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Feb 25, 2026 By Steve King

[GHOSTFACE VOICE: There is no spoiler warning. If you don’t know these movies by now, that’s your damn problem.]

I saw Scream on the second day of its opening in December 1996. My mom took me to it at an old General Cinemas on the West Side of Baltimore. I was 13 and it changed my life. Growing up with this name I was very familiar with horror movies. I grew up on them and probably saw more than a few much earlier than I should have. The auditorium was mostly empty and I didn’t find the film particularly scary. I was too busy having my mind blown. 1996 was a big year for me.

Scream was the first DVD I ever purchased and watched on a very heavy and bulky Panasonic DVD player. I got the VHS of the (very minimal) Director’s Cut, and another for the director and writer commentary. I still have my first Ghostface mask and the knife used in the film, a Buck 120. Fun fact: The Buck 120 was featured on the poster for Friday the 13th Part VII and used by the serial killer in 1994’s Copycat starring, among many others, Dermot Mulroney. See? I know what the fuck I’m talking about. I have forgotten more things about Scream than most people will ever know. I even know when in the first scene they use the regular ghostface mask vs. the one specifically made for the film. It kind of looks like Kevin Williamson is bringing back the old, original mask for Scream 7. Trust me, those masks are hard to see out of. That’s why Ghostface is such a klutz.

Scream made me want to be a writer. I’m no good at fiction but covering politics has been a lot like being a horror writer, to be honest. For purposes of clarity, I think it’s important to really examine the first two films in the franchise and the fifth and sixth, and their relationships to how both trilogies have ended.

The year before Scream’s release, Wes Craven dropped New Nightmare and it is, in my opinion, his best Freddy movie. It was also the first Freddy movie I saw in the theater. It was adult, smart, self-referential, and scary. It was all about the Nightmare films and their real life filmmakers and actors. Many hardcore fans saw it as a betrayal of the original series, but it was brilliant and ahead of its time. It was the turn of the century, and self-referential (or “meta” in the parlance of our times) was having a moment. In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter was another meta modern classic from 1995. Anyway, Wes Craven was primed to create a movie like Scream. Skeet Ulrich even came into Sid’s window like his doppelganger, Johnny Depp, did in Nightmare On Elm Street.

Originally titled “Scary Movie,” Scream was one of those insanely hot scripts that created a ferocious Hollywood bidding war that ended with Miramax’s acquisition under the banner of their cheap horror division, Dimension Films, run by Bob Weinstein. Its writer, Kevin Williamson, also included treatments for two other films, hoping to create a perfect horror trilogy. Made with a modest budget, Scream went on to become the most successful horror film at the box office since Halloween. Based purely on word-of-mouth (we didn’t have the internet back then), its second week box office went up, and kept going up. That rarely happens. It was such a success that it was re-released the following spring, resulting in raucous crowd experiences. When I saw it a few more times that year, I had trouble finding a good seat and laughed along as the crowds lost their shit. Scream was best seen in a Black theater. You simply had to be there.

I still have 10 pages of notes that didn’t make it into this piece. I could go on at length about the battles Wes Craven had with the MPAA (now MPA, the only good example of an industry purchasing its regulator body) just to get the original film an R rating. They couldn’t show moving intestines; Craven had to lie and say he only got one cut of Ghostface chasing down and stabbing Casey Becker. Or how the Santa Rosa school board pitched a bitch all through the film’s production. I truly hate the Millennial Nostalgia that has gripped our culture recently. I hate regular nostalgia, but I really hate Millennial Nostalgia, and I say that as geriatric [shivers] millennial. It’s disgusting how Scream 7 is being marketed. Anyway, I saw the film a total of five times in the theater. At home, I stopped counting somewhere in the 130s. Okay, back to Scream trivia…

The rest is history. The sequel went into production before the commentary on the first film was completed for home consumption. This was before social media but just as the internet was beginning to obsess over movies, so extreme secrecy surrounded the production. Multiple scripts were created to thwart leaks, many scenes for the film were written the same day as shooting. The actors were kept in the dark about who was the actual killer. Craven and Williamson worked very hard to never have “Debbie Salt” and Sidney in the same scene. When she was finally revealed to be Mrs. Loomis, it was horror poetry.

The killer being revealed as Billy Loomis’ mother was a brilliant Psycho-esque turn. Especially because the Loomis name is so meaningful to the horror genre. It’s a name that was passed down from Psycho to Halloween, and finally to Scream. Mrs. Loomis’ motive was simple, while her accomplice, Mickey Altieri (Timothy Olyphant) is more of a fan boy who planned to blame the movies and have the Christian Coalition pay for his defense in the trial. This was another fuck you from Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson to the rightwing conservatives of the ’90s. The movie pulled way back on the gore in order to get by the MPAA. But the motive this time was much simpler: It was about Mrs. Lommis’ revenge. It all ends not in a screaming bloody battle, but a negotiation between Sidney and Cotton Weary (played by Liev Schreiber, her mother’s old extra-marital fling and wrongly convicted murderer) about his clout-chasing and wanting a dual interview with Diane Sawyer. The film performed even better than the original. Scream fever had hit its highest temperature and was a behemoth of not only the horror community but the world.

Here’s where things start to go wrong. Kevin Williamson was very busy after the success of Scream. He made Dawson’s Creek (RIP James Van Der Beek), The Faculty, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Teaching Ms Tingle, and he worked, uncredited, on Halloween: H2O, Wasteland (a show best left in the dustbin of history). He was on a hot streak that anyone would find hard to maintain.

Dimension Films pushed ahead on Scream 3 with a loose outline from Williamson and a new writer, Ehren Kruger. Bob Weinstein somehow had a great lust for horror movies… funny how that worked out… Much of the core cast and crew remained, but that special lightning in a bottle magic was gone and exhausted. What resulted was a predictable, formulaic, retread of all the stupid horror movies the first two films in the franchise had skewered. Even Parker Posey, Lance Hendrickson, Carrie Fisher, and Jay and Silent Bob couldn’t save the film. There was a dumbass dream sequence with Sidney’s mom. The Scream movies were always real-time horror and never had any stupid flashbacks or dream scenes. The only good part of the film is Sidney interrupting the killer’s speech by telling him to take some responsibility. That’s it.

The killer ended up being related to the protagonist and the film accidentally stumbled into a #MeToo allegory that, while ahead of its time, was still ham-handed. I remember that sinking feeling I had seeing it in the theater for the first time, knowing what I was watching was inherently nowhere near the quality I’d come to expect from the franchise. It was my first exposure to adult disappointment. I have tried my best since then to forget that film, but it remains an instrumental lesson in grownup melancholy. The perfect, formative trilogy of my life’s inspiration was irreparably broken, along with my heart. Like any despondent fan, I moved on.

In 2011, I was actually working in the theater business (of course) and got to do a managers’ screening of Scream 4. Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson, and the whole gang was back together. Enough time had passed, maybe it would work and lead to a new trilogy, right? Hard wrong! There are parts of the film I like; the return of gore, working the horror movie trivia game into the climax. I like Kirby, but there’s something about the film that falls short, and it’s obvious. It’s the ending in the hospital. With the killer needing fans and not friends, pulling Jill (Emma Roberts) out on the stretcher was a perfect place to end the film. It was uncomfortable and an interesting way to set up the intended sequel and trilogy, but the Weinsteins, per usual, couldn’t leave well enough alone. Word is they brought Ehren Kruger back in to write that terrible hospital scene. It was truly stupid. It’s best just to be left in the past, and that is exactly what the newer films and all of their accompanying Blu-ray special features clearly decided to do.

Admittedly, I slept on Scream (2022). After the third and fourth films sucking and a weird MTV show that I never watched, the vein had run dry. With Wes Craven dead and Kevin Williamson having been exhausted and fed up with the Weinsteins, no one saw Scream 5 coming. It was created by the Ready Or Not and Radio Silence guys, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, with James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick writing the film. Kevin Williamson was still listed as an executive producer, thus blessing the film with old school approval, with his one caveat being that the film be dedicated to Wes Craven.

What Scream 5 created was no less than the best film in the franchise since the first one. It was fresh, smart, updated to modern sensibilities, and actually had something to say. Like the prior films in the franchise, Scream 5 was active viewing, with an updated cast demographic make-up that actually reflected the new America. Both leads, Sam and Tara, played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, were latina, and their two best friends, Mindy and Chad Meeks, were Black. Race is something that Scream, like many ’90s intellectual properties, never handled very well. And the kicker was that the two villains ended up being white. The same goes for Scream 6. Both had multi-culture survivors and white villains.

Scream 5 was made with great respect and reverence for fans of the original, by fans of the original. The leadership of the film came up like I did, with the VHS tapes of the original film on constant rotation. By all accounts, all of the Radio Silence guys got into the business because of Scream. Right off the bat, Scream 5 intentionally subverted the expectation of the original trilogy by starting the film with one of the two “final girls.” Tara (Jenna Ortega) gets a call from Ghostface, but knows her horror movies and thus does well in “The Game,” and then takes an absolute beating from the killer.

Soon the new Woodsboro friend group is introduced, with Chad (Mason Gooding) even wearing the school letter jacket identical to Steve’s in Scream 1. The school announcements are read by Drew Barrymore, in a very sly cameo. In fact, many dead legacy characters make little voice cameos. Matt Lillard’s voice tells Amber (Mikey Madison) how cool her house is in a party scene. A character eventually shows up in the dreaded blue plaid. Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), like her uncle before her, lays out The Rules of the “requel” that all of the characters are being forced to live through. There is actually a shockingly obnoxious character named Wes, who just so happens to be the son of the former deputy/now-sheriff of Woodsboro, played by Marley Shelton.

Shelton’s Sheriff Judy is no longer the plucky deputy from Scream 4. She had to take over after Dewey was forced to retire after the events of 2011. There are fewer authority figures more meaningful to young people than high school principals and cops. Scream 1 had principal Himbry’s death in broad daylight, and the same goes for Sheriff Judy and her son. After the killer stabs Wes in the throat, killing him, the film thankfully doesn’t let Judy see the body, but does show her own murder on the sidewalk in front of her house, all the while the American flag is waving above.

The Ghostface mask is finally(!) shot in a gorgeous low-light. Even Samantha, Tara’s wayward sister (Melissa Barrera), asks if she’s living through fan-fiction, and she is, in a way. Samanatha has a lot to do in this film. She is actually Billy Loomis’ illegitimate daughter who has hallucinations of her dead father, the gorgeous and barely de-aged Skeet Ulrich. She and Tara are sisters from different misters, as revealed in a painful, too-long monologue in the hospital after the first attack on Tara. Melissa Barrera does the best she can with some very clunky and expositional dialogue.

The thing that brings the whole film to an almost crashing halt is when Sam and Tara are attacked after Tara has been admitted to the hospital. The mask is finally lit correctly with the beautiful hospital recessed lighting. It’s all very reminiscent of the final scene in Scream 4. Dewey shows up with the gang to help, shoots the Ghostface killer into submission, and gets the sisters and Sam’s boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid) off the hospital floor. Richie seems especially upset. Dewey, being Dewey, stays to make sure the killer is dead. As he inspects the killer, his phone rings with a call from Gale, and the killer (wearing a bullet-proof vest) finally gets him. Only this time the killer has two knives. One is used to gut Dewey, as the other is plunged into his back. The whole scene is brutal, devastating, visceral, and painful. His drawn-out, painful death ends with the killer saying, “It’s an honor…,” right before they kick his body into a pool of his own blood. Dewey is dead. This Scream film again reminds the audience it is not like the rest. A legacy character we first met in 1996 was just brutally gutted in the middle of the film.

Although Richie acts as though he knows nothing about the “Stab” films that are based based on the original Woodsboro murders, he’s actually a superfan killer recreating his own version of the franchise, and cheating on Samantha with his sidepiece, Amber, who’s also a fan living in Stu Macher’s old house. Just as an aside, the remodeled Macher house, with all its refinished hardwood, from this former property manager author’s point of view, is truly beautiful.

Here’s where motive matters most and why Scream has been so intelligent and accessible: Billy defined the series at the end of Scream 1 when he said, “Don’t you blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!” Richie is a superfan who has had his heart broken by his favorite floundering film franchise. This is why Scream 5 is the only other film in the franchise to stand up to the original.

While Billy’s motive was more about Sidney’s mother and his own mommy issues, Richie gives voice to many of us fanboys when he gives his killer explanation speech: “Because nobody takes the true fans seriously, not really. They just laugh at us, and why!? Because we love something!? We’re just a fucking joke to them! How can fandom be toxic? It’s about love! You don’t fucking understand. These movies are important to people.”

It’s self-indulgent and narcissistic, but, if we’re being honest, that is the heart of any fandom. It’s involving yourself in a story that you didn’t create and putting yourself up on a pedestal, as if you actually have a say in what happens in that story you love so much. It’s the definition of Toxic Fandom. Every franchise has its toxicity. Star Wars and their Fandom Menace is the worst, as they have literally chased any new minority off social media and are racist as fuck. DC fans intentionally bombed Birds of Prey because god forbid women live their lives without men. Marvel fans tried to tank Captain Marvel (and failed) but succeeded in destroying The Marvels because it was too caramel and queer. Even Star Trek has its own trash contingent. They’re dying out but they’re still around.

The sci-fi/fantasy/horror community is mostly garbage people, to be perfectly honest. Richie, for all his toxicity, in the end is no match for Sam. Sam, Sidney, Tara, and Gale overpower Amber. Richie gets into a knock-down, drag-out fight with Sam. They end up in the same foyer as the first film. The best part of the film to me is Sam seeing a vision of Billy nodding to the knife a few feet away from her, helping her win the fight with Richie. Is he a hallucination or a ghost? Best not to question it. Sam retrieves the knife and goes caveman on Richie with it, stabbing him through the mouth and chest dozens of times before finally, coldly, slashing his throat. Rather than wait for him to come back, ala Billy, she pumps a few bullets into him for good measure.

Scream 6, like Scream 2 was another super-secret breakneck production sequel. The film starts with Samara Weaving being a total dime in New York City and on an online date meetup, which in itself seems like a horror movie. She is soon dispatched by a “Stab” fanboy who is then quickly killed by the new Ghostface who kills him while uttering “Who gives a fuck about movies?!” This is not your normal Scream film.

The directors and writers have said that Scream 6 is meant to be a punk rock B-side version of Scream 5, with an unstoppable T-1000 killer (T2 is probably the best sequel to copy, besides The Godfather II) who will run through anyone he needs to accomplish his goal. Even with a shotgun, if needed. The film then transitions into another predatory environment, a college house party. Too Short’s song from 2006 (!), “Blow The Whistle,” is playing. There’s, of course. a creepy frat bro trying to date-rape Tara. Sam tases his balls. Shortly thereafter we see Sam and Tara together again, this time with Sam being a helicopter sister dealing with her trauma as best as she can, while Tara is clearly ready to move on. Billie Eilish’s “When the Party’s Over” plays. These new Scream kids definitely have us older people cooked when it comes to the quality of their music.

Sam, again, proves she is the anti-Sidney; she’s tough, and even has a secret situationship with her hottie neighbor, Danny, played by Josh Segura and his etched jawline and perfect fade. She’s still having visions of Billy. Because both films were filmed during covid, with all of its movie production restrictions and quarantines, and that created a family atmosphere. Everyone stayed in the same hotels and basically hung out non-stop. That kind of bunker mentality is hard to replicate and will definitely be missing in Scream 7. Dermot Mulroney only took the job because he wanted to be one of the killers. Jack Quaid was happy to be included in the videos left behind by Richie. The Scream 2 callbacks are incredible. There’s a full daylight scene of trying to find the killer. Gale finally gets a Ghostface call, and even Kirby returns as a FBI agent with an axe to grind.

There’s an incredible scene in the subway when the Core Four are being pursued by Ghostface, during which everyone in New York seems to be dressed for Halloween as iconic horror characters we all know and love. The scene is nothing but suspense—an attack could come from anywhere—just like the rest of the city. Mindy is stabbed and separated from the gang. But the real highlight is the final battle.

Let’s start with the obvious. The Shrine (Richie’s New York hideaway of “Stab” memorabilia) being a theater was inspired, as it mirrors the beginning and end of Scream 2, but the details are truly insane. For one, the auditorium and lobby itself is meant to resemble the theater at the beginning of Scream 2. The concession stand is almost identical, and even has a staircase nearby. Scream 2 beginning in a movie theater and ending in an old school theater was great, but Scream 6 somehow tops it.

The attention to detail in The Shrine is god-tier. Richie has items from every Scream story that came before. The blood spatter on Billy’s shirt is damn near perfect, the garage door that killed Tatum in Scream 1 are the moldings around the balcony…. there are honestly too many granular details to catalog, but take it from the original fan, they did the damn work. I’m still in awe of the attention to detail.

The “Kill Box” sequence is amazing for many other reasons. Chad and Tara’s romance comes to a strange head when he has to defend her against two Ghostfaces. It’s the first time we see two Ghostfaces onscreen together since the opening of Scream 2, except this time they’re both the killers. Chad puts up a good fight, even using the Scream 1 camera as a weapon against the killers, before taking an epic beating (i.e. multiple stab wounds) and it really looks like he doesn’t make it out of this one. The two Ghostfaces clear the blood off of the blades in that now iconic way started by Stu in Scream 1. They have all of the killer’s masks displayed throughout the auditorium.

The Carpenter sisters are then herded into the auditorium (Kill Box), with the killers circling like predators. The final third killer is revealed as the detective investigating the case, Wayne Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), who just so happens to be Richie’s father. His two accomplices were the weird kids in the friend group, Ethan and Quinn, Richie’s siblings. Like Scream 2, it’s a raw family revenge motive type deal, something Kevin Williamson had recommended and that mirrored the killer reveal in Scream 2.

However, Mr. Kirsch just finds horror movies to be a “little dark.” It’s then revealed that the Kirsch family created the Woodsboro Truther movement and online rumors about Sam being the real killer of the events of Scream 5, just like Richie had intended. The Kirschs’ objective is not just to kill Sam, but to assassinate her character, further adding to the updated paranoia of the new trilogy. Both of the sisters are forced to throw down again. Sam is in her tank top with her guns out again. She uses a brick as a weapon—very Scream 2; Sid dropped a lot of stage bricks on Mrs. Loomis. Both films move on very fast vibes.

Mr. Kirsch explains everything while standing on the stage, with videos of Richie projected behind him. It’s all a very Scream 2: a primal, family-against-family kind of vibe. The Carpenter sisters are downright savage; Sam straight executes Quinn, and Tara stabs Ethan in the mouth. There are a lot of mouth stabbings in these movies!

The final battle between Sam and Mr. Kirsch pretty much ends with them screaming and running full-force at each other, tackling one another and falling off the balcony together. Sam finally embraces part of her killer identity by donning her father’s mask and stabbing the holy shit out of Mr. Kirsch. She goes a little too far and even Tara is shook by it for a beat. When Ethan comes back to life for one last scare, Kirby drops the Stu TV on him.

Danny shows up with the cops, proving he’s a good guy. Mindy (again) missed the big reveal but she figured part of it out! Chad somehow survives and throws the Core Four sign to the girls as he’s loaded into the ambulance. Tara and Sam are left on the street together. Sam, still holding the Billy mask, looks down at it and feels the homicidal tendency (and music) welling up… and simply drops it on the ground. The Carpenter sisters walk away, safe in their happy ending, with Danny tagging along, as a song that Demi Lovato made specifically for the film plays them out.

Which brings us to the natural ending for this whole thing. If there is one through-line of the entire Scream franchise, it’s the toxicity of fandom and how dark it can get. I learned this lesson the hard way in 2000, when Scream 3 shit the bed. As a viewer you have to divorce yourself from the thing you love the most. You have to provide that extra inch of separation, because if you don’t, it can lead to a very dark place. You need look no further than the discourse surrounding Scream 7. I’m solidly on the side of the people who don’t plan to see the film because of all the things that went into Melissa Barrera’s firing. Will I watch it when it streams on Paramount+? Probably… But I’m not looking forward to it. Scream 7 is literally what Richie was ranting about at the end of Scream 5.

After the most recent war between Israel and Gaza broke out, Melissa Barrera vocally and publicly sided with the Palestinians, and was swiftly fired by Paramount. Jenna Ortega, who continues to have the world under her feet, then dropped out of the film. Shortly thereafter the directors walked away from the production. Paramount has never needed any help making stupid decisions, and that was before the Ellison family bought the company. The studio then decided to pay Neve Campbell what they didn’t want to pay her for Scream 6, and brought in Kevin Williamson to write and direct Scream 7. The writers from Scream 5 and Scream 6 stayed on the production but that’s only because all writers are whores. Myself included. I sympathize with Campbell and Courtney Cox. They are middle-aged in a savage industry that doesn’t see women older than 35. In the words of the president, it’s “checkout time” for them. You can’t blame them for taking the bag. You could blame the two members of the Core Four who are returning; Mason Gooding, bless his heart, is a nepo baby and doesn’t need the money, and Jasmin Savoy Brown still has a long career ahead of her, but it just seems like a bad choice, as the two other women of color leads are not returning.

It’s odd. This whole thing is another unforced error, just like Scream 3. All of the leaks and rumors about the film sound very unfortunate. The killers will apparently be using AI to replicate the voices of the previous killers. Matthew Lillard will be playing an AI version of Stu. I’m not happy with him taking the job, but he’s been such a big part of my life, I can’t be mad at him. Paramount is using AI in the marketing for the film. And like all AI, it’s a cheat. It’s hollow and dumb. It really feels like the studio is going out of its way to torpedo the movie. Scream made me love movies so much I worked in a video store (remember them??) and ran theaters for most of my late 20s. The opening box office for Scream 7’s first weekend is tracking well (because it’s also being released in IMAX, thus inflating the numbers) but I expect an epic second weekend drop-off.

There is no story without Sam and Tara. They have been the heart and soul of the new films. But I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending. I know where it leads. I hope I’m wrong. I’d love to be wrong and have to write a follow-up to this. Scream taught me to love being wrong and surprised. I hope Melissa’s firing and the departure of Jenna and the directors was another big pre-production headfake meant to make us think they won’t be in it. I hope the whole thing is a big old school Scream headfuck of obfuscation, because Sam and Tara were meant to be the killers in Scream 7. Maybe horror isn’t supposed to have a perfect trilogy.

I’ve learned from the Scream films and their productions to never fully trust them. However, every spoiler and leak I’ve heard from Scream 7 seems to be turning out to be true. Kevin Williamson has been there, in some form, every step of the way, and having a killer or killers targeting Sidney’s child feels right for the story, but it feels equally wrong for this trilogy. Neve Campbell has even hinted at a Scream 8, which honestly sounds perfect for them. Knock yourselves out. Why not? Paramount has always had no problem fucking itself, but they seem to be going out of their own way to beclown themselves this time.

Scream naturally brings out fierce debate within its fanbase, but it’s important to take a step back and breathe. You have to fall out of love with these things. That’s the whole point of the best Scream films. The protagonists often love their tormentors, only later to find out that individual was their personal antagonist. Take it from someone who has been through this before: don’t catch feelings.

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