A history of Scream on its 30th anniversary: Scream 7 only works as a nostalgia trip

Like any boogeyman, Ghostface Killer can never truly die.

Sure, the individual persons who wear the black cloak and the Edvard Munch-esque mask are despatched from the film to film, but the concept is immortal. Ghostface will always hunt and haunt its prey.

It’s one of the most enduring tropes of slasher movies, that the villain is not just a person but an idea. It is fear itself.

The moment Kevin Williamson conceived of Scream, he was in the middle of his own episode of “am I about to be murdered”, searching his house for an imagined intruder who must’ve come through a window he didn’t remember opening. He’d just watched a TV special about a serial killer, and his mind was racing, he recalled to The Ringer in 2021.

There was no killer hiding under the bed, the palpitating anxiety gave birth to what would eventually become Scream.

Thirty years after the original film restarted a new wave of horror movies, Williamson is, for the first time, directing an instalment in the franchise.

Scream 7 is in cinemas today, and it is very aware that it marking a significant milestone. Self-aware meta references to the genre is a signature of the Scream movies, so it’s not surprising one character even states that this chapter is about nostalgia.

Williamson wrote the screenplay for Scream in three days, and after a bidding war, it ended up at Dimension Films, a sub-brand of Miramax. But they couldn’t get a splashy director to sign on.

Wes Craven, who made his name with horror classics The Hills Have Eyes and Nightmare on Elm Street, didn’t want to take on another genre project, had already passed on it, but eventually, the studio talked him back around.

At that point in the mid-1990s, the horror slasher was a dormant monster. Except for schlocky B-grades, no one was really making them, and certainly not for a big cinema release.

Drew Barrymore had originally been in talks to play the lead role, Sidney Prescott, but she opted to play Casey, the phone-answerer who would be killed off in the first scene. That was a bold bait-and-switch.

No one was expecting someone of Barrymore’s profile to be brutally murdered in the first scene. She was on the poster, her big frightened eyes popping in fear. It signalled that there were no sacred cows, everyone was expendable, anyone could be the next victim.

To get Barrymore to cry on cue, Craven would remind her of a story she, a famed animal lover, had read in the newspaper about an owner who set their dog on fire. He’d say to her, “I’m lighting the lighter”, and she’d wail as needed.

Barrymore and Courteney Cox aside, the ensemble was mostly up-and-comers on the cusp of something bigger.

The Craft had not yet come out when Neve Campbell went in to audition for Scream, although she had already been on Party of Five. She beat out Brittany Murphy and Alicia Witt as one of the final three for Sidney.

There was also Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy and Liev Schreiber.

They made the film for $US15 million and scheduled its release for just before Christmas in 1996. That opening weekend, it opened at $US6 million opposite the George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer romantic drama One Fine Day, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

But something odd happened the second week. It made $US10 million. Rapturous word-of-mouth and frenzied audiences led to a global box office of $US173 million.

Jamie Kennedy, who played Randy Meeks, told The Ringer that one of his first residual cheques was twice as much as what he had been paid for the film.

It was a huge, unexpected hit, and between it and The Craft, horror was back. The studio rushed a sequel into production and it was in cinemas a year later, almost to the day.

What followed was an explosion of teen horror movies, including another script Williamson had sold before Scream, Killing Mrs Tingle, which was renamed as Teaching Mrs Tingle and re-shot and re-edited after the Columbine Massacre.

Alicia Witt would get her own teen horror with Urban Legend, which also starred Joshua Jackson. There was a huge brood of young actors, many of them who were on big teen TV shows at the time, to call on.

Campbell’s Party of Five co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt came to be the face of the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, Katie Holmes was in Teaching Mrs Tingle and Disturbing Behaviour, Seth Green was in Idle Hands with Devon Sawa, who also fronted Final Destination. Michelle Williams joined Jamie Lee Curtis in a resurrected Halloween movie.

Everyone wanted to be the next Scream. Including the Scream filmmakers.

In Ghostface Killer, the franchise had a masked murderous figure who could be anyone, as long as it loosely followed the rules that it was someone connected to Sidney or the victims, which gave it narrative cover to keep coming back.

Scream 3 (2000) took the franchise’s meta-ness to another level, with a killer on the loose of the Hollywood set of the fictional movies-within-the-movie, Stab. The films had always played with the genre tropes by literally drawing attention to them.

It was designed to be the final film in a trilogy, and for about a decade, it was. Williamson and Craven came back together for Scream 4 in 2011, marking the 15th anniversary of the original release and the first murders.

But the box office underperformed – it had both been rested too long to still be relevant and yet not long enough for a full nostalgia trip.

Craven died in 2015 and while there had been a largely forgotten anthology TV spin-off (none of the original cast members were involved) that ran for three seasons, Scream felt like it was done.

Often what it takes is a new generation with a fresh spin, and for Scream, that was Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, a filmmaking duo who had great success with Ready or Not, a devilishly fun slasher flick about a young woman who married into a family with a ritual where a game of hide-and-seek is a deadly hunt.

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett worked with different screenwriters and set out to relaunch the franchise in 2022 with Scream 5, confusingly titled as just Scream, to serve as a requel – as Mason Gooding’s character explains, this is a revival and a sequel in that it exists within the same canon and timeline, but the focus shifts to a new generation of characters while the OG players still get to be involved.

The newbies included Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, along with Gooding, Jack Quaid, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette and Jasmin Savoy Brown. Of the original cast, Campbell, Arquette and Cox all pop in.

The blend of old and new worked, and Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett found gruesome and creative new ways for characters to die, while the script made a connection between the fresh leads with the legacy story.

The reviews were largely positive and the box office was profitable, so Scream 6 seemed like a no-brainer.

The survivors of Scream 5 were all signed to return, and Hayden Panettiere, who had been in the fourth film, was also confirmed, along with Cox. But Campbell wouldn’t come back after she and the studio couldn’t agree on salary.

She was the face of the franchise and she released a statement which said, “I felt the offer that was presented to me did not equate to the value I have brought to the franchise”. It was a Sidney Prescott moment, but instead of Ghostface, it was Hollywood salary politics.

If that was a dramatic moment, it was a mere teaser to what happened next.

The seventh Scream film had its pre-production start delayed because of the dual Hollywood strikes. Christopher Landon (Paranormal Activity) had been hired to take over from Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett who had a scheduling conflict.

In November 2023, Barrera was fired from Scream 7 by Spyglass Media Group, which was producing the 2020s slate of Scream movies, for pro-Palestine posts she had made on social media. The next day, Ortega, who by then had a huge profile thanks to the success of TV series Wednesday, dropped out.

At the time, it wasn’t clear if the Ortega exit was related to Barrera’s sacking, or if it had happened earlier due to scheduling, but only just been made public because of everything else that was happening.

In 2025, Ortega revealed that she left the project because, “the Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart. If Scream 7 wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.”

Landon too dropped out of Scream 7, within weeks after Barrera’s firing. He said he had received threats in the wake of the controversy even though he was not involved in the decision to let Barrera go, and he ultimately couldn’t see what the movie would be without her character.

Bu March 2024, the studio had put their rescue plan in motion. Williamson, who hadn’t been a part of the franchise since Scream 4, was brought back into the fold, not only as a screenwriter, but also as the director, his first time in the chair on a Scream project.

He and co-writer Guy Busick had to redo the whole screenplay to excise Barrera and Ortega’s characters, and bring it back to the person it all started with: Sidney Prescott.

Variety reported the rewrite cost $US500,000, and now Campbell had more leverage to get the payday she felt she deserved. Her reported salary for this film was $US7 million while Cox was supposedly paid $US2 million.

Scream 7 is Sidney’s movie. She’s not a surprise pop-in at the end or a voice on the other end of the phone call.

There are lots of callbacks for fans of the original, including the return of Lillard, whose character Stu Macher had died (or had he?) at the end of the first film. There’s also the name of Sidney’s daughter, Tatum, named for Rose McGowan’s character who died 30 years ago.

The story, if it even matters that much at this point, is that Sidney is being stalked by someone claiming to be Stu (unless it’s actually Stu), and while her instincts are to protect her 17-year-old daughter, she has to face to past in order for her family to move forward.

Is Scream 7 frightening? Does it live up to the original name of Williamson’s first script, Scary Movie?

Not really. Three decades on, the Scream formula is well established, and some of those death scenes are almost played for laughs. It’s also so nakedly pro-gun you have to wonder if the US National Rifle Association slipped the production some money under the table.

Scream works better if you almost think of it as an interactive, escape room experience in that it is in conversation with the audience about who the killer is. Everyone is in on the same game, you know it too well by now.

If you’re sitting in that cinema, whispering to your friend, “No, it can’t be the boyfriend, that’s too obvious” or “Would you really cast Timothy Simon just to be a red herring?” or “Joel McHale is really small on the poster, he probably dies quickly”, know that the film is aware of all that speculation. It’s expecting it.

It’s absolutely a nostalgia play more than a movie in its own right, but at this point, that’s what the audience wants, something familiar but with one or two surprises. That’s why you can’t ever really kill off Scream.

Scream 7 is in cinemas