‘Scream 7’ Proves Nothing in Hollywood Is Allowed to Die

Like me, you may be thinking, “How are they still making Scream movies?” Well, they are. And this time, the bad guy is AI. Yes, we’ve reached horror in 2026.

For context, the last film, Scream VI, made $166 million globally, so it’s clear the suits wanted another stab at the cash cow and insisted the producers had to find a way for Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox to survive yet another round of murders stitched together by thin plotting.

Scream 7 centers on a small, sleepy town that feels like something straight out of Gilmore Girls. Sidney Prescott is now a mom with a teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May) — named after her best friend who was killed long ago in the first movie, played by Rose MacGowan. Her cop husband, played by Joel McHale, does what cop husbands in horror movies do — show up just late enough. And of course, someone in a mask comes trying to kill her again.

Without giving away specifics, a few things are certain. First, the writers clearly watched a lot of Terrifier, the ultra-gory indie horror franchise featuring Art the Clown, and built around shock-value mutilation. The kills here are straight-up brutal. Current Hollywood It Girl McKenna Grace pops up for half a second as one of Tatum’s friends and is promptly suspended midair while her entrails are ripped from her body. That kind of excess — theatrical, mean, almost competitive in its cruelty, feels lifted straight from the Art the Clown playbook. If I had to guess, the writers sensed audiences have developed a taste for over-the-top gore, and they leaned in.

Second, there’s a heavy dose of Gen Z irony baked in. The film lives in the meta — characters openly reference past installments, question why Sidney skipped the previous movie; In Scream VI, the writers explain Sidney Prescott’s absence by having Gale mention that Sidney and her family went into hiding after the previous killings, choosing to stay off the grid to protect her husband and kids from becoming targets again — effectively keeping her safe and out of the story without killing her off or creating a dramatic fallout. But in the real world, Campbell declined to return after a pay dispute, saying the salary offered did not reflect her value to the franchise. But now, Campbell is back and Scream 7 feels like what the franchise has been since the third movie: man in mask kills people, but wait, it’s not the first guy in the mask. Repeat.

The opening sequence has almost no connection to the rest of the film. A couple visits the original Woodsboro house, now converted into an Airbnb themed around the murders. They are brutally killed. The house is burned down. And then the movie more or less shrugs and moves on. It feels less like narrative setup and more like, “Oh hell yeah, that’s fun,” before pivoting to something else entirely.

Franchise fatigue shows up in the mechanics. The streets are empty. The cops take forever to arrive in what’s supposed to be a tiny Indiana town. The world doesn’t behave like a real place; it behaves like a stage cleared for the next kill. Characters never use the obvious objects around them to fight back. The movie manufactures tension because it has to — the stakes themselves feel exhausted. And visually, 90% of the film sits in near-total darkness, as if the franchise can only generate dread by dimming the lights instead of raising the danger.

In one scene where Sidney and her daughter retreat into a secret escape room built to avoid horrors, only to leave it seconds later. Why do you have a room designed to keep you safe from a psycho killer only to not use it? It’s fireproof, gun-proof, and it has a phone. Stu (Matthew Lillard) from the original film appears — but not in the way you’re imagining. As a Lillard fan, it’s wild to see him back in the Scream universe. As an AI avatar, though? That’s where things get bleak.

Wouldn’t it be great, the writers must have thought, if Stu could send FaceTime messages from beyond the grave. But how? If only there was some convenient technology capable of resurrecting legacy characters for nostalgia-fueled plot twists. Oh right. There is.

The original Scream was a parody of the flailing slasher movies/aesthetic of the 1980s. It mocked formulas, sequels, and lazy gore. Now it’s firmly part of that same covenant — reliant on escalation, digital resurrection, and increasingly elaborate violence to justify its existence. The franchise that once winked at horror tropes now depends on AI to keep its own past alive.

Did the world need another Scream movie? No. But box office logic doesn’t care about need. Despite Scream VI directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett stepping away, actress Jenna Ortega exiting the franchise over scheduling conflicts with Wednesday, and the franchise’s original architect Kevin Williamson having to step in and take over directing duties, the film still got made. That’s zombie Hollywood: we’ve got franchises, bay-bee.

And it will make money. Early projections suggest Scream 7 could pull in around $60 million this weekend. In an industry supposedly starved for original ideas, cheap familiarity still wins. Everything has to be marketable. Everything has to fit on a bag of Doritos. Ghostface masks will keep selling. In the grand scheme of things, why do we go back to these dead franchises when there is so little left in the creative well? That’s likely an indictment of the people watching.

The horror isn’t that AI is the villain. The horror is that nothing in Hollywood is allowed to die — not franchises, not characters, not even the idea that maybe this story died a long time ago.