Scream 7 (Trailer Review)

Kevin Williamson's Scream appears to meet David Fincher's Panic Room in the seventh installment of every horror fan's favorite meta teen slasher franchise. It's been a whole two years since Ghostface last terrorized the horror-savvy characters of the Big Apple, and by early next year, he'll be back for another round of gleefully gory mayhem and self-aware, tongue-in-cheek, pitch-black humor. Based on the results of this first trailer, released yesterday, the day before Halloween (kind of seems like today would have been a more poetic release date for the initial unmasking), Scream 7 looks like it's taking the franchise in a suitably refreshing direction, headlined by the unanimously welcome return of one of the genre's most iconic and badass final women, who has now entered a new chapter in her tortured life as a wife and mother. Shades of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's rebooted Halloween trilogy are guaranteed to follow.

First things first: I feel it's my moral obligation to inform you that I haven't seen the last two installments in the Scream franchise. However, I'm aware that, in addition to bringing it back to the level of critical appreciation it hadn't enjoyed since installment #2 in 1997 -- Part 5 raked in a fourth-place 76% approval rating on the Tomatometer, with an average rating of 6.7/10, while Part 6 spiked the percentage up by one, acquiring an identical average rating -- the franchise dispensed with the storyline of Sidney Prescott in favor of a fresh batch of teenagers known collectively as "The Core Four." In fact, Neve Campbell was invited to partake in the last sequel, but due to a dispute over what the actress deemed insufficient compensation, she summoned up every ounce of self-esteem and sat that one out. It seems whoever is responsible for payment truly heard Campbell's words, her demand for fair economic treatment in Hollywood among genders, and made an offer that did justice to her level of commitment and importance to the franchise. 

Originally, the plan for Scream 7 was to reinstate Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera as the new final women of the franchise, Carpenter sisters Tara and Samantha, while Christopher Landon, director of horror comedies Happy Death Day and Freaky, signed on to helm. Following the exit of all three, Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter who spearheaded Scream in 1996, was hired to fill his spot in the director's chair for the first time in the franchise's nearly 30-year history, while the indispensable Campbell was brought back onboard to lead for the first time since 2011's Scream 4. It sounds like a match made in heaven: the creator of this love letter of a horror series has returned to fulfill the most crucial artistic role (directing as well as co-writing alongside Guy Busick), and the actress who serves as the heart and soul of Scream is once again front and center. If anyone can do justice to the character of Sidney Prescott, arguably the most iconic and enduring female protagonist since Laurie Strode, after all these years, it's most likely the genius who created her.

Having moved far away from the death trap of a town named Woodsboro, California, Sidney Prescott now lives in the quaint, seemingly serene small town of Pine Grove, Indiana with her husband, a cop named Mark Evans (Joel McHale), and their teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), named after Sidney's best friend from high school who was murdered in the original 1996 killing spree. (Honestly, that's already one of the most inspired and logical choices in the script.) Based on the logo on her computer screen, Sidney seems to work for a company named "The Little Latte Coffee Co.," from the comfort of her home, no less, meaning she gets to have it all: a career and a family. To paraphrase a certain well-known cinematic gangster, just when she thought she was out, ol' Ghostly is here to bring her right back in -- and this time, he's after more than just one Prescott woman.

Returning alongside Campbell are Courteney Cox's now-widowed crime reporter, Gale Weathers -- who's more than ready to "unmask this fucker" -- and two fourths of the Core Four, siblings Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (the nephew and niece of the slain horror movie know-it-all, Randy), played by Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. 

Two sequences in this trailer stand out. The first is literally the opening, which is most definitely the actual opening set piece of the movie. A young couple rent the abandoned farmhouse of Stu Macher, half of the inaugural pair of Ghostface killers, for a night, having been converted into a "psycho-killer bed and breakfast." An outline of white tape on the foyer floor marks the corpse of Billy Loomis, complete with a puddle of blood from when he was shot in the head by Sidney. The boyfriend, clearly a fan of the morbid, is having the night of his life basking in the locale where one of the most infamous crime scenes in (cinematic) California history took place. His girlfriend? Not so much. What possessed her to allow this idiot to take her there for the night is unknown (and probably unknowable). Director Williamson engineers a clever jump scare using a motion detector dressed up in Ghostface's attire. When the hot blond turns on a lamp, the masked figure, standing right in front of her, raises his hunting knife, startling her. My first thought was the killer is hiding beneath the costume, pretending to be a motion detector, waiting for the right moment to strike. Lo and behold, I was wrong. 

While Hot Blond observes the inanimate figure, possibly with a mix of unsettlement and respect, an actual Ghostface approaches behind her in the shadows. Presumably after Dumb Boyfriend is hacked off, Hot Blond is chased upstairs (hearkening back to Sidney's criticism of women in horror movies always running up the stairs instead of out the front door), where she engages in a struggle that sends Ghostly tumbling over the railing and colliding with the carpeted floor, sustaining zero injuries. Meanwhile, Hot Blond finds herself holding onto a chandelier for dear life, swinging helplessly above her attacker. She wraps her legs around the stair railing, fighting with every ounce of her being to get back on the surface, but it's no use. Her feet slip off the wood, her hands can no longer hang on, and she plummets straight into the bladed tip of Ghostface's knife. The way Williamson films her kill suggests that, once the camera zooms in fully on the bladed tip, the screen will cut to black, replaced by the title card. 

One of the most notable traits of this franchise is coming up with a distinctive opening murder sequence (subverted in the fifth installment by a mere leg-breaking) for each movie. This one seems about as creative as could be requested, returning fans to the setting in which the original climactic bloodbath transpired, decorating it with posters of the movie-within-a-movie series, Stab, using a prop as a false scare to lull us into a false sense of security, and unleashing a modern crime scene in the same place where a former one sent shockwaves throughout the town of Woodsboro 28 years prior. 

The other standout set piece finds Sidney and Tatum hiding within a panic room a la Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart after Ghostface breaks into their home. As they stand wedged between two walls, struggling to make their way down to the end silently, the killer taps his knife against the outer wall before plunging it through, nearly missing his screaming targets. While it's predictable that both mother and daughter will make it out alive (at least in this sequence), this still seems poised to be a tense, claustrophobic exercise in close-quarters terror. 

The central ingredient that distinguishes Scream from the vast majority of its more stone-faced contemporaries is its grim sense of humor and self-reflexive commentary. Even though the emotional stakes appear higher due to the involvement of Sidney's only child, Busick and Williamson aren't about to forget the number one rule to keep their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. At this point, Sidney is so numb to being contacted and terrorized by a new psychopath donning the ghost mask and black robe that, while speaking to them on the phone, she doesn't even let it scare her into taking a pause on her work. Instead, she adopts a business-as-usual approach and cuttingly states, "Well, you sure know a lot about me for another asshole hiding behind a voice changer." The writers understand how inherently absurd it is that this is happening to Sidney for the sixth time in her life (would've been seven had it not been for the payment dispute), and so they embrace it by allowing their star to express a sense of justifiable annoyance more so than fear. Of course, the latter will emerge once this killer gets a hold of the most important person in her life. 

While it's unknown whether Dane Farwell is returning to don the costume and perform the stunts that make Ghostface both terrifying and amusingly clumsy, Roger Jackson is maintaining his title as the longest-standing actor in the franchise to date. For the seventh film in a row, Jackson is the irreplaceable voice of doom on the phone, and it's somehow even darker and raspier than ever before. However, his lines don't sound to have increased in innovation ("Hello, Sidney. Did you miss me?"), apart from putting a threat on the life of Sid's daughter. Speaking of which, she's played by relative newcomer Isabel May, a blond beauty who appears to have inherited her mother's grit, intelligence, ferocity, and fearlessness. Her two best friends are played by Celeste O'Connor and Mckenna Grace, both of whom are at the top of the list of potential suspects. (A shot of them walking down a suburban street evokes the tracking shot of Laurie, Annie, and Lynda walking home from school in Halloween.) O'Connor was presumably cast by Christopher Landon, or recommended by him, as she played Nyla, the best friend of protagonist Millie in Landon's slasher repurposing of Freaky Friday. Here, she's once again playing the best-friend-to-the-protagonist role, which would make it clever for two reasons if she did emerge as one of the killers: (1) it would serve as a subversion of both her previous role as a legitimate protagonist and the one she's currently purporting to play, and (2) it would make her the first black villain, male or female, of the Scream franchise -- a concept suggested by Randy in Scream 2, who called it "perfect" because it'd be "sort of against the rules, but not really." 

Aside from her, there's Grace's character. If she turned out to be involved in the Indiana killing spree, it would qualify as a double-edged sword (or rather hunting knife). On the positive edge, Grace is the last person you'd normally suspect as a slasher maniac: a stunning 19-year-old blond with a vibrant smile, dressed in innocent, girly pink, famous for having played the precocious but vulnerable little girl genius in Gifted, the younger version of Margot Robbie's Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, crying in the street for the return of her father, and the quiet, bullied, psychic daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren in Annabelle Comes Home. Surely, with all those innocent roles and that angelic face, she couldn't be the one disemboweling innocent people and attempting to do the same to her own friends. Right? Here's the automatic negative edge: anyone who sees Scream 7 will have most likely already seen Scream 4, in which Emma Roberts, famous at the time for her heroic leading roles such as Nancy Drew and Addie Singer in the Nickelodeon sitcom, Unfabulous, infamously unmasked herself as the mastermind behind the Woodsboro Massacre Reboot. Grace would be fulfilling the exact same gimmick, utilizing her attractive, girl-next-door presence and prior protagonist acting roles to deceive audiences into assuming her innocence. If Grace does end up on the other side of the mask, and inhabits the role with the same degree of deliciously evil conviction and go-for-broke vigor that announced Roberts as a formidable force to be reckoned with in the horror genre, then the reveal could still hold a certain extent of power. Nonetheless, the element of surprise attained in 2011 would be automatically reduced on account of Roberts having gotten to the gimmick first. 

One thing I hope for sure is that neither Sidney's husband nor daughter is behind the costume. While no dark idea is truly off limits when it comes to horror, Sidney has been put through enough familial betrayal, having been nearly murdered by her own half-brother and cousin, that revealing the culprit as her life partner or offspring would be twisting the knife a little too deeply. Conceptually speaking, it sounds more depressing and asinine than gut-wrenchingly clever. What would their motive even be? Jealousy over the fact that Sidney is the only famous celebrity between them? Did Mark marry Sidney for the sole purpose of one day killing her and his own daughter? Does Tatum resent her mother's notoriety and is aspiring to become the new sole survivor? If so, she'd just be a rip-off of Jill Roberts. Fortunately, neither option seems to be the case. 

The trailer shockingly appears to reveal the death of Mark, who's ambushed, suffocated by plastic sheeting, and stabbed -- a more appropriately harrowing twist that will add the most painful layer of trauma yet onto Sidney's existence while fueling her hunger to put an end to this psychopath's reign of terror once and for all. As for Tatum, a scene that clears her is when she and her mother work together from two separate locations to kill Ghostface. While Tatum is inside their house, hiding behind the wall, Sidney is outside on the street, using a live view on her cellphone to monitor the killer's every move -- a clever incorporation of modern technology to navigate a life-or-death situation. In a twisted take on mother-daughter bonding, Tatum extends a gun while Sidney instructs her when to shoot and from which direction. When the time comes to pull the trigger, Tatum truly reveals herself as her mother's daughter, firing not just one, but three bullets through the wall, successfully penetrating the killer and knocking him unconscious. Years of safety and domestic tranquility have not dulled Sidney's intelligence. Unconvinced that he's really dead and unwilling to take any chances on her daughter's life, she insists that Tatum shoot him in the head, evoking her instruction to Dewey in the climax of Scream 3. In what appears to be another nod to the aforementioned third installment, Ghostface may have acquired another bulletproof vest, as he shoots up just before Tatum can deliver the fatal blow. (As much as she strives to be the fighter her mom is, Tatum conveniently falls victim to inopportune hesitancy for the continuation of the plot.)

The most peculiar feature of Scream 7 is the eyebrow-raising return of fallen franchise stars David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, and Scott Foley. Somehow, they're all reprising their roles as Dewey Riley, Stu Macher, and Roman Bridger, respectively. Obviously, each of them are dead. Stu had his head crushed and electrocuted by his own TV, Roman was shot in the head, and Dewey was gutted. Franchise fans are clamoring to find out in what capacity Williamson and Busick have resurrected them. Because this is a series that adheres to basic real-world logic, the only explanations can be as characters in a dream, figments of Sidney's traumatized imagination, or vocal remembrances in her mind. As implied by the trailer, the answer hews closest to option 3. Playing over scenes of Mindy and Chad facing off against Ghostface in the dimly lit kitchen of a bar and Mark being ambushed is audio of Dewey saying (likely to Sidney), "All your friends die for just being near you." Over the title logo, we hear Stu ominously say, "This is gonna be fun." This suggests a third reference to Part 3: Ghostface somehow has access on his voice changer to the voices of other characters, including ones who are deceased, and is going to use them to taunt Sidney. It was a contrived conceit in the third film, providing Roman with a convenient tool to deceive and misdirect his victims, and is primed to be as much so here. 

Having survived the last two sequels, even after sustaining serious stabbings, is the luck of Gale, Chad, or Mindy going to run out? Will Sidney end up sacrificing herself to allow her daughter to live? At some point, Ghostface sets fire to the Macher farmhouse. Is it at the end of the double-homicide opening, or the inevitable climactic confrontation between him, Sidney, and Tatum? Do the Prescotts manage to escape the burning home, or is Ghostface walking out in triumph? The trailer doesn't unmask a whole lot, even preserving the appearances of many of its primary supporting actors: Anna Camp, Mark Consuelos, Ethan Embry, Asa Germann, Sam Rechner, Michelle Randolph, and Jimmy Tatro. A few of those names raise a red flag as to the identity of the killers. Embry already has experience portraying a masked, knife-wielding slasher from Vacancy. Rechner played an unhinged, anti-Semitic bully in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, making it plausible that he'd graduate into a full-fledged serial killer. And although she was more comedic in her projectile-vomiting villainy, Camp exhibited signs of borderline narcissism and psychopathy as the leader of the a cappella group in Pitch Perfect. Aside from O'Connor and Grace, I'd put my money on at least one of those three. 

Reinstating its OG scream queen with a script that moves her story forward, and planting its creator firmly in the seat once occupied by horror legend Wes Craven, Scream 7 looks to continue its franchise's recent critical winning streak with a sequel that raises the emotional stakes without forgetting the self-awareness that makes this slasher such a scream.

Who do you think is behind the mask this time? Find out when Scream 7 slashes into theaters February 27th, 2026, and in the meantime, check out the first trailer below. Happy Halloween!