Upon its initial release 30 years ago, Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) was hailed by horror fans and critics alike as a much-needed slice to the arm for the staid and stale slasher subgenre. Exhibiting a cunning self-awareness of the genre’s well-worn tropes and plot devices, the post-modernist overtones of Craven’s film heralded a sharp sea change in the trajectory of horror cinema and birthed its very own slasher icon in the process, the Ghostface Killer.
However, six subsequent instalments later, the extent to which Ghostface’s latest outing has been startlingly stripped of the savvy self-awareness that once made its predecessors so singular within the horror canon is truly shocking. Excising much of the self-reflexivity that had long since defined the celebrated slasher franchise, Scream 7 regrettably reverts to convention and commits many of the same genre sins that prior entries in the series had traditionally side-stepped and skewered.
Co-written and directed by Kevin Williamson, screenwriter of the original film and two of its further sequels, this seventh instalment once again sees the return of the franchise’s fated yet formidable “final girl”, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott. Forced to contend with yet another spate of killings perpetrated by an unknown assailant under the guise of the Ghostface mantle, Prescott is accompanied by a fresh-faced roster of disposable teens, as well as a cadre of returning fan favourites such as Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers.
While spawning needless sequels with diminishing returns is something of a horror genre convention in and of itself, the tradition is one the Scream series has always been cognizant of and fascinated by, both intellectually and creatively. From the meta-cinematic allusions of Wes Craven’s Scream 3 (2000) to the playful pillorying of toxic fandom and legacy sequels in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream (2022), the franchise’s prior sequels were self-aware enough to actively acknowledge and interrogate their own superfluous nature.
However, with any semblance of self-reflexivity jettisoned, Williamson’s Scream 7 is rendered a run-of-the-mill slasher in which the characters are frequently forced to perform the most contrived narrative functions in the name of convention and convenience. For a series of films that would routinely laugh and slash gleefully in the face of convention, such a sight is a pitiful one.
Furthermore, the little, sporadic self-awareness that barely breaks the surface is employed in the service of a smattering of post-modern musings that prove as staid and stale as the very slasher conventions this franchise once excoriated with great abandon. With little new to contribute to the discourse already cultivated by its six predecessors, Scream 7‘s intellectual redundancy indicates that this once-forward-thinking franchise is caught in creative stasis, aimlessly spinning its wheels.
In his 1979 essay, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films”, film scholar John G. Cawelti theorised that all fictional genres inevitably reach a point in their lifecycle where audience familiarity with their conventions necessitates that they either evolve to survive or die. For endangered genres seeking such a transformation, Cawelti believed their evolved creative offspring would adhere to one of four narrative approaches: parody, nostalgia, demythologisation, or the reaffirmation of myth.
Where once the Scream franchise parodically demythologised the tired, trite tropes of the horror genre, it now merely nostalgically reaffirms them. Whether this regrettable reversion to convention represents the death knell for the once-so-celebrated series or heralds the next regressive step in its evolution remains to be seen. Indeed, as any erstwhile slasher film fan knows, the killer is never quite as dead as they may initially appear, and seemingly fatally wounded franchises and genres can resurrect themselves, too.