Hey folks. Don’t often do blog posts these days, but I stepped away from social media and I’ve had a lot of thoughts about the Scream franchise.

NO SPOILERS. I find Scream 7 fascinating.

But first — let’s go back to the beginning.

1996. Scream was a fantastic script with a great twist by new screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and is often remembered as a horror classic. The film is really a ’90s yuppie mystery thriller about the breakdown of the nuclear family, the impact of violence in media, and a vengeful teen killing spree (that foreshadowed the Columbine massacre in 1999). There is nothing supernatural about it. The story is grounded. The deaths feel real, the scope is small, and that makes the film even more horrifying. We were swept up in the thrill of genre, but at the end of the film, it’s two angry teenagers resorting to violence, and we are left to feel the gravity of what we’re watching.

It was Weinstein-Era Miramax, a production company at the height of its own powers, that took the project and transformed it into a cultural juggernaut. The Weinsteins used their Hollywood pull to emphasize the meta features of the script by bringing in horror legend Wes Craven, and stacking the cast with an impossible line up of hip stars on the cusp of stardom. Courteney Cox, fresh off the first season of Friends! Neve Campbell, star of Party of Five! Every choice was in direct opposition to the state of the slasher horror in the mid-1990s, a genre that had all but become a joke for pumping out cheap, poorly made sequels starring unknown actors. And the decision to make the film so splashy and star-laden had the additional impact of amping the script’s whodunit stakes. If everyone on the marquee is a star, it becomes harder to guess who will die, who will live, and the identity of the killer. Drew Barrymore’s casting took this idea further — the face on the poster became the first victim in the film, a nod to Janet Leigh in Psycho.

And so Scream was a hit. Which led to Scream 2, a sequel pumped out within a calendar year of the first’s release, stacked with even more big names and meta sequel jokes, and now riding a wave that had revitalized the horror genre by making it hip, funny, and more concerned with polish than in years past. Self-awareness became the ultimate marketing hook, and the millennial teen market became a lucrative space for launching a generation of new stars.

But after Scream 2, every subsequent Scream became an exercise in diminishing returns. The premise started to show itself to be flimsy, a hall of mirrors without end. Scream 3 lost Williamson as its screenwriter, Campbell was reportedly tiring of the franchise, and the Columbine Massacre led to a mandate for less violence and more comedy. The script simply wasn’t as good, hinging on false meta-commentary on trilogies, and Weinstein meddling led to a second killer getting removed from final cut, leaving some pretty noticeable plot holes. The film didn’t feel as grounded as the previous films.

It was poorly received, and the franchise was shelved for more than a decade… before Scream 4 in 2011. The time away certainly helped the franchise by giving it a statement of purpose and an opportunity to comment both on changes in the horror genre and the rise of influencer culture. Kevin Williamson wrote another smart script, and Craven choreographed a series of memorable and tense set pieces. (Craven was an incredibly talented filmmaker who deserved more celebration than he got in life.) And despite more Weinstein meddling, the final product was a way better entry than the previous film.

Still, the film came out too early to feel relevant to fans of the first three films and not late enough to capitalize on nostalgia for the original films and so it bombed at the box office. By the time Scream 5 and 6 came along ten years after that, the Weinsteins had more or less been ejected from Hollywood due to personal controversy and Craven was dead.

The Radio Silence films were massive successes and well received, but both films were criticized for feeling less fresh than previous entries. In between Scream 4 and 5, The Force Awakens had established a Hollywood template for legacy sequels that allowed for the backdoor remakes of films that included returning characters, and so Scream 5 basically became the very thing Scream 4 had prematurely satirized by creating a competent remake of the first film. We even got Force ghosts! And despite a pay dispute keeping Campbell out of Scream 6 and forcing more of a focus on new stars Melissa Barerra and Jenna Ortega, the film still felt weighted by too much franchise baggage. The final showdown took place in a theatre full of easter eggs from all five previous films, real crime scene evidence equated with fan collectibles that somehow tied in to an in-movie horror franchise. The hall of mirrors was definitely showing cracks.

And now we have Scream 7. The less said about the film’s troubled production history the better, other than that screenwriter Williamson is in the director chair (the first time in this franchise). Campbell and Cox are back alongside Matthew Lilliard, Scott Foley, David Arquette, and a few other (alleged) cameos. And the story itself seems remarkably meta-free, again venturing back into the domain of the domestic thriller that the original film was beneath all of that Miramax sheen. Sidney’s daughter is in peril and she must fight to protect the life she built away from the trauma of her past.

Unfortunately, the problem is that franchise longevity has all but eroded the stakes. It’s simply not possible for this world to feel grounded anymore, or for Campbell’s Sidney Prescott or for Cox’s Gale Weathers to feel like real, relatable humans after seven entries without the film replaying emotional beats from previous films and/or undoing character growth. There’s also no way these characters can be killed because of the needs of franchise filmmaking, and so their plot armour eliminates the primary stakes. The film’s budget is also smaller, with a less buzz-worthy cast, and a smaller cultural footprint. We’ve already burned through two “new generations” of Scream characters. Without spoilers (and I haven’t seen the film, to be clear), it’s fairly easy to predict the victims, heroes, and villains just by looking at the cast poster.

All the things that had been celebrated about the original film are absent here. We have something predictable. There is no friction between reality and fantasy, no real people plopped into extraordinary circumstances — just an endless loop of nostalgia bait and empty callbacks, and a bunch of superheroes facing no real peril from villains who are thin avatars.

Now, despite the tone of this post, none of this is meant to be a criticism of the talented cast or crew of Scream 7. By all accounts, it seems like a friendly set, and a labour of love by the returning players. Even with the assumed predictability of this chapter, I’m still hopeful that the film can bring new dimensions to the franchise, and each of Williamson’s previous scripts have offered up something interesting to say about horror or Hollywood.

Still, I don’t have confidence that this film can say what really needs to be said because this is also his meal ticket. The elephant in the room here is the very thing another version of this film would have tackled deftly, and that is the need to properly satirize Hollywood franchise filmmaking.

Remove the plot armour!

Kill all the leads!

End the franchise by suggesting that the endless sequel-spawning maw of 21st Century Hollywood is destroying storytelling. Shock the audience by confirming their greatest fears…

Death is real. All things come to an end. Nothing can last forever, regardless of how much studio execs may want to keep squeezing every last penny out of a concept. An ending that is earned sometimes needs to be preserved.

The more time we trot our heroes out of retirement, the more hollow their sacrifices become, and the more their happy endings give way to something far more bleak. Did we really need to kill off Big and have Carrie go back to Aiden again and then end up alone in a Gramercy mansion? Did we really need to have the Connor family continue for several years after a Roseanne overdose, struggling through a post-COVID world? Did we really need to kill off Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia? Or Michael Keaton’s Batman? Or burn down The Overlook with Danny Torrence in it?

Nostalgia became an easy shorthand for familiarity and fast money, reminding us of our glorious youth. But the older we get, and the more we keep pointing back to the same good times, the more empty even those memories become, and the more the darker truths start to bubble up to the surface whether we’d like them to or not…

There are no lessons. There is no growth. There is no happy ending because there is no ending. Instead, we march in place, and make the same mistakes, and do the same dance again and again and again until we die… Or worse. Get reanimated like Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus.

And maybe that‘s way scarier than some dude in a cloak with a knife.