The Scream Franchise – The Comfort Movies of Horror

By Brittany Bryan

Growing up, I wasn’t afraid of anything. 

I wasn’t afraid of the dark, it was the lack of color that made me uneasy. I really did like rollercoasters, I just preferred to mainline my adrenaline from the bench, guarding the purses. I was VERY cool with open water, I am only screaming for you to bring the boat back around because I am COLD, Aunt Keri! So WHY then, was I so in love with the twisted, outrageously horrific slasher-movie Scream? In the same summer that I forewent the twist and turns of Miss Six Flags 2001, I binged-watched all three existing Scream movies on VHS. We felt the thrill of figuring out who the killer (killers) might be for the first time. It made no sense, here I was getting my horror movie fix at lunchtime before my 9PM bedtime? The one with multiple night lights?

In my bid to understand everything ever, I set out to understand why I wasn’t afraid of the Scream movies. Far from it, I now own all seven, and I have, more than once, fallen asleep to Scream 3. Perhaps don’t yuck my yum just yet!

In the original Scream, after a series of heartburn-inducing events, we’re led to believe our story’s main character is one played by Drew Barrymore – dressed like a stick of butter in a synthetic wig – but that’s far from the case. Casey Becker is the first victim of the franchise. We’re introduced to the first rendition of Ghostface’s infamous “What’s your favorite scary movie?” line. And then – We meet Sidney. Sidney is super cute. She’s got her poofy bangs and her dial-up internet. Her computer modem is the size of a Prius, God bless 1996. Sidney has a boyfriend, Billy, and he looks more like ‘90s Johnny Depp than Johnny Depp. Oh look! He’s climbing in through her window! Sounds fun, right? No! More on him, later.

Shortly afterward, we meet Gale Weathers, the ambitious and ruthless tabloid reporter. Gale is beautiful. She’s TV ready. She’s got her MAC Spice lip-liner and her radioactive lime-green power-suit. She wrote a book about the murder of Sidney’s mother, Sidney read it (as one does), and Gale gets punched in the face in every single sequel after because of it. 

Dewey Riley arrives onscreen as a sweet little dumb-dumb. He’s the heart of Woodsboro, quite frankly! In the beginning of the series, Dewey is heavily underestimated as a town deputy sheriff. He is very very cute and nice and sweet, so naturally, he has a crush on the malicious Gale. She uses it to manipulate him to get ahead with her story.

These three characters end up dodging Ghostface after Ghostface for THIRTY years, and they save each other’s lives over and over again. By Scream 5, they’ve formed an alliance forged in blood, forever trauma-bonded together. After Scream 5, when we lose Dewey, the “Core Four” slip into place as the next round of survivors-turned-found-family. As a viewer, it’s satisfying to watch this story-arc layout over seven movies. It’s deeply comforting knowing I’ll be able to anchor onto at least one of them whenever I get to fire-up the streaming service for number eight. There exists familiarity in horror movies, sure, but not often of such positive nature!

In the first movie, we meet Randy Meeks early on. He works at the video store, he’s got jokes, and we’re pretty sure he’s in love with Sidney. Randy is my favorite character, because he is the great architect of the logic behind the whole damn franchise itself. There. Are. RULES! A very specific formula of three, to be exact:

1. You can never have sex. 

2. You can’t drink or do drugs.

3. You must never say “I’ll be right back”.

If you know the rules, you can survive.

Indeed, it’s because of Randy’s no-sex rule that he makes it out alive (hardly long enough before we lose him in the sequel, goodbye sweet diva). Through a VHS left behind posthumously in Scream 3, Randy shares his horror-movie-logic legacy and an addendum is added to the rules as the series of killings become chapters in a trilogy. They’re amended again in Scream 6 when the killings become a franchise.

Rules? Not always on board with those, you know? In this case, these specific rules create a structure that we viewers comfortably navigate within from our couches. They provide a sense of security and balance in the otherwise royally unhinged setting of a Scream movie. With the rules, we can be made to feel safe as an audience. We’re gonna outsmart the whole plot so bad! We’re so sure when our favorite characters are safe, and when they are so, so, sooooo not.

The one thing the rules don’t make a pattern of is the ways in which the audience can identify the killer (or, more often, killers). Randy mentions looking at the love interest, but that only occurs with Billy in the first movie, and Richie, Sam’s boyfriend in Scream 5. We’re told to look at the friend group, and that there’s always more than one killer, but both logics are thrown out the window by Scream 3, when Sidney’s estranged brother Roman is revealed to have been the mastermind behind everything up until then. It’s here where another main element arrives to us, because after all — you’ve gotta have a motive, baby.

Motive provides genuine stakes and gives insight into why and how any given masked crazy person got to be so level-one-million type of crazy.  It strips away the common theme in horror movies of the 90s of a senseless killer and gives them full-blown backstories and through this discovery we can understand each specific killer’s emotions and why they are so hell-bent on Sidney in the first place.

The killers in the Scream franchise range in dynamic right from the jump with the psychopathic-yet-brooding Billy, Sidney’s boyfriend. He’s got a one-track mind set on killing her after we find out he killed her mother with Stu Mocker, also psychopathic but my favorite killer because he is so weird and funny and dresses like N’SYNC era Justin Timberlake. Who can forget Stu, covered in his own blood, when he grabs the phone to ask Sidney if she’d really called the cops, “My Mom and Dad are going to be so mad at me!!!!” Turns out all the killers in these movies often are of the same clinically insane flavor! All bets are off in Scream 7, when I was questioning my entire life, worried Sidney was the killer (she is not, it is her neighbor and some guy with a background in AI). But all of the bad guys have the same thing in common, they are real, flesh-and-blood humans. No matter who’s behind the mask, Ghostface is always just a human in a costume who trips over couches, gets hit with beer bottles and makes really dumb mistakes. I see her in that way, I’ve been her at parties!

So there it is – There is something sociological and scientific behind why you and I love the Scream movies so much. They are funny whodunnits dressed up in a scary mask. Real life is chaotic, unpredictable, and without a script. Scream tells the audience exactly what the boundaries are. Within its three major players, Sidney, Gale, and Dewey, we aren't rooting for the bad guy. We are comforting ourselves with the endurance of the survivors. And the killers are mostly idiots. It turns the horror into a solvable whodunit mystery. Consider my fear managed!

Will we get to see Sidney in the next Scream installment? I really, really hope so! But who knows? It only took four sequels to give her a gun!

… & for what it’s worth… 1,3,5,6,4,2,7 ok byeeeeeeeeeeee!