Scream 7 is set to top the box office, but the franchise has fallen a long way since its 1996 debut. Some thoughts on the new movie. There are mild-ish spoilers in this piece. Certainly for older Scream films. No big spoilers for Scream 7, but manners dictate we put this bit in anyway. “Why ... Scream 7 | Some things I want to get off my chest
Scream 7 is set to top the box office, but the franchise has fallen a long way since its 1996 debut. Some thoughts on the new movie.
There are mild-ish spoilers in this piece. Certainly for older Scream films. No big spoilers for Scream 7, but manners dictate we put this bit in anyway.
“Why do we have to queue to get in? We’ve been invited.”
Some context up front. I don’t usually do this, but – for a change – I went to a posh screening of a film. One that attracted one or two people on, er, ‘the entitled side.’ Queues! Awful. They should be reserved only for people like me.
I’m rarely at events like this – I live in the bloody Midlands – and noted on the way in to see Scream 7 how there was a photoboard for influencers, that blocked my way to the gents. And a big note on the screen ahead of the screening advising us we weren’t allowed to talk about the film until the day of release. To my knowledge, there was only one preview screening ahead of release, too.
It didn’t suggest confidence, but still: this is horror cinema. Snobs be damned. The reason I came to this particular screening was the thought of watching a franchise movie of this ilk with a thousand or two people in the room. Some of whom who weren’t on their phones. That’s got to be the best way to watch it.
Also, Scream 7 isn’t hiding away the number in its title, and the crowd was there to be played to. Oh, and the screening was sponsored by Reese Piece’s. They’ve come a long way since E.T. I couldn’t eat the chocolate, but I was looking forward to the film. And seeing it in a packed house of others wanting to see it on, on a huge screen? That’s surely the best way to watch it.
I won’t name the film, but just before the movie began, a trailer played for an upcoming feature that had a lot of the crowd yelping. As a test to see whether the audience was on board, it absolutely worked. But also, it turned out to be the old story of when Frank Skinner was the support act for a Steve Coogan stand-up tour. By the end, people wanted to see a lot more of Skinner, and a lot less of Coogan (Coogan talks about that here.).
As for Scream 7? When you consider how fresh, vibrant and electric 1996’s Scream was, how skilfully Wes Craven directed it, how Kevin Williamson’s script managed to subvert, freshen and alter the genre in which it sits…. Well, I concluded that Scream 7 has become the kind of film that the original Scream took the piss out of. It’s become what it used to push against.
I’m going relatively spoiler-light here, but there are things in the film I’m going to discuss. Probably best not to go past this bit if you’ve not seen the movie itself.
I knew I was in trouble from the opening sequence.
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Scream films have prided themselves on getting these right, a pre-title card killing that tonally gets things moving. This time, two characters found themselves in a recreation of the original Scream house. It’s like when people go and see the house where Downton Abbey is shot: little cards pointing out bits of trivia, although to my recollection, Downton didn’t have a mechanical Ghostface, and a recreation of the movie trivia quiz phone call from the first film.
But by god, this sequence dragged. Kevin Williamson, famously, is at least the third choice director for Scream 7, a hugely talented writing but only a second time helmer. I had to import the DVD of his debut effort, 1999’s Teaching Mrs Tingle, as it bypassed cinemas in the UK. It’s not great.
See also: Scream 7, and the story conclusion we’ll almost certainly never see.
Contrasting how Wes Craven and more recently the Radio Silence directing duo nailed the openings, Williamson – who repeatedly seems to type the word ‘INT.’ on his copy of Final Draft – lets this play long and tepid. The opening ends with a decent kill, but it’s pretty boring, pretty fast.
I’ve followed this franchise from day one, attended midnight screenings, and even in the weaker entries have appreciated moments of fun and ingenuity. Here, I got an opening that was dimly lit – I got vibes of Aliens Vs Predator – Requiem, and those vibes didn’t go away as the film progressed – and predictable.
It made me think that the parody Scary Movie franchise is a bit more honest about what it’s doing. Famously, for the first of those films, they had footage from Scream playing on a monitor next to the camera to make sure they matched it. They may as well have done that here, just with fewer jokes.
In fact, Bryan Bertino’s 2008 The Strangers movie would have been a better touchpoint, as the opening of Scream 7 has ingredients not a million miles away from that. Instead, we get a museum to recap previous films, and a bit of bloody slashing. Moving on.
Check out Modern Horror Screams, a special podcast covering the entire Scream franchise!
What was interesting was I was in a crowd of fans. Early on, Neve Campbell walks back into the franchise, now working at a very pleasant looking coffee shop. Her appearance drew applause from the cinema audience, and it’s a story well told of how she was shortchanged out of appearing in the last movie. However this piece seems though, I fully appreciate you can only judge the film you’re watching, not the one you didn’t get. It’s just there are a few scars around the place.
Still, there’s some character threads that suggest a bit of promise.
Now, Campbell’s Sidney Prescott has a daughter – Tatum – who’s the same age as she was in the original film. She’s married to Joel McHale’s Mark, and there’s a weariness to her character, of people wanting to make podcasts about her, and asking about the Woodsboro killings of previous films.
There might have been more of a film there had Kevin Williamson’s script followed that, but it soon becomes more interested in reuniting Sidney with Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers, which is where the tale ultimately heads. Then, it brings back a mother/daughter dynamic near the end, that it’s spent precious little time fleshing out. It’s hard to care too much about it when the film in front of us doesn’t.
Neve Campbell is a terrific performer, and to see her character narrowed to basically going through the motions is a huge disappointment. There’s an idea in here that Scream is now an obsession over her rather than the killings, but there’s simply not the flesh (chortle) to make this count. Had that original take on Scream 7 played out, there’s a strong chance that Campbell wouldn’t be back. I’m glad she is, but good lord, she deserves a lot better than trying to hold this lot together.
I reconciled as this went on that it was the Deadpool & Wolverine of the Scream saga. In that, it’s bound to be successful, but it’s utterly reliant on what went before. I think it was Mark Kermode who described Deadpool & Wolverine as trawling through the rubble of the Marvel universe, and it’d be a very apt analogy here too.
The return of Matthew Lillard is a bright spark, though.
Not withstanding the inconvenience of his death in the saga before, and against hints that ‘we never saw his body’, Lillard brings energy, life and fun to a film in need of all three of those things. The eventual explanation for what he’s doing there is about the least interesting way I think they could have done it, but still: he’s actually great here. Screw you, Quentin. The man three to the left of me in the screening actually put his phone down when Lillard was on screen, and that’s the best poster quote you’re getting out of this article.
I want to jump to the ending, though. I’m not going to reveal the specifics, just talk around its bizarre complexity.
People are still wrapping themselves up in knots trying to decipher Christopher Nolan’s 2020 puzzle box Tenet, trying to work out if it’s a brilliant film that just needs work off its audience, or if it – bluntly – excavates its way into its own arsehole.
Scream 7 throws what looks like an endless supply of Ghostfaces at this, happily winking through its dimly-lit interiors that it might be this person, or that person. We’ve seen a robot Ghostface at the start too, and who knows, it might be them? I got curious as to how they were going to wrap this up and explain it.
I shouldn’t have been.
Kevin Williamson is a far, far better writer than me, and has enjoyed deserved success. It’s not for me to tell him how to write films. My role at best is an audience member, who would like to observe this: that if your story, for a two hour slasher movie, is so convoluted that it requires a character in mid-frame to explain everything for a good three or four minutes (no exaggeration), you might have over-egged things.
I think it was the M Night Shyamalan film Split where at one stage, a character arranges a Skype call (remember Skype?!) to basically explain things to the audience. I remember watching that thinking that Austin Powers’ Basil Exposition may as well have retired on the spot.
I contend that even as a character explains the reveal at the end of Scream 7 to you, you’ll need a BA (Hons) in Tenet to even begin to wrap your head around it. There are graphs to be drawn about what it’s trying to tell you, and what motivations it’s trying to explain. I’m watching it thinking: WTF? Really?
Remember how clean and clever the ending of Scream was? I’m not sure Kevin Williamson does. Genuinely, three or four minutes of explaining. It went on and on and on and on. “Are we having fun yet?” it has the temerity to ask at one point.
No. And there’s the problem.
When did Scream become this? I’m reminded of a scene in 1991’s City Slickers, when Billy Crystal’s ad executive is sent away to find himself after buying in an anondyne radio commercial. “We used to make fun of people who bought crap like that,” he’s told. Exactly that.
Sadly, the film that never was in unavoidable. They openly cite Campbell’s absence from the last movie. They wink at that audience about it.
At one stage, Radio Silence were toying with returning. Then Christopher Landon signed up, before dropping out to make Drop, a far better staged piece of cinema. Stars Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega walked away, one fired, one fed up. And things that had been set up, the whole idea of moving Scream away from a small town to a big city, went on the bonfire. We’re back to the original ingredients instead of at least geographically altering the circumstances of the story.
In fact, what we’re left with is a photocopy of Scream, where the copier is running out of toner ink, and each facsimile is getting weaker and weaker. Even now, thinking about it, there’s a moment in a car, where a laptop is discovered, and I’m wondering: why? What? Outside of trying to give me a red herring, what does it exist for?
There are good performances here, and a couple of chuckles. But there’s not the confidence for it to be its own thing. Instead, Scream 7 sits somewhere between a scrambled rescue job, a transparent attempt at fan service (a sequence where Campbell walks through a house filled with screens being the most blatant), and an attempt to do more interesting things with the character of Sidney Prescott.
The priority, though, is the first two items on that list. The resultant film is something Wes Craven never would have signed off on: boring. It’s dull. This is the year of Send Help, where Sam Raimi to a degree replays some hits, but finds fresh energy and ideas to help him do so. Even The Housemaid, where Paul Feig sets up characters and situations before ratcheting up the edgier elements.
Scream 7 is a miserable footnote in a franchise that its financiers are keen to keep going, and yet presumably will remain good for $200m worldwide after a big opening weekend. The warning signs for the future are written all over it though. It’s out of gas. Tellingly, the biggest reaction from the packed crowd in a London IMAX cinema was for a trailer before the movie. A two minute clip elicited a bigger reaction than a two hour entry in one of the most influential horror franchises of recent times.
On the plus side, it kept lots of interior soundstages in business, some people got free chocolate, and at one stage a character is dressed as a big fluffy dog. On the downside: when you have a character splat that (the brilliant) Mean Girls did a whole lot more effectively, questions need to be asked.
There’s talk of a Scream 8. It needs an improvement. Or a Matthew Lillard spin-off film….
