because of something to do with covering up the murder of a spouse (it is not well explained).
The one thing I was hoping of Kevin Williamson is that he would bring back a focus on the wry meta-fiction and genre in-reference that marked the best of the series. Surprisingly, that is the one thing we barely get. There’s an opening scene that plays on the whole horror trivia quiz phone call opening from the first film. And there’s the odd amusing line: “Scream queens are not allowed to have happy endings. There’s a reason they keep putting Jamie Lee in new Halloween movies.” The rules are raised again only to then be tossed out the window.
There has been a whole generation of horror movies that have popped up since Kevin Williamson last put his hands on the Scream franchise – something that Scream and Scream VI fumbled – and this feels like a missed opportunity. Recent years have shown a whole generation of meta-slasher movies that have been getting really quite clever – see Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), The Final Girls (2015) or weird variants like Totally Killer (2023) and Heart Eyes (2025). How many layers of meta-fictional hilarity could Williamson have had fun with by having a meta-slasher about all the meta-slashers that have built on the original meta-slasher movie itself?
Certainly, Kevin Williamson holds up fairly well when it comes to the actual horror aspect. There is quite a harrowing scene where Neve Campbell and Isabel May are fleeing from the Ghostface as they run down a narrow hallway from the panic room while he stabs a knife through the wall. All of the attacks happen with a satisfying brutality. It works out okay, but I expected a whole lot more from Scream 7 than that.
Kevin Williamson’s other films are:– the script for I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997); the script for Scream 2 (1997); as creator of the hit non-genre teen tv series Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003); as executive producer of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998); the script for the wittily self-aware alien body snatchers film The Faculty (1998); the script for Wes Craven’s werewolf film Cursed (2005); as producer of the voodoo film Venom (2005) and The Exorcist homage The Exorcism (2024); and as writer/producer/creator of the tv series Glory Days (2002), a rather good smalltown mystery series that was naturally run over by a number of Williamson-esque deconstructions, but that only lasted for ten episodes; the similarly short-lived series Hidden Palms (2007); the tv series The Vampire Diaries (2009-17); the script for Scre4m/Scream 4 (2011); the teenage witches tv series The Secret Circle (2011-2); the serial killer tv series The Following (2013-5); the tv series Stalker (2014-5) about a police unit that hunts stalkers; the tv series remake of Time After Time (2017); the tv series Tell Me a Story (2018-20) that tells a series of modernised fairytales; and the script for the Covid home invasion film Sick (2022). Williamson made his directorial debut on the teacher-pupil psycho-thriller Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999).
Trailer here