10 Exact Moments Horror Movies Stop Trying

3. Scream 7 (2026)

After everyone and their mum dropped out of or were fired from the planned trilogy closer for the new Scream movies, few of us were concerned; the franchise, after all, was built on subverting expectations, commenting on itself, and plucking manic villains out of thin air. And, once we got the news Neve Campbell would return as Sidney Prescott, after her contentious departure from Scream VI, we were even, dare we say it, excited. Well, more fool us for getting our hopes up.

Scream 7 finds us in Pine Grove, Indiana, where Sidney Evans has built a new life with her husband Mark and daughter Tatum (Joel McHale and Isabel May). All seems good and dandy until the spectre of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) pops up on a video call and the bodies start dropping again. Good stuff… right?

Another chapter in the Scream saga was never going to be a smooth ride, but the tipping point between so-bad-it's-good and so-lazy-it's-just-bad is when Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) turns up in her SUV at just the right moment to mow down one of the would-be killers, splat – the first moment in a steady decline towards the film's woefully inadequate final reveal.

It took some effort (or maybe just no effort) to butcher such a silly, no-rules franchise like this, making it the first bad picture of the 30-year-old series, and yet somehow writer-director Kevin Williamson managed it.