return of original final girl Sidney Prescott<\/a>, played by Neve Campbell, who chose not to return to the franchise for Scream 6 due to a financial dispute. The movie focuses on Sidney protecting her daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), after she becomes Ghostface\u2019s next intended victim. Courteney Cox\u2019s dogged reporter Gale Weathers, who has appeared in every film, will be back as well.<\/p>\nBut while Scream is slashing in a new direction, it never hurts to brush up on your scary movie knowledge. (You know, just in case Ghostface calls and asks you trivia questions\u2026 IYKYK.)<\/p>\n
How did \u2018Scream\u2019 start? Who was the original Ghostface?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first Scream, which was released in 1996 and directed by Wes Craven, follows Woodsboro high school student Sidney, whose mother was murdered a year earlier. When two students are brutally killed by a person wearing a Ghostface mask, it reawakens Sidney\u2019s old trauma and makes her reconsider whether Cotton (Liev Schreiber), the man she pointed to as her mother\u2019s murderer, was really innocent. When the killer starts taunting Sidney \u2014\u00a0and then picking off her friends, one by one \u2014\u00a0it becomes clear that the killers are sending a message, and that it all ties back to Sidney\u2019s mother\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
At the end of the film, Sidney\u2019s boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu (Matthew Lillard) reveal that they are the murderers. They killed Sidney\u2019s mom as revenge for her having an affair with Billy\u2019s dad, and now they want to kill Sidney too.<\/p>\n
In true final girl fashion, Sidney is able to kill both Billy and Stu before they can deliver the final blow \u2014\u00a0all with the help of Gale and Deputy Dewey (David Arquette).<\/p>\n
But Scream isn\u2019t just a slasher or a murder mystery: it\u2019s also a commentary on the genre, with each of the characters well aware of the \u201crules\u201d of the movie that they\u2019re in. Randy (Jamie Kennedy), Sidney\u2019s friend and the franchise\u2019s first movie obsessive, spells out exactly how to survive: Don\u2019t have sex, don\u2019t drink or do drugs, and never say \u201cI\u2019ll be right back,\u201d because, well, you won\u2019t be.<\/p>\n
As the franchise goes on, most of the character motivations tie back to \u201cthe movies\u201d in some way or another. In Scream 2, for example, one of the killers, Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), says that he\u2019s going to blame onscreen violence in horror movies for his crimes at his upcoming murder trial. (He\u2019s shot and killed by Laurie Metcalf\u2019s Nancy Loomis, the real mastermind behind the operation and Billy\u2019s vengeful mother.) And things get super meta as Scream introduces the Stab franchise \u2014\u00a0a tongue-in-cheek cinematic version of the events of the Scream movies \u2014\u00a0that star Tori Spelling and introduce the whole world to Sidney\u2019s trauma.<\/p>\n
What happens in the later \u2018Scream\u2019 movies? How might they tie into this one?\u00a0<\/p>\n
After Scream 4 hit theaters in 2011, it took more than a decade to see Ghostface back on the big screen. With Craven\u2019s death in 2015, 2022\u2019s Scream 5 was the first to not be directed by the horror filmmaker and set a new path for the franchise.<\/p>\n
Scream 5 (marketed as simply Scream) follows Sam, a young woman estranged from her sister, Tara, after a mysterious family falling-out. When Tara is attacked by Ghostface, Sam returns to Woodsboro and meets Tara\u2019s friends \u2014 many of whom happen to be relatives of characters from previous Scream movies. That includes Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding), twins who are the niece and nephew of Sidney\u2019s pal Randy. It\u2019s Mindy who declares that the new crew is in a \u201crequel,\u201d which is a combo of a reboot and a sequel \u2014 and it has its own rules to live by.<\/p>\n
But it is Sam who has the deepest connection to Scream lore, as she reveals she\u2019s actually the biological daughter of Billy, the killer from the first movie. (Turns out Billy was a bad boyfriend for a lot of reasons, because he also apparently cheated on Sidney in high school.) Sam\u2019s also been seeing hallucinations of her dead dad, and left her family out of concern that she was just as twisted as Billy was.<\/p>\n
As Ghostface picks more people off during this round of Woodsboro slashings \u2014\u00a0including OG character Dewey, estranged from his on-again, off-again love Gale \u2014 Sidney returns to town to help Sam deal with the bloodshed. Unfortunately for Sam, she and Sidney have a lot in common: It turns out that Sam\u2019s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) is the killer \u2026 and he\u2019s working with Tara\u2019s best friend Amber (Mikey Madison). The reason? They\u2019re disappointed with the direction the Stab franchise is taking and want to create new killings to inspire better films. Meta!<\/p>\n
Scream 6, the most recent film in the franchise, follows many of the surviving characters from Scream 5 as they attend college in New York. Unfortunately, a new crop of Ghostface killers make it incredibly hard to enjoy the Big Apple, and Sam must protect her sister yet again.<\/p>\n
While Sidney does not return for Scream 6, Gale does \u2014\u00a0as does Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), a fan-favorite survivor of Scream 4. The killers are ultimately revealed to be family members of Richie from the previous films, an echo of Scream 2, in which Billy\u2019s mother (Laurie Metcalf) was the mastermind of Sidney\u2019s own killings in college.<\/p>\n
Scream 6 left Sam and Tara in a safer place, with Sam choosing to see herself as a heroine instead of the child of a Ghostface killer. Now, however, it\u2019s unclear if there will be any additional wrap-up for Sam and Tara, or if Scream 6 was the last time we\u2019ll hear of them. The Meeks-Martin twins, however, are returning to the franchise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do you like scary movies? If so, good news: Scream 7 hits theaters this Friday, just shy of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,224346,27374,224345,206,224344,22525,169554,223059],"class_list":{"0":"post-488400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-gale-weathers","10":"tag-ghostface","11":"tag-ghostface-billy-loomis","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-sam-carpenter","14":"tag-scream","15":"tag-scream-6","16":"tag-sidney-prescott"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}