While Halloween is closely approaching the point of it being in the rearview of 2025, Paramount Pictures has taken a beat to make the lead-up to the spooky costumed festivities all about Scream by getting folks abuzz about the return of Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott next year for Scream 7.
The trailer wastes no time getting to the horror/comedy slasher delight that Scream is known for, showing Blue Mountain State actor and comedian YouTuber Jimmy Tatro and his girlfriend entering 261 Turner Lane, which has been remodeled into an Airbnb despite the gruesome murders that happened there in the first Scream. But alas, they get bamboozled by an actual new Ghostface hacking them up to bits moments after getting distracted by an anamorphic Ghostface on display in the house. Classic Ghostface!
We then see the return of legacy character Sidney, who has built a new life for herself and her daughter, played by Isabel May. However, Sidney is abruptly pulled back into the chaos of Ghostface as the new killer taunts her by threatening to upend their quiet lives by using the above murder to challenge and torment them as his next victims.
Apparently, this new Ghostface, despite the franchise sequels practically wringing the rag dry with how many people she knew from her childhood turning out to be the maniacal slasher, is also someone who claims to have known her and wishes to torment her with a cold call behind a voice changer. While Sidney is on her Sarah Connor vibe, calling Ghostface everything outside of a coward for his whole hide-and-seek rigmarole, Ghostface says he’s not hiding this time. And sure enough, dude wasn’t kidding, he’s popping out like Batman from the attic and sitting up like Michael Myers hunting Sidney and her daughter down, promising not to hurt her daughter unless Sydney can get a front-row seat to witness it. Enter Mama Bear Sidney.
In titular Scream fashion, we see Ghostface menace unsuspecting friends of Sidney as she and her daughter attempt to work together to stop the new Ghostface as a team—including the return of Courteney Cox’s Gale—neatly flipping the trope of there always being two Ghostfaces on its head. Only this time, they want to make sure this doesn’t happen again by double-tapping the cloaked killer and preventing any more copycats from coming back to haunt them.
Addressing the elephant in the room, it’ll be interesting to see if the franchise, now on its seventh film, has pivoted away from its real-life falling out with Melissa Barrera and, consequently, Jenna Ortega as its new franchise leads to dip back into the well once more, bringing Campbell back into the fold as its hero. That, plus the evidently panicked decision to bring back Courteney Cox along with other very much dead characters, like Matthew Lillard and David Arquette, leads one to assume they’ve either completely jumped the shark or will have them show up as ghosts in Sidney’s imagination. Regardless, it’ll at least be interesting from a meta perspective to see how this plays out and whether the next Scary Movie will follow suit by doing the funniest thing—having Ortega and Barrera cameo and poke fun at Scream‘s obvious grasping at straws to keep the franchise moving.
Whether you’re morbidly curious or genuinely excited to see how these narrative and metanarrative mysteries unfurl, all will be answered when Scream 7 hits theaters on February 27, 2026.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled Sidney Prescott and Courteney Cox’s names. io9 regrets the errors.
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