Instead, Scream 7 feels like a return to roots for the venerable meta-slasher franchise, far more interested in and effective at propping up the more playful tone of Scream’s early days than the increasingly deconstructive tendencies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries. It succeeds as a(nother) back-to-basics reset for Scream, but ironically for a story centered on how much a mother will let her trauma affect her daughter, living in the past in order to drive a franchise reset does keep Scream 7 from having an identity of its own.
The two Radio Silence-directed installments which precede Scream 7 felt like very intentional attempts to recontextualize the franchise into a more modern sensibility, something really hammered home by Scream 6’s move to a bustling New York City. Kevin Williamson takes over directing and writing duties (the latter shared with Scream 5 and 6 co-writer Guy Busick) for Scream 7 and, though he wrote the first, second, and fourth films in the franchise, it represents his first time in the director’s chair on a Scream movie and his first time directing a film since 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Williamson’s approach veers hard back into more old-fashioned Scream territory, something communicated quickly by the opening scene set at the house of Stu Macher, the co-killer of the original Scream. Stu’s house is now being used as a “psycho killer BNB,” decorated with chalk cutouts of the various victims and killers who’ve died there, posters from the Stab movies, and even a motion-activated Ghostface which you can be damn sure is going to get used to some spine-tingly ends. That sequence may end with Stu’s house in flames but, as the rest of Scream 7 plAnly demonstrates, some foundations are just unshakable.
That idea persists through Williamson’s choice to move the action back to a small town, not Woodsboro this time, but Pine Grove, Indiana. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has put down roots there with her police chief husband Mark (Joel McHale) and kids Tatum (Isabel May) and… the two younger ones conveniently visiting Mark’s parents out of town the week all the murder stuff kicks off.
