After a 10 year absence, Ghostface is back. The latest installment in the Scream franchise, simply titled Scream, is in theaters now so audiences can watch the masked killer once again terrorize the frictional town of Woodsboro, California. The original trio of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette) are all back, trying to survive alongside a new roster of teens that Ghostface seems keen on stabbing a bunch.
Naturally, since this is a Scream movie, there’s plenty of relentless violence, self-referential humor, and many moments of the creepily-voiced Ghostface taunting his would-be victims over the phone. All of which teases the major question of every Scream movie:Who’s under the mask? And which characters are we going to see die by the knife? There’s plenty to talk about from this film and, honestly, so much happens that you might have missed something when you sat down to watch the film, so let’s go over it all.
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for Scream, the latest film in the franchise. If you haven’t seen the movie, that’s your cue to walk away now, or else everything you don’t want ruined about the movie is going to be spelled out for you.
Who dies
While the body count in this movie might not seem as high as in some past films, there are a number of notable deaths for us to dig through.
Dewey Riley: This one hurts most of all. Dewey is killed by Ghostface in the new film. The last few years haven’t been kind to our beloved Deputy/Sheriff Dewey. After he and Gale split up, he lost his job as Sheriff and was now living in a trailer. He never stopped loving his ex-wife, though, and he was looking for a way to reclaim his good name in Woodsboro, by taking care of Ghostface once again.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way as he was quite literally gutted by the masked killer. All it took was a knife in the stomach and a knife in the lower back–both of which were ripped up his body–to finally put Dewey to rest. And, funnily enough, his death was teased early on in the film when he explained that he’d already been stabbed nine times. Much like a cat, his nine lives were up.
Sheriff Judy Hicks: After Dewey left the Sheriff’s office, he was replaced by the former Deputy Judy (Marley Shelton). Sure, Gale thought her lemon squares tasted like ass in Scream 4 but in the new movie, we get to learn quite a bit more about Judy, including the fact that she has a son named Wes. She also just so happens to be a fantastic Woodsboro Sheriff, from the looks of it.
Sadly, she doesn’t make it out of the movie alive, being stabbed to death in front of her own home, while racing home to save her son from Ghostface. Who on earth would want to be the next Sheriff, after all of that?
Wes Hicks: Just after killing off Judy, Ghostface turns to her son Wes (Dylan Minette) and takes care of him, as well. It’s a bad day for the Hicks family.
Vince Schneider: We don’t learn much about Vince (Kyle Gallner), other than he has a summer fling with Amber, drives a cool car, and seems like a scumbag. Perhaps that’s why it was so surprising that he was targeted by Ghostface and killed outside of a bar. Of course, after that we also find out he was none other than Stu Macher’s nephew. Coincidence? Absolutely not.
Liv: This one hurt, as Liv made it to almost the end of the film, before being shot by an unmasked Ghostface. She’s also the last of the principal cast to go before the ultra-violent climax of the film.
Who is Ghostface
After all of the murdering, surely you want to know who Ghostface is. It turns out, as has been the case for every Scream save for the third installment, there are actually two people under the mask. In this movie, it’s Tara’s (Jenna Ortega) best friend Amber (Mikey Madison) and Sam’s (Melissa Barerra) boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) doing the killing. And their reason is ridiculous in all the best ways.
As it turns out, both Amber and Richie are superfans of the movie series Stab–based on the original film. Sam became an obsessed fan after her parents bought the house Stu lived in, otherwise known as the location of the climax of the first Scream movie. However, when the eighth film “directed by the Knives Out guy” ruined the franchise, in their eyes, they felt compelled to make their own reboot–and what better place to do it than in the house Stu and Billy faced their last stand? After finding each other on Reddit, they concocted a plan wherein Richie would track down Sam and start a relationship with her, solely to bring her back to Woodsboro to protect her baby sister Tara.
Why is Sam so central to the new Ghostface’s plan, you wonder? Because, as it turns out, she’s also the daughter of–wait for it–Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich)! That’s right, Billy Loomis was secretly cheating on Sidney in the first film, it seems. Now, his daughter Sam is having visions of him in her daily life, care of a digitally de-aged Ulrich.
Richie and Amber’s plan is to frame the daughter of Billy Loomis for the new killings, with them being the sole survivors that make it out alive to tell the tale and reignite Stab. That doesn’t work, though. Instead, the two end up dead, while Sidney, Gale, Sam, Tara, and the twins Mindy and Chad (the niece and nephew of Randy) walk away alive. As for a potential next Stab movie or book from Gale, she says she plans to write the story of Dewey Riley instead. We can’t wait to see the Dewey biopic.
Scream is in theaters now.
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