Final girl

Sarah Century on the behind-the-scenes disputes driving the destiny of Scream's original final girl.

It’s December 1996, and you made it to the theater in time to catch the first Scream. The serial slasher Ghostface calls the teenaged Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who is alone in her enormous house in the California suburbs, and asks “Do you like scary movies?” This is no prank call. A similarly menacing voice asked Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) the same question before she was brutally murdered a few scenes before. We know that; Sidney doesn't. She likely hasn't seen When A Stranger Calls (1979), in which the protagonist (Carol Kane) answers the phone and is told that the threatening calls she’s been receiving are, in fact, coming from inside the house.

Sidney replies that she doesn’t watch horror movies at all, explaining, "They're all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act, who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting."

Sidney might not like horror movies, but this observation is in direct conversation with the public perception of the genre in the 90s. After all, Scream famously walks a fine line between criticizing and praising 80s slashers for their formulaic qualities, including every trope she lists above. Sidney has long been praised as one of the premiere “Final Girls,” a term coined in Caroline Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws. The book was originally released a few years before the first film, and Scream’s media-savvy dialogue shows at least a passing awareness of Clover’s commentary on slashers. The “rules” for surviving a horror film that Randy (Jamie Kennedy) passionately yells to a group of drunk teenagers in the first Scream film? Clover dissected each of them in Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Audiences today tend to have a more expansive view of horror that includes feminist criticism and creators, and that’s due in part to critics like Clover, and, well, Sidney. 

For the record, Sidney is a great final girl. She’s not the first and she’s not the last, but it’s impossible not to root for her. She’s the center of every film until the fifth, at which time she becomes a support character for the new kids, the Carpenter sisters, Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenny Ortega). However, Sidney was not in Scream 6; Campbell declined the role due to pay disparity issues.

Now, even the siblings that Scream 7 was intended to center on have departed—Barrera was fired in a massively unpopular move from Spyglass Entertainment. Then, Ortega and director Christopher Landon left, with Landon stating, “It was a dream job that turned into a nightmare.” What this means for the series, we don’t know. And so, for a franchise long championed as a feminist-leaning response to horror, the behind-the-scenes slashings are what’s been taking the center stage.

THE HORRORS CONTINUE