By Simon Thompson
In case you haven’t walked past or boarded a bus recently, there is a new Scream movie coming out, and so to promote it, Paramount decided upon a very well thought out one day pop up event which is as far from being a Wonka experience style disaster as you can get. Located within Stormzy’s House Party Club in Soho, the organising team repurposed its seven floors to resemble a generic 1990s suburban style American house that pretty much any of the characters from the series would live in.
Now, because I am a neek who spends of his most of his time rewatching The X Files, playing retro video games, and reading manga, I had no idea that Stormzy had a club in the first place, let alone that it hosted themed events. So before I turned up I went in with my usual rule of having low expectations before attending or watching anything, however I was more than pleasantly surprised with how well organised and thought out the pop up was.
The first floor of it a sitting room, complete with a TV that was constantly on, various chairs/ a sofa, and stills from previous instalments in the franchise. The twist however, is that this in fact a crime scene with a dead body outline on the floor. Before you even had a chance to look around, one of the two performers dressed as Scream style 90s college student immediately urged you to get out of there because some kind of masked killer was lurking around.
Taken through a collapsable book case, you were immediately confronted by Ghostface, the franchise’s iconic antagonist. Once inside a Scooby Doo style hidden room, you were tasked with picking up a phone call and avoiding him ambushing you. Now, for someone who hasn’t got twitchy caffeine reflexes or spent an ungodly amount of time playing survival horror games this would be scary as hell, but thanks to a lifetime’s worth of training from Resident Evil I legged it out of the room and behind the collapsable book case faster than a disgraced Tory peer at a surprise select committee.
The second floor was a bedroom, with a bloody sheet, and a turning animatronic Ghostface, which did its job and threw me off for a couple of seconds. The final and less elaborate part of the pop up, was a basement area, with a 90s style kitchen and a place to get your photo taken with a Ghostface statue.
What works about this event for me was the sheer detail put into every room. While the TVs on the first two floors were both modern HD ones, everything else was a carefully chosen piece of 90s tech, from a Nintendo 64 hooked up to the sitting room tv, to an old late 90s/very early 2000s at the latest PC desktop in the second bedroom area. All of this made you feel as if you’d stepped back in time to the 1990s suburbia that the early Scream movies depicted.
Overall, for a free event this was far better than it had any right to be, and if it weren’t for attending it before 5 pm, I would’ve taken advantage of the various bars dotted across the venue. It’s a shame that this was only a one day deal, because I would have loved to have taken some friends who enjoy both haunted houses and alcohol, but have never had the opportunity to combine the two.
Scream 7 arrives in UK cinemas from 26 February 2026.
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