Ghostface returns in Scream 7: Review with spoilers

For decades, Ghostface has made his mark in the horror industry as an iconic slasher villain. And yet, he remains to terrorize the same lady over and over again. Scream 7 premiered in the United States on Feb. 27, 2026. Predictably, they released the same story in a different font.

As someone who hasn’t seen any of the previous movies and only a couple spoilers, I thought the movie was OK as a stand-alone, there were obvious references to the previous movies but were introduced with some context behind it.

The movie itself was not my favorite; I believe most of the film’s tropes were clichéd and predictable. Aside from that, the plot was unique in its own way with the slogan “Face your past.”

*spoilers*

The main character, Sidney Prescott, a character in every Scream movie prior to the seventh, was a survivor of multiple mass murders. Her past had been used for media as those stories became movies within the franchise’s universe. In the introduction to the film, there seems to have been some time since her last encounter with the killer. In that time, she had built herself a family and had taken plenty of safety precautions that had ended up failing. The killer strikes again, targeting her daughter, Tatum, and then kills her friend, Hannah. This sparked fear in the town, instigating a lockdown as the victims pursued an endeavor to catch the murderer. 

During the lockdown, Sidney teams up with an old friend to investigate the murders, as it appears that the murderer is portraying one of the first killers from the movies. After the lockdown curfew, Tatum meets up with all her friends to investigate the killer herself. To her demise, the killer had tracked down her and her friends and managed to kill everyone but her.

Tatum escaped and hid in her mom’s coffee shop, thinking she was safe, the killer surprisingly unlocked the door to the cafe using the pin on the keypad. Barricaded in her mom’s office, Tatum is guided by Sidney over the phone. Her mother instructed her to search for a gun stored in the office. As the killer searched for other ways to enter the room, Sidney pulled up the café’s security cameras and guided Tatum to shoot the killer through the walls. 

Successfully taking her shots, Tatum hesitantly exited the office. Her mom begged her to shoot the killer in the head, knowing what was to come next, as Tatum hesitated, Ghostface sprang up and knocked her unconscious. Sidney panics as the phone is hung up and begins running toward the cafe to find that Ghostface or Tatum are nowhere to be found. She runs home to continue her search in an attempt to save her daughter. At their home, she finds Tatum is held captive by two different killers dressed as Ghostface, and that her husband had been brutally stabbed many times. 

As the killers reveal themselves, one turns out to be Sidney’s neighbor and friend, Jessica, who frequently visited her at her coffee shop. The second killer was an employee from the psych ward she visited during her investigation on the killers earlier in the film. 

Jessica reveals her motive, claiming that she felt betrayed and heartbroken when Sidney decided to leave the public eye and hide from her past, as it had been spread to the world through the movies. Jessica had idolized Sidney in a way that was psychotic, using a memoir that she had written as an inspiration, twisting the meaning and interpreting it as an advocacy for murdering her own tormentor, her abusive ex-husband. She stated that her goal was to create a second “final girl” by traumatizing Tatum in the same way Sidney was in the first film, by watching her own mother be killed in front of her.

Sidney and Tatum manage to fight back, escape the hold Jessica had on them, and shoot the second killer. Jessica retreats to the garage, ensuing an intense fight between the three. Despite getting badly injured, Jessica continued to hold up a fight until she was shot in the head by Tatum.

I wasn’t impressed by this movie, but I didn’t think it was terrible. I felt as if the story was rushed, and the producers obviously make these films to be satirical in a way that makes them predictable and overused. I rate this movie as 5/10. Despite my personal rating, the movie broke the franchise record with an impressive $97.2 million profit and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 32%. With that being said, don’t let my opinion stop you from seeing the movie; everyone will have a different perspective!