Scream 7's gnarliest casualty is the franchise's dignity
The sequel marches on without new stalwarts Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, their absence leading to the flimsiest film in the franchise.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
It’s now old news that Melissa Barrera, star of the past two Scream “requels,” was fired by production company Spyglass in 2023 for sharing pro-Palestinian sentiments on social media. (For the record, her accusation of Israel committing “genocide and ethnic cleaning” has since been substantiated by an ICJ ruling.) This led to Jenna Ortega, who plays her on-screen sister, announcing her departure from Scream 7 the very next day. Director Christopher Landon—set to take the reins from Scream VI‘s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—jumped ship shortly after, reasoning that the loss of the film’s stars (along with the death threats he was getting over the misconception that he terminated Barrera) was just too messy. A little over two years later, Scream 7 arrives in theaters, after a $500,000 rewrite and a major shift toward navel-gazing as opposed to tongue-in-cheek genre commentary.
Sure, there’s a repeated emphasis on “final girls” and references to cheap nostalgia, but there’s no underlying bite to any of it. Kevin Williamson, scribe of the first, second, and fourth installments, teams up with Scream V and VI co-writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick on the script, but the tone clashes between Williamson’s tendency toward the franchise’s overarching mythology and the latter two’s penchant for grisly kills and nerdy repartee. Williamson directs for the first time since his inaugural effort, 1999’s Teaching Miss Tingle, and his ability to conjure suspense is one of the film’s sole saving graces. But drab cinematography, flat set design and AI-adjacent aesthetics ring just as hollow as the string of familiar faces that are haphazardly resurrected with little narrative purpose.
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