Tomorrow marks the release of Scream 4, and to say that I am excited is a gross understatement. I am not particularly fond of scary movies (and especially not the torture-porn gross fests of recent years), but the Scream franchise is always a favorite of mine. Firstly, it’s incredibly meta and self-referencing. One of my least favorite things in scary movies is when characters act as though they’ve never heard of a scary movie before in their lives, and it’s exhausting. If anything, the characters in Scream know way too much about scary movies and talk about slasher movies as if everyone is watching them, all the time. They know the conventions of killers, yet they still fall into their traps. Death, it seems, is inevitable.
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| Who will the killers be this time? |
Scream movies are also a cut above the rest by being ball-droppingly hilarious. Half of the characters are in the films for comedic effect, and usually the jokes land (except for in the not funny, not good, but not terrible Scream 3). Scream again succeeds by having very human killers. The stabbers in Scream don’t attack you in your nightmares or trap you in a room and force you to chop off your own limbs. No, they just run at you with a knife, occasionally tripping over an ottoman or falling prey to a well-aimed freezer door. These aren’t the killers of dreams, these are just regular serial killers, which makes them all the more frightening.
What really makes these movies interesting is the characters, who are interesting, vital, and (though often ultimately dead) feel very much alive. So, in an effort to still my beating heart (beating in fear and anticipation), I will attempt to look back and rank all of the characters in the Scream franchise. It’s incredibly subjective, so I look forward to your dissension in the comments [Major Spoilers Ahead]:
