“Burn it all down.” For a tagline so front and center of Paramount’s marketing for Scream 7, it has very little relationship to the actual ethos of the movie.
Nostalgia is front and center from the opening scene set in Stu Macher’s house, where the finale of the first Scream took place – it’s even important enough to be the focus of a Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmine Savoy-Brown) breakdown on “the rules” for Tatum and her friends. It’s also the bedrock of much of Scream 7’s comedy, which is heavily rooted in, you guessed it, clowning on both Scream lore and horror history. But the more Scream 7 goes on, the more it feels like all that hearkening back to “where it all began” is designed to open the door for nods to the franchise’s past that don’t wind up feeling justified on their own merits. Scream 7 swings for the ‘member berries hardest in its climactic sequence, a mostly straightforward game of cat-and-mouse that builds nicely on the strength of Campbell and May’s intensity and teamwork and even ends with a satisfying bang. But the reveal of who’s behind Ghostface’s dastardly plot this time suffers greatly from the smoke and mirrors game the movie plays with that killer’s identity. By the time they’ve revealed themselves, it feels like Scream 7 has run out of time to flesh out their motives, or how those motives connect back to the movie’s nostalgic themes.
Scream 7 might be a little light on the deeper genre commentary that made the series famous, but as for how it functions as a pure slasher? The thing ticks like a clock. Williamson has a great sense of rhythm for building up, paying off, and cooling down from tension, which gives Scream 7 a lively pace that keeps many of its shortcomings from lingering long enough to feel fatal. The director has a clear affinity for the operatic when it comes to staging Ghostface kills, with a number of these sequences culminating in memorably grotesque tableaus. An early attack on one of Tatum’s friends leaving her dead body suspended above a stage, a long shot of a knife going through one character’s skull just long enough to really give you a secondhand migraine, and a kill involving a beer tap that feels like an instant classic moment for the series all point towards Williamson having put a lot of care into crafting each and every Ghostface encounter, even if one or two end a little too abruptly for their own good.
Verdict
Scream 7 packs in plenty of satisfying slasher action, and may even bring some lapsed fans back into the fold by focusing down the scope of that action after Scream 6, but the new ideas it does bring to the table are either too thin to fully explore or ill-advised enough to detract from the success the movie does find in playing the hits, the deep cuts, and the killer tracks.
