Scream

Scream is Wes Craven’s meta-horror franchise built around a masked killer known as Ghostface and the teens of Woodsboro who keep surviving him. Launched in 1996, the series invented a template for self-aware horror that every slasher franchise since has borrowed from, and it remains one of the few to sustain a genuine main character across seven films. Scream 7 released February 27, 2026, directed by franchise creator Kevin Williamson, and became the highest-grossing film in the series.

The Original Scream (1996)
Wes Craven directed the original Scream from Kevin Williamson’s screenplay, released by Dimension Films on December 20, 1996. The film follows Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell, a teenager in Woodsboro, California, one year after her mother’s murder, as a new killer in a ghost mask begins targeting her and her friends. The film’s central innovation was giving its characters explicit knowledge of horror movie rules while using those same rules to structure the actual plot, a trick that worked because Williamson’s screenplay was genuinely clever about it rather than simply winking at the camera.
Ghostface’s voice, delivered through a phone by Roger L. Jackson, has been the constant audio anchor of the franchise across every film since 1996. Courteney Cox played tabloid journalist Gale Weathers and David Arquette played Deputy Dewey Riley, both of whom became franchise pillars alongside Campbell. The film grossed over $173 million worldwide on a $15 million budget and revived the slasher genre after a years-long commercial decline.

The Scream Sequels and the Williamson Era
Scream 2 in 1997 and Scream 3 in 2000 completed Williamson’s original trilogy, with Sidney surviving two more Ghostface killers while the franchise built out its mythology and its satirical commentary on sequels and trilogies. Scream 4 arrived in 2011 with Craven directing again from a Williamson script, a sharper and more cynical film than the middle two entries that examined remake culture and the decade of horror that had passed since the original.

Radio Silence and the New Generation
After Craven’s death in 2015, the franchise passed to directing duo Radio Silence, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, for Scream in 2022 and Scream VI in 2023. Both films introduced a new generation of characters in Woodsboro and New York respectively, centered on sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega alongside returning legacy characters. The approach of blending a new cast with the original survivors became the template for the Scream 7 production as well.
Melissa Barrera was dismissed from Scream 7 in November 2023 following social media posts about the Israel-Gaza conflict, and Jenna Ortega subsequently departed the franchise citing scheduling conflicts with her Netflix series Wednesday. The departures fundamentally restructured the planned seventh film and led directly to Neve Campbell’s return to the franchise.

Scream 7 (2026)
Scream 7 was written and directed by Kevin Williamson, marking his first time directing a feature film and his return to the franchise as a creative force after writing the original 1996 film. Neve Campbell returned as Sidney Prescott after sitting out Scream VI, with Courteney Cox back as Gale Weathers and David Arquette reprising Dewey Riley. Isabel May plays Sidney’s daughter Tatum, the film’s new central target, with the story set in Pine Grove, Indiana where Sidney has built a new life with her husband Sheriff Mark Evans, played by Joel McHale.
Matthew Lillard returned as Stu Macher, the original 1996 co-Ghostface killer, in a role that generated significant fan discussion ahead of release. McKenna Grace, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, and Anna Camp round out the cast. The film received generally negative reviews from critics but grossed $214 million worldwide against its $45 million budget, making it the highest-grossing entry in the franchise’s history. Roger L. Jackson returned as Ghostface’s voice.
Despite it’s box office success, fans were torn with this new one, after Barrera was let go. I thought Scream 5 and 6 changed things up and made the characters much more complex, seven was a return to form from what the previous 4 films did before and that’s not necessarily a good thing. The movie does feature one of the coolest kills in a movie I’ve seen and it involves a beer tap.

Ghostface and the Rules of Scream
Ghostface is not a single killer but a costume and a phone call. Every film in the series features a new person or persons underneath the mask, with the identity reveal as the structural climax of each entry. The costume is an off-the-shelf Halloween mask based on Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which the original film deliberately used to comment on the commodification of horror. The black robe and the Roger L. Jackson voice have been consistent while the killer behind them has changed every time, a concept that allows the franchise to introduce new characters as potential suspects in every entry without requiring a supernatural explanation for Ghostface’s persistence.

To continue the theme of anyone can be Ghostface, he shows up in Dead by Daylight as well. Not connected to anyone in the movies, but as Danny Johnson, a freelance reporter from Roseville that liked to stalk his victims before their death. It’s possible that Behaviour chose the name Danny for the killer’s identity because of real life serial killer, Danny Rolling. Rolling was Kevin Williamson’s inspiration for the original Ghostface character for the movies.

The Legacy of Scream
Scream’s influence on horror is difficult to overstate. The franchise’s self-awareness changed how horror films were written and marketed, and the vocabulary it introduced, final girl, sequel rules, calling out tropes mid-film, became the dominant mode of horror comedy for a decade afterward. The series also made Sidney Prescott one of the few final girls in slasher history to survive long enough to become a genuine recurring protagonist rather than a one-film archetype. With Scream 7 performing well commercially and the franchise’s rights situation stable at Paramount, a Scream 8 development seems likely.