Spoiler warning: this Scream 7 review discusses major plot points, including late-film reveals and motives.

Scream 7 is an entertaining, messy mix of confidence and self-sabotage. When it centers on Sidney Prescott, it absolutely works, and Neve Campbell remains the franchise’s biggest draw, giving the film real emotional weight and a reason for Sidney to fight that feels fresh instead of recycled. And even when the movie around her gets tangled in continuity mistakes, nostalgia overload, or a few AI-heavy detours that play distractingly cheesy, the core appeal of Scream still generally holds: sharp momentum, a powerful final girl, and that specific brand of meta tension that makes the series feel like it’s always talking back.

Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group | Scream 7

Sidney’s Arc Works, and Neve Campbell Shines

Let’s start with a positive. The best parts of Scream 7 come from treating Sidney as a person first, icon second. The film finally reframes what she’s fighting for, and that shift makes her arc click in a way it hasn’t in a while. The family life angle specifically raises the stakes without diminishing her, and it makes her distance from the chaos feel like growth, not retreat, which is exactly what Sidney has earned.

Over the trajectory of her story so far, Sidney’s strength has never been that she enjoys the fight. It’s that she refuses to let it define her. Scream 7 understands that, and Campbell sells the evolution with ease. She feels dynamic without feeling rewritten, and the movie is at its strongest whenever it lets her perspective steer the tone. If the franchise’s future is going to keep orbiting legacy, this is the blueprint that works—not just bringing Sidney back, but pushing her forward.

Continuity Fixation With Some Loose Facts

Scream is one of the few horror franchises where continuity is part of the sport. The films don’t just reference earlier installments, they interrogate them, remix them, and in several instances, weaponize them. Scream 7 clearly wants to keep that tradition alive, and to be fair, some of its continuity checkpoints are genuinely satisfying. It’s often fun to watch a sequel that cares enough to reach backward and try to stitch everything together.

The problem is that the film’s canon obsession also exposes its blind spots. It drops “facts” with absolute confidence that don’t always line up. It talks like Casey and Steve were the first victims. It positions Tatum as the last friend Sidney could trust. It requires timeline revision with Sidney being a mother by Scream 4. Even if it’s more delivery than messing up the specificity of its own universe, the film sometimes muddies timelines in ways that feel less like intentional reframing and more like someone in the room mixed up the details.

When a movie spends this much time insisting it knows the franchise history, those slips become hard to ignore. They don’t entirely ruin the experience, but they do create a weird push-pull where you’re appreciating the effort while also noticing the lack of precision. The best Scream meta writing lands because it’s exact. Here, the intention is right, the execution is uneven.

Nostalgia Overdose, Still Fun, Sometimes Too Loud

I’m the nostalgia crowd. I like legacy returns, iconic echoes, the franchise winks. Scream 7 delivers that in bulk, and in the moment it can be a blast. The film is loaded with direct pull-quotes from the original, recreated shots, and set pieces designed to light up the part of your brain that remembers where you were the first time you heard Ghostface on a landline.

But it does push boundaries and leans into dependence. Several beats feel less like homage and more like reenactment: the boyfriend sneaking through the window, the town lockdown rhythms, direct line echoes that are framed as “legendary” rather than allowed to work naturally in the scene. It starts to feel like the movie is constantly proving it’s Scream instead of trusting that it already is.

What complicates that is the franchise has already done this move well, and recently. Scream 4 used the original as a skeleton for its reboot satire and made it sting through bloodline envy and legacy theft. Scream (2022) returned to familiar ground with a modern legacy-sequel blueprint that balanced respect with a clean new thrust. Scream 7 can feel like the fourth version of the first film in a different font, which is a little deflating even if you’re enjoying the ride.

Still, the AI material is where the nostalgia approach gets wobbliest. The AI-themed scenes often look extremely rough, in a way that reads more like Stab production value bleeding into the “real” franchise than an intentional aesthetic. Some of it even plays like a cameo-style attention grab rather than a story necessity, and that’s where the film flirts with becoming the thing it usually mocks. Still, when Scream 7 uses the meta angle to generate tension rather than just applause, it snaps back into place quickly. It’s just not exactly consistent.

When the Movie Stops Making Sense, the Fun Has to Carry It

As a slasher, Scream has always allowed a little heightened logic. People panic. They make dumb choices. Ghostface gets unnaturally lucky. The better entries still maintain internal rules that make the danger feel trackable. Scream 7 loosens that structure more than usual, and whether it bothers you will depend on how much you’re willing to let the genre thrills do the heavy lifting.

The lockdown material is the clearest example. The town becomes oddly barren for long stretches, even after police are informed, and the curfew angle starts functioning like a blanket excuse to erase the idea of anyone else existing. Sidney’s husband being an officer adds extra strain when he can go missing for hours without the film convincing you that a functioning department is actually responding like adults. Police search a house knowing their targets are possibly inside and knowing someone has been murdered, then neglect a glaring space like the attic.

The geography gets slippery too. Sidney ditches her car, runs down what feels like an endless road for an unreasonable amount of time, and still arrives exactly where the plot needs her before anyone else. Ghostface sometimes behaves more like a Michael Myers presence than a tangible human threat, dropping into frame and disappearing on command (where former Scream films played with tracking and positioning better).

Even so, the movie’s momentum still finds ways to power through the nonsense. The attack choreography is punchy, the tension spikes are mostly well-timed, and the franchise’s basic rhythm still hits. It’s not always logical, but it’s frequently effective.

Characters and Killers, A Mixed Bag With Some Real Highlights

The cast is a little uneven, but it’s not a complete hit to the film. Sidney’s daughter helps form the emotional center outside of Sidney herself, and that portion of the film feels like it’s building toward something worthwhile. Though, there’s also a sense that a few newcomers could have been positioned more meaningfully. Celeste O’Connor, especially, feels like she had the ingredients to become a more lasting presence, particularly if the film truly wanted to deepen the next-gen connection with Tatum moving forward.

Conversely, the legacy characters also help keep the tone buoyant. Mindy and Chad bring plenty of unexpected humor. Gale brings a jolt of energy that instantly raises the temperature of every scene she’s in. Their inclusion can feel a little convenient sometimes, but the payoff is that the movie rarely goes flat when they’re on-screen. It’s generally fun watching these personalities bounce off each other again, even when the story is bending to make the reunion happen.

However, the killer setup is where the film gets most divisive, and it’s easily one of the franchise’s weakest. At its simplest, the motive is framed around Sidney “going soft” for not showing up, paired with a desire to pass the trauma down to Sidney’s daughter. In theory, there’s something thematically sharp in that, especially for a franchise that keeps asking what survival turns you into over time. In practice, it leans on a “you are past your prime” explanation that feels less potent after Scream 4 already delivered a nastier, more memorable version through Jill, and Jill’s motive cut deeper because it was fused to bloodline envy.

It also feels shakier because it’s the first killer setup where the reveal isn’t really rooted in someone inside the core group, even while Tatum is used as part of the motivation. That distance makes the obsession feel less grounded than it could be. A simpler, yet crueler idea, like killing everyone around Sidney to refuel her “final girl” energy and force her back into the role, might have even hit harder through clarity alone—and it could have provided these peripheral characters and legacy roles more reason to be involved in the first place.

Instead, with minimal screen time and thin integration into the ensemble, the unmasking lands more like a twist the movie wants you to accept than a conclusion it earned.

Score: 6.5/10

Scream 7 is bloody and fun, with Sidney doing the heavy lifting. It may be the weakest entry of the franchise, but it still rewards fans, even if nostalgia overload, continuity slips, and a shaky motive hold it back.