How the new ‘Scream’ movies became the very thing that the franchise once rallied against
Ahead of the release of Scream 7, controversy arose when Melissa Barrera was fired by Spyglass Entertainment for sharing pro-Palestine posts on social media, with the company deeming her comments antisemitic, and with many fans quick to boycott the seventh instalment of the franchise. Thus, the question arose whether this spelt the end for Scream.
If that, paired with the fact that leading lady Neve Campbell, better known as Sidney Prescott, was absent from the sixth film following accusations of a low salary offer, isn’t the sign of a franchise that should be put to bed, then I don’t know what is. What started as a terrifically meta dig into the clichés of the horror genre, revelling in equal parts fear and humour, has turned into the exact thing it initially rallied against.
The original film was devised by writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, who’d already earned a stalwart place in the horror canon as the man behind movies like The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the opening scene of Scream, the latter film is directly referenced, with Williamson’s script refusing to hide its influences and place in the genre.
By this point in the ‘90s, horror was getting a bit stale. The genre had blossomed into something grittier and more violent in the ‘70s with the rise of slashers as a result of the Hays Code’s weakening grip on the mainstream, and so with less censorship, there was more chance for gore, brutality, and moral ambiguity, due to which the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween entered the scene.
Yet, the ‘80s saw horror franchises emerge alongside endless sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, and inevitably, uninspired ideas started to take hold, where even Craven was guilty of this, with seven movies coming in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise before Scream was released in 1996. He wasn’t involved in all of them, but he certainly had a hand in driving the genre into a world of franchise, which rarely yields original and enduring results.
So, with Scream, he and Williamson decided to play off this, and having successfully made the meta Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994, the director brought this self-aware style to a comedy-horror bracket that both parodied and expanded on the slasher film, making for a genius move.
Instantly killing off its biggest star, Drew Barrymore, the movie was unpredictable and genuinely scary in places, with some cracking one-liners to boot. Randy, the resident horror movie expert, guides us with his knowledge of the genre, explaining the rules of such movies to other characters, with Williamson and Craven not so subtly winking at the viewer.
With its follow-up, Scream 2, this meta brilliance continued with the creation of Stab, the movie-within-the-movie about the events of the first film. It sounded stupid, but it worked, because it didn’t take itself seriously, and there were some really great standoff scenes between Ghostface and the other characters.
When Scream 3 emerged, some people were less enthusiastic, seeing it as a less imaginative and inferior sequel, but I’d argue that it’s a surprisingly ahead-of-its-time take on the slasher, using the backdrop of sexual abuse in Hollywood to give the franchise a new angle. Now the film was more than just a meta take on the horror genre, but a meta take on Hollywood as a whole; move over Mulholland Drive.
But maybe that’s where the franchise should have ended, as a solid trilogy, because Scream 4 isn’t as good as its predecessors, but it was still directed by Craven at least, and its exploration of technology and social media fame is pretty ahead of its time, once again. Still, you could tell that Scream was starting to get a bit stale, a little more unfathomable; of course, when a series does well, studios aren’t going to want to give it up that easily, and who cares if making another film turns the franchise into a shadow of its former self?
Following Craven’s death in 2015, you’d think that the instalment would be properly put to bed, but since then, we’ve had three more, and none of them has been good. Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin directed the fifth and sixth, which sees a new main cast of (incredibly annoying) teens, people coming back from attacks that no one would ever possibly survive, the ghost of Billy Loomis emerging in the mind of a newly-revealed secret daughter he fathered before he died, and, most tragically, the death of everyone’s favourite character, Dewey. Basically, they commit some unforgivable sins.
2022’s Scream is genuinely awful, and Scream VI isn’t much better, although it has some fairly gripping kill sequences; but with no Sidney, no Dewey, and no real connection to the killers, it is hard to care. So, that brings us to Scream 7, the most soulless example of a franchise being dragged out purely for the cash, laden with nostalgia-baiting plotlines, including teasing the return of Stu, who may or may not be alive after all, while AI deep fakes play a central part in the plot. It’s even more disappointing when you realise Williamson directed this one, because he definitely should’ve known better.
While Scream has always been on the pulse, with Scream 4’s exploration of technology taking on real resonance, Scream 7 doesn’t say anything much about AI. In fact, the film partnered with Meta AI to promote a feature in which smartphone users could place themselves in scenes from the movie, as if it had forgotten everything that made it so clever, so ahead of the curve, and so exciting.
You can only take meta commentary so far, and the first few movies in the franchise do it so well, bouncing off each other as the Stab franchise plays a vital role in each killer’s motivations, but once you do that a few times, you’ve got to give it a rest. Sadly, Scream has kept beating a dead horse, killing its best characters and hoping that fans will still be interested in the corpse that isn’t even comparable to a toenail of its former glory.
