Scream 7 Review

0:00This is IGN, series OG's Kevin Williamson and Nev Campbell return for plenty of satisfying slasher action, even if the film gets a little too comfortable for its own good. This is your IGN review of Scream 7 by Tom Dorgensen, burn it all down. For a tagline so front and center of Paramount's marketing for Scream 7, it has very little relationship to the actual ethos of the movie. Instead, Scream 7 feels like a return to roots for the venerable meta-slasher franchise. Far more interested in and effective at propping up, the more playful tone of Scream's early days than the increasingly deconstructive tendencies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries. It succeeds as another back-to-basics reset for Scream, but ironically for a story centered on how much a mother will let her trauma affect her daughter, living in the past in order to drive a franchise reset does keep Scream 7 from having an identity of its own.

1:02The two radio-silence-directed installments which precede Scream 7 felt like very intentional attempts to recontextualize the franchise into a more modern sensibility, something really hammered home by Scream 6's move to a bustling New York City. Kevin Williamson takes over directing and writing duties for Scream 7, the latter shared with Scream 5 and 6 co-writer Guy Busek, and though he wrote the first, second, and fourth films in the franchise, it represents his first time in the director's chair on a Scream movie and his first time directing a film since 1999's Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Williamson's approach veers hard back into more old-fashioned Scream territory. Something communicated quickly by the opening scene set at the House of Stoomocker, the co-killer of the original screen. Busek's house is now being used as a psycho-killer B&B, decorated with chalk cutouts of the various victims and killers who have died there, posters from the stab movies, and even a motion-activated ghost face, which you can be damn sure is going to get used to some

2:03spine-tingly ends. That sequence may end with Stoom's house in flames, but as the rest of Scream 7 plainly demonstrates, some foundations are just unshakable. That idea persists through Williamson's choice to move the action back to a small town. Not Woodsboro this time, but Pine Grove, Indiana. Sydney Prescott, played by Nev Campbell, has put down roots there with her police chief husband, Mark, played by Joel McHale, and kids, Tatum, played by Isabel May, and the two younger ones conveniently visiting Mark's parents out of town the week all the murder stuff kicks off. Nev Campbell's return to Sydney is a constant highlight of Scream 7. She'll take the comfort and confidence that comes with playing a character for 30 years, and translates it into a performance that shifts believably from dead serious to tongue-in-cheek and back, often within the same scene, but never in a way that rings false or tonally out of step with her circumstances. Sydney has to balance the normal anxieties of being parent to a teenager, with how her

3:05bloody backstory is antagonizing her relationship with Tatum, as news of the murders at Stoom's house reach them in Pine Grove. Even though much of how Scream 7 goes on to dig up the bones of the first movie winds up being to its detriment, Campbell's performance as Sydney benefits from the constant resurfacing of the Woodsboro murders. It's as if Kevin Williams saw how hard David Gordon Greene threw the killing machine lever in one direction for Laurie Strode in the recent Halloween sequels, and said, I like it, but maybe 80 percent less. Scream 7 might be a little light on the deeper genre commentary that made the series famous, but as for how it functions as a pure slasher, the thing takes like a clock. Williamson has a great sense of rhythm for building up, paying off, and cooling down from tension, which gives Scream 7 a lively pace that keeps many of its shortcomings from lingering long enough to feel fatal. The director has a clear affinity for the operatic when it comes to stage and ghost face kills, with a number of these sequences culminating in memorably grotesque teblos.

4:06An early attack on one of Tatum's friends leaving her dead body suspended above a stage, a long shot of a knife going through one character skull just long enough to really give you a second hand migraine, and a kill involving a beer tap that feels like an instant classic moment for the series, all point towards Williamson having put a lot of care into crafting each and every ghost face encounter, even if one or two end a little too abruptly for their own good. Williamson packs in plenty of satisfying slasher action, and may even bring some lapsed fans back into the fold by focusing down the scope of that action after Scream 6, but the new ideas it does bring to the table are either too thin to fully explore or ill-advised enough to detract from the success the movie does find in playing the hits, the deep cuts and the killer tracks. Scream 7's IGN score 6 out of 10, thanks for listening to IGN. My name is Tony Jackson, and if you want more news on your favorite games and entertainment topics, make sure to visit us at IGN.com.

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