Moments before the half-way point of “Scream 7” a high-school student costumed as a princess will be rehearsing a theatrical scene on a trapeze strung high above the stage. She will be slashed each time her body connects with a glistening knife held aloft by an assassin standing on the stage below. The assassin is a tall, black-robed figure sporting a Halloween mask whose mouth is rotated ninety degrees such that its lips are vertical, mere darkness where its throat should be. The trapeze loses its momentum. A spotlight of almost unimaginable brightness backlights the floppy woman suspended at head-height, entrails hanging down from open abdomen, the theatre otherwise black as a tunnel on a train line. But there is a backstory—this is a sequel; “You heard the podcast,” a man says. “There is lot of belief out there that Stu survived.” The theatre director has a different problem; “We don’t even have an understudy,” he says.
Forty-five minutes earlier, “Scream 7” (Paramount Pictures), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, gives away most of the tricks of the textbook-slasher genre in a slick, ten-minute teaser. The cinematic lights dim and our eyes adjust to the darkness. We are in the middle of nowhere; the night is starless; the motorcar headlights beam through the fog; the motorcar stops; the man and woman open the doors; they climb five stairs up to the front door of a wooden house surrounded by a white picket fence. “Are you ready?” the man asks his partner, punching in the code to a lock box containing the front-door key. “Oh my God,” he says. “A real-life murder house. It’s perfect.” That same masked figure is perched in the corner. “It’s fake,” the man says. It moves as he draws his fingers across its face. “That is so cool! It’s got a motion sensor. Pretty hi-tech!” A cartoonish cutout drawn in white paint on the carpet, hands raised like a target on a shooting range, points to where a body fell. The woman selects a chopping knife from a block on the kitchen island and twirls the steely point on her left cheek like a toy ballerina. A movie poster for “Stab” is stuck to a wall. The man’s phone rings; the lights snap off as if a brittle carrot; the orchestral strings go berserk; the woman pants, shrieks, grabs the chandelier, and starts swinging from the rafters.
The first part of the movie establishes that Sidney, played by an excellent Neve Campbell, is a veteran of the franchise and no stranger to the masked man; she owns a coffee shop, has a cop husband, and a teen-age daughter, Tatum, played by Isabel May, who is also in the school play. Just after Sidney arrives at work one morning, her next-door neighbour’s son arrives. “What part do you play?” Sidney asks. “Just a techie,” the boy replies. “I work the lighting desk.” Sidney receives a call from “another asshole hiding behind a fake number and a voice changer”; she assumes he is a prankster. The voice warns of the imminent mass-shooting event at the theatre. “It’s showtime, bitch,” the voice says.
Nostalgia comes at the start of the second act with the appearance of Courteney Cox of “Friends” (1994-2004). Gail is a failed television-news anchor and survivor of previous attacks. Another phone call; “I’m coming for you,” the voice tells Sidney, “and I’m gonna love every second of it.” Gail convinces Sidney to play detective; “Don’t you wanna to know who’s behind this?” she asks. (Stu was killed in a previous instalment.) The two women bait the assassin during a live-phone-in television interview. “Call me,” Sidney says. “You have a platform.” Their underperforming producer is desperate. “This is my exclusive!” he says. “That was the deal!” and then directs the camera to “zoom in, tighter, tighter.” The voice does call back, but the channel has gone to a commercial break. When one character says, “You’re kind of past your prime,” towards the end, we realise that this theme has been running throughout, referring to Gail and to Sidney and to the friendship between them.
“Anyone can do deep fakes these days,” Tatum’s dad says. Intruder cams and and internet-enabled devices and voice modifiers—as well as so-called Artificial Intelligence—become twenty-twenties tools for slashers (an actual tool box appears too, upturned to spill out an assortment of hammers, wrenches, and mallets). The coffee shop’s internal security cameras are repurposed; live images on Sidney’s smartphone allow her to direct her roll-up-your-sleeves daughter from outside. “I think he’s left,” Tatum says. “No,” Sidney replies, “he’s just trying to find his way in.”
Dispatching the stick-drawn guys—well-scrubbed boyfriend for Tatum, ‘let-me-protect-you’ husband for Sidney, nerdy-next-door-neighbour tech boy for prime suspect—to the background avoids the misstep of the otherwise great “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which I reviewed in October. “Scream 7” bets the house on its women—they are the “slasher queens”—and parades their unquestionable talents. But “Scream 7” does hew closely to the dark production design expected by the audience, rendering “The Housemaid,” whose action takes place in full daylight, and which I reviewed in December, all the more distinctive.
The sophisticated musical score controls the audio component of suspense with the natural qualities of the violin, which can crescendo rapidly by moving the bow quickly but then cut suddenly. (The violins’ scores are the thickest in symphonic music because they play more notes than any other instrument.) And bars are wonderful sets for slashers, with spigots and glasses and kitchens with meat tenderisers and long counters along which to slide dead bodies and neon silhouettes of, say, “beer” and a guitar flickering on the dark windows. Ms May’s best scream of the movie? In the bar.
Sidney fears that her daughter will be murdered next. “Where’s your go-bag?” she asks. “So, what,” Tatum replies, “we just run?” The two of them pack to go; camera and music matching their pace. “If we stay here,” Sidney says, “more people will die.”
Adam Poole
6th March 2026
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