Spoilers: What Went Wrong and What Did Ghostface Do to Deserve ‘Scream 7’?

The following contains spoilers for Scream 7. I’m going to say who the killer is. You’ve been warned.

I was watching the music video for the Ice Nine Kills feat. McKenna Grace Scream 7 track and couldn’t help but ask myself what Ghostface could have possibly done to deserve this. This isn’t to throw a dig at INK, a very fun horror-loving band, but listening to a tie-in track plucked from the early 2000s played over a janky-looking slop-adjacent music video full of animated Ghostface’s, I just couldn’t help but wince. Sure, there’s the desire to enjoy the throwback to a time where films had tie-in music (heck, Mission: Impossible had some doozies), but something just felt so strange about a series built on interrogating fandom selling me a weird music video.

I can’t pretend this is a tactic unique to this latest film. Scream 3 had a Creed track. So it was difficult to put my finger exactly on what it is that made this move feel so disingenuous. Have Scream fans aged out of the new movies? Probably. Has the growing fandom and the internet combined to create a new monster? Seems like it. Has the whole practice of filmmaking been so beaten by art-as-capitalism that nothing feels sacred? I’d guess so. Have the Scream movies lost their way? Absolutely.

Scream fandom has taken on a life of its own, bursting past the confines of a screen and into a phenomenon. For Ghostface fangirls, it’s a dream full of popcorn buckets, t-shirts, and branded trips to Stu Macher’s house. The movies then look right back at their audience and interrogate their zeal. After interrogating horror fandom (in an albeit extreme tongue-in-cheek way) in the first, the films later looked at the blurry line between fans of horror, true crime, and the Scream movies themselves. The biggest difference between real-life Scream fans and in-world Sidney Prescott and Stab fans is that for us, these killings didn’t really happen. Intense Scream fans might feel ownership over a character not controlled by them, but it’s that horror fandom being examined, not that of a real-life murderer.

This blurry line in the films’ interrogations has been hard to manage, and the success or failure to do so is what separates the better from the worse sequels. And after all of the challenges that preceded this latest installment, never has the meta-commentary line been blurrier, creating a challenge that Scream 7 did not successfully take on.

Gale’s books have always been a flawed piece of source material for the Stab movies because they fail to answer for omniscience. Certain Ghostface actions would have died with his victims, and Scream audiences are forced to suspend some disbelief to allow for reenactments. Where Scream 7 begins to fail is in its confusion about what would be available to Stab and true crime fans, decorating their fandom with things that would have died or stayed with characters and not been known to ones that exist in their world. That’s where this film seems lost in its navel gaze instead of delivering meta-horror commentary.

Ghostface, as a character, exists separately from the people behind his mask. He’s traditionally been clumsy and flailing, while haunting and brutal. His voice is almost always the same until the mask is removed to reveal someone else wearing him like a living suit. It allows fans to latch onto a horror icon without necessarily rooting for the actions of the killers dressed as him. It’s what made the character an icon that ties the happenings of these movies together while making killers vulnerable to death. It allows for a delicious whodunnit that ends in a grand killer monologue. They’ve not all been perfect, but they each seem linked to similar themes of fandom, rage, film, and the modern motivations common at the time each films’ release.

Scream 7 comes in this line of meta-commentary about real-world fandom but has nothing to say beyond a single headline. Neve Campbell did not return for Scream 6 over a salary dispute, and when the originally planned Scream 7 fell apart, she was brought back along with early franchise scribe, Kevin Williamson. For her return, audiences got a story about a bunch of people who were mad that Sidney hadn’t been around and who insisted it was her non-appearance that motivated new killers to act.

This year’s Ghostface isn’t a vengeful family member, or a lingerer in the horror section, but a couple of Sidney Prescott true crime fans pissed off she took a vacation from her time as a final girl. Though Anna Camp’s flawlessly delivered maniacal monologue stands out even among franchise greats, it’s a hollow collection of rants about finding a fresh Sid for a new generation when hers took a break. If only Sid had never left, maybe there wouldn’t have been any casualties.

Scream 2 opens at a movie theater where rowdy fans take in Stab, munch popcorn, and wear Ghostface merchandise. While this audience cheers at the real-life slaughter of Casey Becker, a new Ghostface shows up to slice and dice. It’s a haunting and quick follow-up to Scream that basks in the ability to add its own audience to the canon of the horror fandom it’s lampooning. In the same year that Scream 3 took the story to Hollywood, Scary Movie came to take a piss out of the format. Now, the Scary Movie 6 trailer is intentionally playing before Scream 7, which all makes sense if you follow the trail of studio mergers and acquisitions.

Maybe it started with the shotgun pose in New York, but it’s lamentable that the flailing but haunting Ghostface has been transformed into a glamor shot craving super-baddie. With that, he has traded in his best stumbles for pop-rock music videos and promo shots. What did Ghostface do to deserve this? Don’t answer that question, I know, I’ve seen the movies. Maybe I’m just an entitled fan.