Between the firing of Melissa Barrera for supporting Palestine and a staunch refusal to innovate, the once-beloved horror series has reached new lows.
In the opening scene of Scream 4 two characters (played by Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell) watch Stab 6, one of the series’ satirical film-within-a-films. “That was so fucking stupid. Pure horseshit. The death of horror right here in front of us!” remarks Paquin’s character. The Stab movies, by this point, had become ridiculous and naff, regurgitating past ideas, incorporating time travel, and the Scream characters rightly hated them. Stab was Scream’s shadow; a constant reminder for Wes Craven’s shrewd and wicked slasher franchise to never descend into cheap, torturous parody. Yet here we are! Scream 7 has arrived: a heavily retooled and creatively impotent course correction after star Melissa Barrera was fired in 2023 for posting on social media in support of Palestine and Jenna Ortega exited shortly after. Craven’s iconic horror saga has now sunk to a level of barrel-scraping that even Stab wouldn’t go near.
It’s a tragedy because the first Scream has always been the coolest kid in class. If it didn’t begin with a serial murder spree, many of us would have been content watching a sharp, sexy teen film about Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich hanging out in their huge houses in their sunkissed California town. But the beauty of Scream is that every rewatch peels off a new layer of hellish, blistering cynicism. It is a film that has been remembered in the pop culture consciousness as a silly and witty teen comedy horror, but feels like a nasty, nihilistic canary in the coalmine for a now-ubiquitous culture of cruelty. Kevin Williamson’s ear for motormouth teen-speak has never been put to better use; Scream is a film petrified by the desensitisation of 90s teens towards violence. Besides Sidney Prescott (Campbell), the series’ straight man and a girl familiar with the horrors of the real world following the murder of her mother, every character confronts the threat of death with a blithe indifference.
Nostalgia and wink-wink, IP reliant references continue to have Hollywood in a chokehold, but Scream was once unique for being one of the first studio films to acknowledge that these characters had seen movies and knew the tropes. In hindsight, that seems more born of necessity. Sidney’s friend and poorly aged nerd archetype Randy (Jamie Kennedy) narrated the ‘rules’ of surviving a slasher because, by 1996, pop culture was the only language young people spoke. Scream was a reality check for a generational cynicism that continues to trickle down today. We love Scream because it does all of the above while simultaneously being a hilarious, stylish and genuinely frightening horror movie. Few genre films can spin so many plates and not completely fall apart.
Against the odds the Scream franchise kept those plates spinning for 15 more years. When it returned just a year later in the form of Scream 2 and ridiculed bad horror sequels without succumbing to the same fate, it was a genuine shock. Lightning had inexplicably struck twice. The third film was weaker and dogged by production issues, but it’s salvaged by a terrifying and insane combo of Parker Posey doing career-best slapstick and a subplot about Hollywood’s institutional abuse of young women (in a film executive produced by Harvey Weinstein). The fourth struggled to find its footing in the early 2010s but it’s arguably the smartest of them all. Its killer, Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), is so hellbent on achieving fame that she masterminds a killing spree to become its sole survivor. “I mean, what am I supposed to do?” she hisses in Scream 4’s finale. “Go to college? Grad school? Work?” But 2011 wasn’t ready for such prescience and the Scream films drew to a close, seemingly forever when director Wes Craven passed away in 2016.
When Scream was relaunched/remade/rebooted/requel-ed/whatever in 2022, under the direction of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, something was missing. It treated the first four films as sacred texts, with a sincere reverence that felt out of character. Scream never took itself too seriously, so to build on its legacy is to not care about its legacy. Craven and Williamson used the original films to satirise the idea of too many cooks in the creative process, but here it had become a reality. 2022’s Scream arrived with a surfeit of fanfiction ideas, namely Melissa Barrera’s Sam Carpenter being the illegitimate daughter of original killer Billy Loomis. She took antipsychotics to suppress hallucinations of Loomis, with 50-something Skeet Ulrich uncannily and ludicrously reprising his role as a 17-year-old. Its follow-up, Scream VI, ended in a museum filled with every killer’s Ghostface costume. The meta dialogue, previously confined to Randy, now extended to every character – 2022’s Scream wanted you to know how supremely clever it was. Its supposedly timely observations on the future of horror were about ‘toxic fandom’ and ‘Mary Sues’, ideas ripped wholesale from a 2016 Jezebel op-ed. While serviceable and sporadically entertaining, Scream had lost its defining qualities: its wit and prescience.
Then, before she could complete her three film arc, Barrera was fired for her pro-Palestine social media posts. The original script for Scream 7 was completely overhauled and Jenna Ortega departed in support of Barrera (despite claims it was due to a scheduling conflict with her role in Wednesday). New director Christopher Landon also left following Barrera and Ortega’s exits. Though Sam wasn’t exactly the most riveting lead, it was important to see the character close out her story, and the treatment of Barrera ranks as one of the most insane acts of modern day Hollywood McCarthyism. It failed – she makes her Broadway debut later this month – but Spyglass Media Group revealed their true colours and showed exactly the kind of studio fans would be supporting.
This leads us to the retooled Scream 7, with Neve Campbell parachuted back into the lead after skipping Scream VI over a pay dispute. Frankly, the cupboard has never been more bare. Scream 7 is a limp, shambling corpse of a horror movie, offering Lifetime movie cinematography and a revolving door of tragic green screen cameos. The Bettinelli-Olpin/Gillett films were undoubtedly flawed, but they at least had an imagination (and a star-making role for future Oscar winner Mikey Madison, who appeared in the 2022 reboot). Scream 7 exists solely as an in-universe justification for bringing Sidney back. Its killer – in an incoherent, franchise-worst reveal – tells Sidney that “a Ghostface attack doesn’t count if you’re not there.” This is the point we’re at in this franchise: the killer in Scream now has the same motivation as the studio behind Scream. Despite director Kevin Williamson claiming that the new film forgoes any meta commentary (“The rules thing, we don’t do that anymore,” says one character), that’s simply not correct. Scream 7 is a 114 minute film that exists in the shadow of Melissa Barrera’s firing and struggles to define itself any other way.
It’s difficult to overstate how much of a gaping void sits at the heart of this franchise now. This won’t be the end of Scream – no doubt an eighth film will lumber its way into cinemas next year after the deeply depressing box office success of 7 – but a line has been crossed. No matter how creatively destitute and morally compromised this franchise has become, Ghostface will return! What used to excite now feels like a threat. The charm, the coolness, the sexiness and the genuine fear that this franchise once inspired has dried up entirely. It’s perhaps inevitable that a series built on wink-wink humour and plotlines would eventually start to cannibalise itself, but no one could have imagined it deteriorating like this. Then again, perhaps it’s darkly fitting that Craven’s baby has descended into Stab-esque slop without him, and that in order to enjoy a new Scream film in 2026, you must be utterly desensitised to real world violence.
0 Comments