For a franchise that began as an ironic commentary on 1980s slasher movies, then sequels, then trilogies, then reboots, then legacy sequels, then franchises, it sure feels like Scream 7 has run out of things to say. There isn’t even a particular emphasis for critical assessment this go-round, perhaps because the entire enterprise feels clunky and rushed. I enjoyed Screams 5 and 6 and found them to be some of the best sequels in the series, so I was genuinely disappointed when the stars and creative team of those two movies left (or pushed out for political solidarity, but who’s to say?). In their place, we get Kevin Williamson as co-writer and director. Williamson was the original writer for the Scream series and has made a name for himself with his hyper-verbose, genre-riffing (The Faculty is underrated) and translated into running successful TV soaps with Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries. A director he is not, as evidenced by his only credit, 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle. The seventh entry brings back Neve Campbell as Sidney Briscoe attempting to live a “normal life” running a coffee shop in middle America. Wouldn’t you know her teen daughter, Tatum (1883‘s Isabelle May), is being stalked by Ghostface because the terror never ends. There’s a higher body count with this sequel, and the kills are grislier and more cruel, including a guy impaled on a broken beer tap with a flow cascading out of his dead mouth, but this might be the first Scream movie I’d actively cite as boring. Even when the franchise has been at its worst, like 2011’s Scream 4, the last one scripted by Williamson and directed by Wes Craven, the movies still had some bite to them, some snarky genre commentary and twists. There’s none of that with Scream 7. There’s no focal point. It’s just a mechanical slasher with our middle-aged characters being asked yet again to scream and run. There are assorted franchise cameos that don’t make much sense in-universe except as sops to the fanbase to get them to come for the seventh movie in a 30-year horror franchise. The previous movies began to tease an enticing prospect, the idea that Ghostface could be an anonymous fame-seeker or conspiracy-rotted hanger-on. I thought for a while, “Was this movie going to present my suggestion for Scream 6 as Scream 7?” Nope. The eventual reveal of the killer(s) is the biggest shrug of the entire franchise. Beforehand, there’s chase scenes and cowering behind walls and dull genre cliches presented without ironic comment. Characters repeatedly talk about lives of constant trauma, yet they don’t even make a nod to modern elevated horror’s penchant for making everything a metaphor for trauma. Alas, Scream 7 is the kind of empty slasher movie the franchise was satirizing at its start, proving that with enough time, every franchise becomes its own parody.

Nate’s Grade: C