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With Scream 7 out in theaters, slasher fans are saying “Hello, Sidney” all over again… for the sixth time in 30 years. Neve Campbell remains a scream queen for her work as Sidney Prescott, survivor of the Woodsboro Murders, but this latest outing has revealed that the franchise may have long run out of things to say about its central character. That feeling only is only intensified by the fact that Sidney had moved away from the chaos, seeding the attention to Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), a very different type of survivor.
Unlike her sister Sam (Jenna Ortega), Tara had hallucinations of her father Billy Loomis, the original Scream killer, once again played by Skeet Ulrich. More than just a call back, Billy’s return would have been a longer arc, as “part of coming back for five and six was being a part of seven,” Ulrich told the New York Post. “It was a three-picture arc for Billy Loomis, or the imagination of Billy Loomis in Melissa Barrera’s character’s head. But when all that went down with her, obviously you lose her and you lose what’s in her head.”
The “her” in question is Barrera, and “all that went down” was the decision by Paramount and CEO/Trump sycophant David Ellison to fire her from the project after she spoke out against ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Ortega and eventually director Christopher Landon soon quit in solidarity with Barrera, forcing the studio to restructure Scream 7. They settled on a tired slasher rehash with Campbell back in the lead, the return of the other original killer Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), and original screenwriter Kevin Williamson behind the camera to direct.
Even those who liked the Scream 7 that hit theaters must admit that the Loomis/Carpenter plot was building up to something more interesting than the standard slasher story. From 2022 reboot Scream through the NYC-set Scream VI, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick had found a new twist to the franchise’s central premise about obsessions with killers.
Certainly, both films had murderers whose love of scary movies drove them to put on a Ghostface mask and stab people to death. But where Sidney Prescott was always a woman hunted for the actions of her mother Maureen, Tara was a woman hunted by her father and his expectations for her. Both Scream (2022) and Scream VI played with the idea that Tara would eventually succumb to the family madness and start killing.
That tension made Tara both a victim and a potential killer, something rarely seen in slashers. The concept showed up in 1981’s Happy Birthday to Me, the very end of 1988’s Halloween 4 (only to be botched by Halloween 5), and more recently in James Wan‘s insane Malignant (2021). But the slow burn of Tara’s struggle made her conflict more rich and complicated.
But in the end, she said something that offended the boss’s political preferences, so now we don’t get that movie. Instead, we have Sidney still dealing with Ghostfaces in her 50s. It almost makes you want to scream.
Scream 7 is now playing in theaters.
The post Original Scream 7 Plan Would Have Given Us a Unique Final Girl appeared first on Den of Geek.
