Scream: 30th Anniversary & Scream 7 News

It is one of the most lucrative horror franchises in the history of cinema: the 7th opus of “Scream”, which is released Wednesday in France and Friday in the United States, is intended to be a return to the roots for the cult saga which revitalized a genre in decline in the mid-1990s.

Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of the first “Scream”, this time goes behind the camera for the return of Neve Campbell, the interpreter of Sidney Prescott, a legendary character who disappeared from the 6th film. Here are five things to know about “Scream 7.”

When the very first Scream was released in 1996, just 30 years ago, the genre film had almost disappeared from the big screens.

The wave of horror cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, notably embodied by “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th”, has passed.

At the time, “I was just trying to write a script to get noticed by Hollywood,” recalled Kevin Williamson in an interview with AFP.

Inspired by the true story of Danny Rolling, a serial killer who terrorized a small town in Florida for one summer by murdering five students, Kevin Williamson began writing “Scream”.

The script landed in the hands of the pope of horror cinema Wes Craven (“The Hill Has Eyes”, “Claws of the Night”) who agreed to direct the film. Faced with success, he will film the following three opuses before passing away in 2015.

“Scream” belongs to the subgenre of horror cinema called “slasher”: it features a psychopathic killer (Ghostface in “Scream”) who murders a group of young people one after the other with extreme brutality.

The film plays with the rules of the genre, twists them and uses comedic means, without leaving aside pure terror.

The scene from the first “Scream” with Drew Barrymore, the film’s biggest star killed after 12 minutes, is considered one of the best openings in the history of horror cinema.

After the death of Wes Craven, “I more or less said goodbye to the franchise,” recalls Kevin Williamson, screenwriter of the first four “Scream”.

He finally takes on a role as executive producer for opuses 5 and 6 which will be released in 2022 and 2023 respectively, more than ten years after “Scream 4” (2011), which was a commercial failure.

For “Scream 7,” Williamson agreed to direct for the first time because “Neve (Campbell) asked me,” he assures.

Neve Campbell, who plays Sidney Prescott, returns after disappearing from “Scream 6,” which she declined because she was “not aligned” with the salary offered at the time. The offer “would have been higher if I had been a male actor,” she noted recently on Quotidien, a talk show on the French channel TMC.

Central character of the first film, who became an icon of the saga as the films progressed, Sidney Prescott has this time become a mother. “We wanted to tell a story about a mother and her daughter, how they are estranged and then how they connect and fight Ghostface,” explains Kevin Williamson.

After the death of Wes Craven, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett introduced new characters.

Sam, played by Melissa Barrera, and her sister Tara, played by “Wednesday” series star Jenna Ortega, were the headliners of “Scream” 5 and 6.

But Melissa Barrera was dismissed by the production company Spyglass in November 2023 after posting a message denouncing “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza on social media.

Jenna Ortega will decide to follow her colleague out of solidarity, refusing to return for “Scream 7”.

“Scream” has earned $910 million at the global box office since its creation in 1996. This places the saga among the most lucrative of its genre, behind “The Conjuring,” “Saw” or the adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “It.”