This article includes spoilers for Scream (2022).
When the original Scream debuted, the world was a different place. I was 10 years old, and my biggest concerns were homework and playing pretend with my friends. In a few short years, however, my life and everyone’s around me would be forever changed 一 and I’m not talking just about Ghostface. The turn of the century brought the Columbine school shooting, the Y2K hoax, and 9/11. It’s those mass events that I remember most from my childhood, and they all unraveled within the span of two years. When my generation speaks about collective anxiety, depression, and trauma these days, we recall a very specific time in our culture when it seemed it was all falling apart and we had to figure out who we were and what that meant in a near-apocalyptic time.
Scream came along right when we needed it most. Wes Craven’s meta-slasher was far more than a cool reinvention to my favorite horror sub-genre. Its themes of womanhood, trauma, recovery, and growing up wove through the horror/comedy with the razor sharpness of Ghostface’s buck hunting knife. An emblem of hope and ingenuity, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) didn’t suffer any fools, whether in handling her on-again, off-again boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) or the masked, cloaked stalker. She never backed down and more than once demonstrated a primal muscle to survive at all costs. Even as she grieved her mother, Sidney didn’t let it consume her. Instead, she funneled such suffering into a steely determination to live 一 and not only live but to thrive. Throughout the original film and the 1997 follow-up, she was a young woman trying to understand her sexuality while combating cultural violence. When met with tragedy, she emerged the heroine to her own story, instilling within my generation a sense of worth and a courageous spirit.
Adventuring into the world of Scream wasn’t only about escapism. It was about coping with and understanding what was happening in the world. 1996 brought the murders of Jon Benét Ramsey and Amber Hagerman; Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997; Mathew Shepard was beat and tied to a barbed wire fence, left for dead, in 1998; and the Columbine school shooting struck a deep fear in our hearts one year later. I’ll never forget the warm air on April 20 and the way the sun danced across the field, as we sat waiting, our hearts beating out of our chests, for our parents to come pick us up. Our middle school received a bomb threat mere hours after the massacre, and time seemed to stand still. My friends and I were afraid to ever go to school again, and we were right to fear a world we had taken for granted.
Scream and Scream 2 captured our anxieties and operated as welcome soothing agents, too. You could always trust that when you watched these films that you’d feel much better afterward. No matter what was going on in the world, these horror pictures seemed to assuage our fears, frightening even our darkest nightmares back into the deepest recesses of our adolescent minds. With Scream 3, we were in full-on panic mode. Puberty had set in for most of us; we were still acclimating to a post-Columbine world; and pressures to plan for college began to swell. The third franchise entry is considerably campier, perhaps an unintentional way to further extricate from the horrors of the real world. Yet it wasn’t without its heavier explorations of residual trauma and sexual assaults.
Sidney went into hiding, hoping never to endure another attack. She didn’t let the past define her, but she wasn’t stupid. It was more about protecting those around her than it was even about herself. She naturally turned her ongoing recovery into a lifeline, working as a crisis counselor to help other women just like her. She was always thinking about others, and that’s why she has become such an important horror figure. As Randy details via pre-recorded VHS, Scream 3 was littered with “an unexpected back story and a preponderance of exposition,” including a revelation that Maureen Prescott was raped during her time out in Hollywood.
This particular story beat casts a harder edge around the franchise, mirroring exactly the acidic vat of our culture. A year prior to the film, Woodstock ‘99 left a deep scar, particularly as it relates to exploitation of and violence against women. I heard about the much-maligned festival only in faint whispers in the halls or during the afternoon Channel One broadcast months later when classes resumed. “When you look back on what went down at Woodstock ’99, the sexual assaults particularly and the violence, it felt a bit like the mask had been ripped off. And it sort of raised the question, how level was the playing field, really?” pondered journalist Maureen Callahan in a 2019 deep dive into the festival’s legacy.
Scream helped rip off that mask. In the original film, Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) is fueled “by his misogynistic ideology and a destructive obsession with masculinity and male approval,” as Veronica Phillips writes for Film Daze. The late ‘90s and early aughts were littered with misogyny in both film and television, and when it came to horror, the Ghostface saga deconstructed it the best. Sidney had agency when so many women in other films and in real life did not. She was a force to be reckoned with, always pushing through bogus stereotypes and antiquated ideas around gender roles. It was a new generation, and she was our leader.
The original trilogy is a sacred text. There’s no question of its importance in our lives, especially as young kids. In the years that followed, it was hard to imagine how a franchise could uncover fresh things to say about the world. Arriving 11 years later, Scream 4 bears the weight of being way ahead of its time 一 its incisive takedown of influencer culture is prescient 一 while also responding to the late-aughts recession. Sidney further reclaimed her narrative by writing a best-selling book, “Out of Darkness,” and it appeared she had finally earned her spot in the sun. As suggested by The Washington Post, the millennial generation is “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history,” and perhaps Sidney is the unluckiest Final Girl in horror history. She thought she had long dealt with and buried her past, but it always comes back. Always.
Like many in my generation, including myself, Sidney returned to her hometown, and it was like she never left. A new cast of characters, including the franchise queen Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), suggested the town had long moved on, yet a shroud of past trauma hung thick in the air. (No, I’m not talking about that glossy Instagram filter). There’s resentment and anger lobbied at a previous generation, even if it’s misplaced and misguided.
Scream 4 was the first Scream film I ever saw in the theater. I was 25 and in total awe of its very meta-meta-ness (that double opening scene fake-out is chef’s kiss). It encompassed the growing cynicism of my generation through characters like Olivia, Charlie, and Jill. We’d been burned too many times, so we took things less seriously but always called a spade a spade. We forged new creative avenues previous generations didn’t have and learned how to use our anxieties to our advantage. “I don’t need friends; I need fans,” Jill pronounces in the film’s epic finale. We didn’t need or want what previous generations had settled for; we knew we deserved better.
It was a new decade, and the world was once again shifting. The rise of social media, for better or worse, allowed for more, more, more in all areas of our lives. I was only just beginning my writing career at the time, and society’s compulsion to dictate how I should be living my life seemed suffocating. But like Sidney, I fought back and defined the journey on my own terms. Our central heroine comes the closest she’d ever gotten to dying, and thankfully, she didn’t. And that gave me hope again. There’s a necessary resilience you gain only through tragedy, and Sidney had certainly been through it all by now. Scream 4 spoke to me (and it still does) in a way the previous sequels did not.
That is, until the brand new film this year. Scream (2022) pulverized me in a way I did not expect. Another 11 years later, I am now entering my late 30s and find myself in a similar situation as Sidney. She’s married with kids, and I am happily single with cats. The past is firmly in her rear view mirror, and she has vowed never, ever to return to Woodsboro. Of course, life is unpredictable, and a fresh series of attacks draws her back in again.
“Something about this one just feels different,” comments Dewey, a bit weary, over a heartfelt conversation with Sid. Where the mood and tension feel familiar to the first film, everything else is different. Sidney is no longer the target; the killer is far more aggressive; and several key deaths carry significant emotional weight. There are actual stakes that make this entry grounded and real.
I see much of my own life reflected back, like I’m gazing into a mirror. Over the last 11 years, I’ve lost people. Too many people. My last grandparent. My father. My mother. My sister. Countless friends. And I don’t even know what to make of it all. What I do know is death is the one constant in our lives and in our favorite horror movies. We’re disturbingly attracted to it, perhaps. We love to watch death. You’d think it makes it easier to swallow when it happens in real life. We pretend it does, but it doesn’t.
Scream (2022) confronts death, fully and unapologetically, in a way that sets it apart from every other sequel. The opening scene is brutal and visceral, setting up the film’s throbbing urgency. But it wasn’t until Judy’s murder in broad daylight that I realized how serious filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were in handling the material. A level of care had been brought to the table, and they were willing to go to the darkest places, even if it meant killing off beloved characters. I had come to adore Judy in Scream 4, so to see her plead for her son Wes’ life before being unceremoniously slaughtered was heart-wrenching. When Ghostface pops out of the shrubbery, she’s taken by surprise. That’s how death works sometimes. It just happens. And you can never be ready for it. Judy lived her life the best she could, but it still wasn’t enough to save her or her child.
The same can be said for Dewey Riley (David Arquette), whose death had me straight-up bawling my eyes out. Literally. A legacy character, he always cared about others, often putting himself in harm’s way to uphold his civic duty and do what all good samaritans do. In his final moments, after Tara (Jenna Ortega) is attacked for a second time at the hospital, he turns back to put a bullet into Ghostface’s head. Despite Sam’s (Melissa Barrera) “who gives a shit!” plea, he lets the elevator close shut behind him and faces death itself. He empties his revolver to reload, squaring up his stance in front of a seemingly-fallen killer. A call from Gale momentarily distracts him, and that’s all it takes. Ghostface has just enough time to drag their knife from stem to stern, eviscerating his body and letting blood and guts spill across the tile floor. It wasn’t like I was seeing an iconic character be killed (although that is true), I was reliving the pain of losing both parents vicariously on the screen. Dewey’s death meant closing a chapter in my life. You grow older, and you experience tremendous loss. That’s the way of it, plain and simple.
Dewey’s presence pulses through the rest of the film. You might expect his swift exit from the franchise to be deflating, but I found the opposite to be true. His death catapults the story into a bonkers third act that banks hard on unexpected twists and turns, while keeping familiar threads intact. In pursuit of revenge, Sidney and Gale must confront their past, one last time, with cycles of violence, trauma, and survival repeating for the next generation.
In the final scene, a bloody and bruised Sam asks Sidney one simple question: “Am I going to be okay?” Sidney takes a moment and then replies, “Eventually.” Eventually. She’ll eventually no longer be scared to answer the phone or go out late at night. Eventually, she’ll be okay with death. And eventually, she’ll heal.
In the way films like The Final Girls (2015) and Anna & the Apocalypse (2017) have helped me survive my recent brushes with death and grief, Scream (2022) has already proven essential to my recovery. It’s hard to imagine 25 years ago that I would forever be changed by Sidney Prescott and her many escapes from Ghostface. What’s even more, little did I know that the Scream franchise would parallel pivotal moments and transitions in my life and become a centerpiece to the millennial generation. With the latest film’s box office success, I sure do hope we get many more to come. We deserve it.
