There\u2019s a lovely running gag in Scream 4 (2011) about the limitations of creatively exhausted movie franchises. Seven seems to be the dreaded number here, as the seventh iteration of Stab, the ironic horror-franchise-within-a-horror-franchise, is deemed to be the nadir. \u201cThese sequels don\u2019t know when to stop, they just keep recycling the same shit,\u201d says the outraged film fan Rachel (Anna Paquin) moments before she is brutally murdered. \u201cA bunch of articulate teens sit around and deconstruct horror movies until Ghostface kills them, one by one. It\u2019s been done to death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fifteen years on, Rachel\u2019s analysis is looking more cogent than ever. Scream 7 is a bland and rote bum note, a last-minute patch-up job that was apparently necessitated by the untimely departure of several personnel who made the very successful and quite brilliant Scream 6. They include the co-directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, the co-star Jenna Ortega and the charismatic lead Melissa Barrera. Barrera was fully established as the new \u201cScream queen\u201d, replacing Neve Campbell, until she criticised the Israeli government\u2019s actions in Gaza<\/a> and was fired in November 2023.<\/p>\n So now Campbell\u2019s oddly vacant Sidney Prescott has been dusted down and plonked at the centre of this, to quote Paquin\u2019s Rachel, \u201crecycled shit\u201d about a ghost-face killer terrorising a tiny Indiana town and murdering the residents with ghoulish aplomb. A girl is disembowelled, a guy is impaled on a beer tap and the ace reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) skids into frame via the kind of \u201cta-dah!\u201d entry that might have launched a thousand ecstatic \u201cwhoop whoops\u201d 20 years ago but now proves only a groaning source of overfamiliarity. Oh great. Sidney and Gale are back together. Again. Whatever happened to that new girl? Shut up \u2014 look at Sidney and Gale. They\u2019re back!<\/p>\n