![\"Drew](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Scream-Movies-List-MAIN-Everett-H-2026.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t‘Do You Like Scary Movies?’\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n
With Neve Campbell coming back for another round of meta-bloodshed, THR ranks all seven installments of the horror franchise.<\/p>\n
\tPublished on February 28, 2026\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tDrew Barrymore in the original ‘Scream’ (1996) and Neve Campbell in ‘Scream 7’ (2026)<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Everett Collection; Paramount Pictures<\/p>\n
\n\tThirty years ago, you answered the phone every time it rang. Watch Casey Becker in 1996\u2019s Scream. She\u2019s Drew Barrymore in a brilliant stunt cameo, but she could be any kid back then practicing now-ancient telephone etiquette. Casey asks, \u201cWho are you trying to reach?\u201d She says, \u201cI think you have the wrong number.\u201d When a stranger keeps dialing her back, she makes casual conversation. She does not assume, as anyone would today, that the unknown caller is a scammer, a spambot or worse. The central shock of that perfect first scene depends on a recent revolution in consumer technology: Casey, on her house\u2019s cordless landline, realizes the man must have a cellular. He could be anywhere. He could be anyone. He will die bloody, like Casey, but the media, the movies and the internet keep resurrecting his ghost\u2019s face. In the fullness of time, he becomes an app.<\/p>\n
\n\tScream paid homage to Psycho, Halloween and Friday the 13th. Director Wes Craven was a living genre legend who blew minds with 16-millimeter scumshock cinema before creating Freddy Krueger. The Ghostface mask was a pre-existing Halloween outfit, still licensed all these years later from Fun World. But the script came from Kevin Williamson, a rookie screenwriter about to become the voice of WB youth. A fresh-faced cast helped define the new teenquake: indie-cute, gothy-hot, overflowing with self-aware verbosity and whatever \u201cSkeet\u201d was. The movie\u2019s success brought horror back to box office life and launched a series that continues three decades later. After a successful Gen Z pivot withered in geopolitical controversy, Scream 7 reunites Williamson with a few of his original stars. Put the popcorn on the stove. Grab a kitchen knife. Crank Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds\u2019 \u201cRed Right Hand.\u201d We\u2019re gonna play a little game and figure out which Screams stabs hardest.<\/p>\n
\n\t(Warning: Spoilers ahead if you haven\u2019t seen all of the Scream films.)<\/p>\n
\tUNRANKED: Scream (2015-19)<\/p>\n
\t\t\t![\"Scream](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Eliza Morse\/MTV\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tDid you forget when Scream went to basic cable? MTV\u2019s attempt to do another Teen Wolf spent a couple years grafting the movies\u2019 tropes (freaky phones, jump scares, oft-tormented girl, sketchy boyfriends, \u201cEverybody\u2019s a suspect!\u201d) onto a small-town mystery about a surgical-masked serial killer. It\u2019s Pretty Little Liars with more farm-equipment gore \u2014\u00a0until the third season ignores all of that, rebooting to Atlanta for a new teenkilling saga that features Keke Palmer in a \u201cMrs. Obama\u201d Halloween costume and a Ghostface killer played by Tyga. (That final run of episodes got dumped without ceremony onto VH1.)<\/p>\n
\n\tSmall-screen Scream was brisk and silly, and I bring it up to make a crucial point. Nobody expects Michael Myers to hack your home-security system. Ever-trendy zombie apocalypses give Earth a healthy internet detox. The Conjuring only conjures stuff from half a century ago. For better and for worse, Scream must be Right Now. The TV show\u2019s version of digital modernity was often clumsy \u2014\u00a0snuff GIFs, murder selfies, a true-crime podcast hosted by a long-lost murderous half-sister \u2014 but that evokes the source material\u2019s bleeding-edge spirit. The Scream concept launched in a gone world of 900 numbers, Star 69 and corded receivers. Sequels track the creep of insidious innovation: Caller ID, creepy texts, ranty message boards, social media, malicious livestreams. Now Scream 7 features motion sensors, AI deepfakes, Ring Cams and a hellish AirBnB. Unique among the great slashers, Scream\u2019s taps a fear that\u2019s primal and postmodern. The knife is just a weapon. The true terror is connectivity. Or, as Neve Campbell\u2019s Sidney says in Scream 7: \u201cOh, fuck you, phone!\u201d<\/p>\n
\t7. Scream 3 (2000)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tSensing a post-Columbine backlash against amusing teen butchery, Scream went to Hollywood to uncontroversially slay a bunch of showbiz sinners. After murdering the host of the country\u2019s \u201cNo. 1 nationally syndicated talk show,\u201d the new villain carves through the cast of threequel-within-a-threequel Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro. The script by Ehren Kruger replaces Williamson\u2019s video-store savvy with lame insider gags: Carrie Fisher as a Carrie Fisher lookalike, Jenny McCarthy complaining about rewrites, queasy casting-couch subplots in a film executive produced by Harvey Weinstein. The big tech idea is that Ghostface has, like, the Home Alone 2 Talkboy? Campbell seems too classy for this tomfoolery. While death stalks West Hollywood, Studio City and the Hills, Sidney Prescott spends the first half of the movie working a crisis hotline in a remote cabin. At least Parker Posey has fun as the daffy actress playing Stab\u2019s Gale Weathers, streaks and all.<\/p>\n
\t6. Scream VI (2023)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Philippe Bosse\/Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tDon\u2019t laugh when I say every Scream is both a film and an essay on film. There\u2019s a slasher about slashers, a sequel about sequel, a remake about remakes, a legacy sequel about legacy sequels. (Scream 3 announces itself as \u201cthe concluding chapter of a trilogy,\u201d a big deal back when trilogies still concluded.) Scream VI is the first installment that can\u2019t pin down what sort of movie it is. When bloodshed follows the \u201cCore Four\u201d Woodsboro survivors to their New York City campus, Jasmin Savoy Brown\u2019s Mindy claims they\u2019re in \u201ca continuing franchise\u201d of \u201cepisodic installments designed to boost an IP.\u201d That should be a dire warning: Nobody\u2019s safe now that Hollywood killed Iron man and James Bond! But then precisely zero main characters die. Returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have fun unleashing this housebound franchise in a very Montreal neighborhood of Manhattan. (Ghostface goes to a bodega, an apartment building, and a subway.) The climax leaves the mean streets behind, though, enclosing the cast inside a museum of Scream artifacts. That\u2019s when you realize VI is less about continuing a franchise, and more about maintaining an archive with referential nostalgia. (Stop thinking The Last Jedi; start thinking The Mandalorian.) Since star Melissa Barrera got dropped from the seventh film after posting about Gaza, her strange duology wraps as an inadvertent warning about IP-ravenous Hollywood. All these new characters wind up trapped in somebody else\u2019s old content.<\/p>\n
\t5. Scream 7 (2026)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Paramount Pictures\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tOK, but you know who doesn\u2019t think every Scream needs to be some sort of meta-essay on film theory? The creator of Scream. Returning to co-write the seventh installment and direct his first feature in 27 years, Williamson mostly avoids Stab by self-reference for a personal tale of maternal instincts in chaotic times. Sidney Prescott is now \u201cMrs. Evans,\u201d mother of three, police wife, proprietor of The Little Latte caf\u00e9 in Pine Grove, Indiana. She has tried to keep 17-year-old Tatum (Isabel May) innocent \u2014 and worries her helicoptering has\u00a0left her daughter a defenseless victim. \u201cIf we protect our children too much, they\u2019ll never learn to protect themselves,\u201d a mom friend points out. It\u2019s that big question breeders keep pondering lately: Gentle Parenting or FAFO?<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile this seventh installment got delayed and reconceived, something unthinkable happened. Last summer brought sequels to Final Destination and I Know What You Did Last Summer \u2014\u00a0and both were incredible! There was suddenly a real possibility that Scream was becoming the third-best franchise of the teen-horror wave it launched. That\u2019s why, with all due respect to the truthers protesting Barrera\u2019s firing, I had one question about Scream 7: Would Neve Campbell get material as good as Jennifer Love Hewitt got from the last Summer? Answer: No. It\u2019s great watching Campbell play parental paranoia \u2014\u00a0she really doesn\u2019t trust teen boys \u2014\u00a0and a genuine pleasure how Williamson rediscovers tension in the \u201ccomplicated but enduring\u201d Sidney-Gale dynamic. But the central mystery muddles AI skepticism with limp backwards continuity. Oddly, this family-focused installment is most notable for its garish brutality. Deaths involve a chandelier, a drama-club flight rig, a beer tap, and a construction site with sharp tools lying around. Random objects used for bloody murder? Consider this a stinging compliment: It reminds me of Final Destination.<\/p>\n
\t4. Scream (2022)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Brownie Harris\/Paramount Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThere are certain rules one must abide by to make a Scream movie. Actually, there\u2019s only one rule. A good Scream is about other movies, and a bad Scream is only about other Screams. This revival narrowly enters the \u201cgood\u201d column by making mirth from the age of blockbuster fandom backlash. Characters old and new get caught in the latest maniac\u2019s oh-so-Reddit attempt to keep progressivism out of sequels and Make Stab Great Again. Savvy casting caught Jenna Ortega and Mikey Madison right before Wednesday and Anora propelled their stardom. And Melissa Barrera had been delightful as the hot-mess sister on the Starz\u2019s Vida \u2014 which makes it baffling that her Sam Carpenter is such a rueful wet blanket. She\u2019s the daughter of Billy \u201cGhostface the First\u201d Loomis, so her stern resolve masks simmering psychopathic rage. But expressing that killer instinct with a de-aged Skeet Ulrich is a bad, bad, bad idea. Conversely, 5cream\u2019s best grace note comes from a decidedly un-de-aged David Arquette, returning for one last stumble as lovable human pincushion Dewey Riley. I assume if you\u2019ve read this far you won\u2019t mind spoilers about everything from here? The ex-Sheriff comes back just long enough to look cooler and more pitiful than ever. His death \u2014 he looks at his phone at the worst time \u2014 is the kind of shock missing from the lesser Screams.<\/p>\n
\t3. Scream 4 (2011)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Gemma La Manna\/Dimension Films\/courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tSidney joins forces with a savvy teenagers \u2014\u00a0like the fifth movie, and the seventh. Except these youths are self-absorbed, traitorous, wacked out on webcasts, desperate for clicks, entirely unoriginal, and potentially illiterate. Also: They all die. Emma Roberts plays Sidney\u2019s lookalike cousin Jill. Introduced as the new teen hero, she\u2019s actually \u2014 twist! \u2014\u00a0a fame monster. She mutilates her friends, targets her own family, and shoots her boyfriend\u2019s dick off \u2014\u00a0all for the likes! Scream 4 takes aim at the previous decade\u2019s remake culture, a debased and delirious era of extreme violence and \u201cflashy music-video direction.\u201d So it\u2019s extra meaningful that Jill\u2019s ultimate plan is reboot herself as Sidney 2.0 \u2014\u00a0right after she eliminates the original. Production was troubled. The Cox-Arquettes decoupled. Williamson left, later telling Entertainment Weekly<\/a> he had a \u201cmassive fight\u201d with producer Bob Weinstein. Craven surely didn\u2019t want his final feature to be a fourquel. But the director\u2019s previous film \u2014 2010\u2019s painfully sincere My Soul to Take \u2014 was an original-concept flop, severely undergrossing all the remakes of his horror classics. The indie cool of the 1990s had long since mutated into 2000s pop sleaze, and Dimension Films\u2019 own Scream-replicating Scary Movie parodies were earning more than Scream ever did. Does all this explain the rage bubbling beneath Scream 4\u2019s playful surface? I think Jill is the best villain this series produced after Billy Loomis, and the final showdown has serious resonance. Sidney killing Jill is quite possibly the single meanest thing Generation X ever did to millennials.<\/p>\n \t2. Scream (1996)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\tWes Craven made an amazing movie where a woman gets scary phone calls from the murderer who wants to trap her inside a horror film. It flopped. Two years before Scream, Wes Craven\u2019s New Nightmare brought back original Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp to play a version of herself stalked by her cinematic past. Why was that meta-horror slasher the lowest-grossing Freddy Krueger sequel right before this meta-horror slasher became Craven\u2019s biggest hit? You could call out all of Scream\u2019s young stars: Rose McGowan as the no-bull best friend, Matthew Lillard\u2019s Kabuki-theater version of teen jerkitude, Skeet Ulrich doing James Dean doing Anthony Perkins, Jamie Kennedy\u2019s oddly endearing loudmouth-nerd virgin. Williamson weaves a brilliant mystery into slasher logic. Craven directs with slick efficiency, but you spot his gnarly \u201870s instincts in the intestinal rawness of the bloodshed, not to mention all the hilarious ways the victims keep beating Ghostface up.<\/p>\n \n\tPeople in Screams always tell Sidney Prescott she\u2019s the hero, the leading lady, the star. (In Scream 7, at long last, someone finally calls her a \u201cFinal Girl.\u201d) But right from the start, the series has two equally crucial tentpole personalities, and I believe their friction explains the film\u2019s runaway success. Not enough respect gets paid Courteney Cox for filming a zeitgeist-dominating feature film on hiatus from her day job on one of the most popular sitcoms in history. And I maintain Gale Weathers is Cox\u2019s greatest performance: Ambitious, self-destructive, brave, ridiculous, unapologetic. (Think Monica without any friends.) Cox\u2019s comic energy balances Campbell\u2019s sensitive toughness. When they team up in the finale to stop a couple mass-murdering bros, it\u2019s an alliance that\u2019s both surprising and totally righteous.<\/p>\n \t1. Scream 2 (1997)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\tOf course Sidney Prescott wants to forget Billy Loomis ever happened, and of course Gale Weathers writes a bestseller so successful that Billy Loomis becomes a pop culture virus that will never die. As legendary film reporter Clark Collis recounts in his recent horror-film history book Screaming and Conjuring, the sequel came together at breakneck speed. Williamson was filming the pilot of Dawson\u2019s Creek while he crafted this College Years follow-up for Sidney and her friends. It should feel rushed, slapdash, desperate. Instead, Scream 2 soars high on its own supply, at once enamored and horrified by its own phenomenon. The opening scene replays Drew Barrymore\u2019s nightmarish killing with carnivalesque dread. When Jada Pinkett Smith gets attacked at a Stab screening by somebody dressed as Ghostface, nobody helps her. They\u2019re all dressed as Ghostface, too; they assume her death is a publicity stunt. It\u2019s the best scene in any Scream movie, a bent-reality mindwarp that\u2019s owes less to Halloween than Natural Born Killers.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat a cast! Pinkett Smith, Omar Epps, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Joshua Jackson! Timothy Olyphant and Liev Schreiber give attention-grabbing parts eons before their TV stardom. Kennedy\u2019s Randy rocks a goatee, and his death hurts \u2014 just like the endearing limp Arquette gives Dewey. Jerry O\u2019Connell sings. And Courteney Cox\u2019s hair is the best hair anyone has ever had on their head. Tori Spelling also appears as \u201cSidney Prescott\u201d in the movie-within-a-movie. Airquote gags like that would swallow a couple Screamquels, but Neve Campbell\u2019s palpable dismay keeps the movie grounded. She\u2019s an essential \u201890s archetype, a cultural sensation who just wants to be left alone. <\/p>\n \n\tA crucial plot tangent reveals Sidney has taken up acting, playing Cassandra in the Windsor College production of Helen of Troy. Can she relate to the mythic prophetess? \u201cShe knew she was cursed,\u201d her drama professor explains. \u201cIt was her fate, and she embraced it.\u201d Sidney carries her own curse, hunted by something that won\u2019t die no matter how many times she kills it. It\u2019s an easy shorthand to call Scream\u2019s bad guy Ghostface, but all those masks and killers are disposable. The real villain is the voice on the phone \u2014 still and always performed by the great Roger L. Jackson. \u201cHello, Sidney,\u201d the voice purrs in her era, \u201cRemember me?\u201d She killed Billy Loomis but she can\u2019t kill that voice. In 1997, Scream 2 saw the new century of lunatic fanbases and trollish anonymity. Naturally, the new killers met on the internet. \u201cGod, I hate this shit!\u201d Sidney says. She doesn\u2019t like scary movies. Her problem is that we all do.<\/p>\n \t\tTHR Newsletters<\/p>\n Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n