Scream 7 - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Scream 7



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
As is the case with many a long-legged slasher franchise, the Scream franchise has had its ups and certainly its downs. The first two films were absolutely killer (yes, Mike make funny), and the 3rd film basically nuked it in its tracks. Only for it to get a really good sequel about 11 years later with Neve Campbell making a comeback…..only to languish around in our memories until a couple of years back when it got rebooted/sequeled for a new generation around 2022. And since then we’ve had multiple attempts at recreating that magic to the point where we thought we had a whole new group of scream queens and final girls ready to carry the torch, only for their lights to get extinguished thanks to some political back and forths between studio heads and our leads. So Paramount Studios decided to go back to basics and follow the Halloween sequels of recent years and bring back the originals, just with the added flair of having their progeny co-star alongside them. And while Scream 7 may not rival the great 1990s and the comedy/dissection of the slasher motif, but it still manages to be a very enjoyable slasher sequel in a time when we REALLY could use more faceless killers gutting dumb teenagers.

It’s been years since the Ghostface murders of years past, and even longer since the original murders happened to Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a teenager. Now that everything is calmed down, Sidney has returned to Woodsboro to live a peaceful life as a coffee shop owner and wife to her cop husband Mark (Joel McHale) and mother to her daughter Tatum (Isabel May). Putting out a memoir of her encounters with the killers, Sidney is something of a local celebrity, but while everyone in town knows her mother's story, young Tatum feels like she doesn’t really KNOW her own mother. Sidney is closed off and protective of her past, attempting to make sure that Tatum doesn’t know about the darkness that she had to go through in order to come to where she is.

But like many things in life, we don’t always have a say in how they play out. As parents, we try to keep our children from making the same mistakes that we did. Attempt to buffer them from the real world in ways that may be good in some ways, but over-exuberance in that thought process many times mysteriously leads to our progeny repeating those same typical things that EVERY teenager goes through. But in the case of Tatum, her life in Woodsboro is going to be a bit TOO much like her mother’s. You see, someone masquerading online as Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) is sending Sidney threatening texts in the Ghostface killer’s voice modulator, and before you know it, the mysterious masked killer is back and slashing his way through Tatum’s friends like paper mache. Digging deep and circling the wagons, Sidney and Tatum now have to figure out who is masquerading as her dead high school friend and just who is behind the mask once more.

Like with ALL Scream sequels, the 7th film follows many of the same genre tropes. There is more than one Ghostface killer. There are many brutal deaths. And we have some mild deconstruction of the horror franchise with some meta-analysis moments. Luckily, this film doesn’t dabble toooo hard into that trope, though, as they went a bit overboard with the reboot a few years ago. This time it’s more of a straightforward slasher film, with the typical reveal not being who you expected, nor was it the reason you would expect, too.

The film got a lot of controversy when it was in theaters, based on how cliché and rote it was. But in reality, that’s kinda what the franchise needed. The reboot caught our attention by bringing the old cast back ala Star Wars 2015-2021 era, but we got tired real fast of the overly meta moments. The 6th film tamed things down a bit, but the two lead girls were sadly not the kind who have staying power. This one goes back to the roots a bit and just has fun having Sydney back, just like fans wanted. And honestly, this isn’t bad. It’s not going to light the horror genre on fire, but I genuinely had a very good time with it all, and feel like it works as a good middle-of-the-road sequel with some spectacular kills (that one on the high school stage was by FAR the best)




Rating:

Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, and language.




4K Video: Video:

Derived from an 8.6K digital source and then transferred to a 4K digital intermediate for the master, Scream 7 looks spectacular in 4K UHD (as well as the Blu-ray included in this set. Which is nice to see Paramount returning to releasing combo packs once more. Now only if we could get Warner to do the same thing) and really sparkles in the darkness infused murderscape of Woodsboro. The image is clean, crisp, and free of any major artifacting whatsoever. Fine details pop all around, whether that’s the inside of Sydney’s coffee shop. To the crows' feet around Neve’s eyes. Blacks are deep and inky, and the use of Dolby Vision really adds some depth to all of the shadows that the Blu-ray doesn’t have. Colors don’t really jump off the screen that much, but the primary shades that are there in daylight scenes really do look more vibrant, though I found the depth of the blood to be the most visually striking.






Audio:

The Dolby Atmos track is a treat as well, giving us the goods with a robust and encompassing mix that rivals the last couple of films' audio mixes. The sense of spatial awareness is subtle, but still there thanks to the judicious use of overheads in the score and certain directional cues. Surrounds in general are really well done, ranging from the screaming, the score, and simple footsteps falling around corners that signal where the killer is coming from. Dialog is above reproach, but what really stood out to me personally was the massive LFE track. This is a bass bomb from the get-go, slamming the listener back in their seats multiple times throughout the film. To the point where I actually had to take a couple of guitars off my back wall because the strings were buzzing (yes, I hadn’t gotten a resonance like that in a long time).

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Extras:

• Music Video: Ice Nine Kills Presents "Twisting The Knife" Featuring McKenna Grace
• Deleted Scenes: Dive into the deleted scenes that were slashed from the final cut. Not every moment could survive the edit!
• Scar Tissue: The Making Of Scream 7: Kevin Williamson takes the helm! Watch the legacy cast survive the set of the most personal Scream yet. Don't forget the rules.
• Building Tension: Production Design: Discover the designs behind the goriest death traps and get an inside look at the making of the iconic Macher house!
• Dance Of Death: Stunts: What does it take to be a final girl? Go inside the choreography of the film’s most intense chases and physical face-offs with Ghostface.

Final Score: ​

With so many of the main cast killed off in the sequels over the years, it’s barely a fraction of the original lineup left to make a movie with, but here we are with Gale Weathers and Sidney doing their best to hold down the fort. And honestly, it was done rather well. I still feel the weight of Dewey’s death from the previous film (as a huge Dewey Stan, there really is a massive hole in the franchise that can be almost physically felt without him), but Sidney is and always will be the Scream queen in this series, and she falls back into the role effortlessly. Kills are pretty wicked, and while this won’t blow everyone’s skirts up that much, it just WORKS as a decent slasher. And I’m all for good mid-range horror films coming back. With the great audio and video and reasonable extras, this is a must-buy for slasher fans, and I’m most definitely a slasher fan to the bone.




Technical Specifications:

Starring: Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, McKenna Grace, Joel McHale
Directed by: Kevin Williamson
Written by: Kevin Williamson, Guy Busick
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Core), French, Spanish DD 5.1
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish
Studio: Alliance Entertainment
Rated: R
Runtime: 113 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: June 16th, 2026

Recommendation: Good watch for slasher fans.