Scream 4 - When a core character needs to die

Note: The second half of this article contains many spoilers about who does and doesn't survive Scream 4, (as well as Serenity.) You have been warned.

When writing a thriller or an action movie, one of the most important things a writer can convey is the sense that the script might have the stones to do the unpredictable and actually knock off a main character or two before the end. I believe this is what Blake Snyder called, "the whiff of death."

One recent film that really conveyed this feeling was Taken. Part of the reason I got drawn into the script is there was just something about the tone that gave me the sense the filmmakers would have the balls to end the film on a dark note. It was the kind of film that could have ended with Liam Neeson failing, and his daughter winding up either dead or sold into sexual slavery. The brilliant thing about that is that once you convince the audience that the unpleasant is possible, the "happy ending" is so much more of a relief and release.

Sometimes in order to make these stakes real, you've got to sacrifice a beloved character. The thinking is that if the audience sees you gun down an audience favorite, you've proven that affection for the characters alone won't save them and everyone is fair game. Supposedly, when Return of the Jedi was being developed, screenwriter Lawrence Kasden was a major proponent for killing off one of the core characters at some point in the story. He felt it would have been more powerful for the Rebel victory to come at some cost, and he was a major advocate for killing a character early in Act Three, so that the audience would worry that they were just the first of several.

In most accounts, Lando is the character considered most expendable, and he would have been killed after detonating the Death Star and failing to escape the blast in time. Harrison Ford was also a major proponent of killing off Han Solo, feeling the character had nowhere to go, so he might as well die and give the whole story some resonance. As you know, all the heroes came out unscathed, and it's possible the film wouldn't have been as big a hit if Han bit the dust. Then again, if that had been part of the plan from the start, perhaps it would have helped set the tone of the film more in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. (Or it would have clashed like hell with the kid-friendly Ewoks, making the film even more uneven as a result.)

Serenity is a good example of this detail being executed properly. The film was spun off from the TV series Firefly and was hoped to be the first of several films with the TV cast. This made it all the more shocking when little more than halfway through the script, the Shepherd Book is killed. Even more traumatic to fans, less than half an hour later, beloved pilot Wash is swiftly killed after getting the ship on the ground mid-battle.

Two much-liked characters dead - and what does the film gain? Tension. Writer/director Joss Whedon used those deaths to set the stage for a climactic final battle where most of the survivors are in the middle of a pitched battle against the ravenous Reavers. Suddenly it doesn't seem unlikely that Whedon might go for an ending that has ALL of the Serenity crew go down in battle, and sure enough, as the fight progresses, there's a moment where it seems everyone's in mortal danger. Even when River ensures everyone else's safety and takes on the horde herself, we're still not sure that her noble sacrifice won't be a permanent one. There's only one thing we're sure of about the ending - anything can happen.

Fans still call for Whedon's head for killing Wash, but what that loss did for the climax is immeasurable. The alternative would have been a case like the original Star Trek, where very week you knew that if someone was going to die, it'd only be the nameless extra who beamed down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Kill a core character, and suddenly everyone feels like fair game.

Which brings me to Scream 4. Last week I said that I hoped that Neve Campbell's Sidney wouldn't be killed off over the course of the film, especially as part of a bid to hand off the franchise to younger characters. Even after seeing the film, I still stand by that thought. Sidney IS the franchise and the neatest trick of this latest sequel is that rather than diminishing that, it's a flat-out confirmation of that fact.

I might as well just say this flat-out - the film completely cleans house on the new teenage cast. None of the fresh-faced CW types make it out of this film alive, nor do any of the other new characters, save for Marley Shelton's Deputy Judy. The returning characters of Sidney, Gale Weathers and Dewey Riley all survive to the final fade-out. After seeing the film, I feel like there should have been one core-cast death ala Wash, as it would have lent more tension to the climax when Sidney seems VERY likely to meet her maker.

There's a scene about halfway through the film where Gale encounters the killer and gets stabbed a few times. Dewey is quickly on the scene too and has a brief tussle with the killer before he (or she) gets away. Despite a very brief attempt to convince us that Gale might die, it's pretty clear by the time we see her at the hospital that if they were going to kill her, they'd have done it already.

One of Scream 2's best decisions was killing off Randy. No one wanted to see Randy die - he was one of the fan favorites from the first film. He was part of the core group who returned from the original so there was the sense that he was a bit more invincible, and he CERTAINLY wasn't supposed to be killed mid-movie. When Randy was killed partway through the film, it lent the sense that an even bigger casualty was possible later.

In my humble opinion, that's what Scream 4 was missing, but I'm not naive enough to think that the option was never discussed. I've worked in development when these sorts of franchise films are being developed and there's always a point where the possibility of killing a core character is considered. Maybe the filmmakers still regretted killing off Randy and got gunshy about offing another "regular." Maybe the actor in question balked at coming back just to die, or maybe the studio worried about what would happen if one of the core three died. We can't know, but I'm sure it was on the table at some point.

The issue is made a little bigger by the fact that neither Gale nor Dewey have an especially integral role to the story, and there's very little they have to accomplish after their brush with Ghostface (save for their role in the climax.) Killing one of them might have energized the character arc of the other, and given that character a stronger emotional arc to play.

My preference probably would have been to use Gale's horrible wound as a red herring and then - while the audience is still reeling at the possibility that she might bleed to death - have the killer finish off Dewey. This helps in several ways. First, Dewey's survived severe stabbings in all of the other films. When he first goes down, the audience might expect another fakeout - giving his death that much more impact. Secondly, as the only "new" character to survive to the end is the Deputy, we've already got someone who can fill Dewey's role in the climax of the film. Finally, it means that Gale gets the story she's been trying to find, but it comes at the cost of her husband.

And of course, this means that when the killer stabs Sidney in the gut and it looks like we're seeing the series heroine bleed to death, the first thing in our minds is, "They killed Dewey, Gale's hanging on by a thread, so they're probably cleaning house and this really is it for Sidney."

(I will admit that I'm so used to trying to out-think the creators that when Sidney was stabbed, I didn't dismiss it as a fake out, for I assumed that NOT killing Gale earlier was to lull us into a false sense of security that our old friends would make it out alive. Basically, I didn't trust them not to reverse the reversal.)

In the end, I don't think this is a huge black mark against the film. In fact, given the way the Cox/Arquette relationship talk dominated some of the press for this film, actually killing off one of those two might have only lead to some uncomfortable speculation about behind-the-scenes tensions.

But I can't help but wonder - if Dewey died, how would that have affected the reaction in the theater when Sidney takes what appears to be a mortal wound? I bet it would have led to even bigger cheers when she tells the killer: "First rule of remakes - Don't fuck with the original."

The opening of Scream 4 - expectations and misdirection

NOTE: Heavy spoilers for the first 15 minutes of Scream 4 follow, plus some vague spoilers for the rest of the film.

Since I've devoted several posts to the Scream franchise in the past, one as recently as last week, I wasn't surprised when I got a few Tweets and emails asking for my take on the latest entry in the series, Scream 4. Not wanting to ruin the surprises of the film, I went mostly radio-silent about it on Twitter, except to say that I enjoyed the film. I didn't think it was the equal of the first one, but let's be honest - topping the first one would have been almost impossible. I was hoping it would be better than Scream 3, and on that order it delivered, coming in more or less even with Scream 2.

I've harped a lot on the importance of a strong opening in a film. The best specs I read usually have an opening sequence that defines the film and its world in an incredibly effective way. The worst tend to just lazily drop us into the world and trot the main characters out one by one. The original Scream had an unforgettable opening that just oozed tension. Once you watched it, the only way you weren't going to stick around for the rest was if you scared easily. In both Scream sequels, the opening kills have often been some of the better executed sequences in the film, so the new movie had it's work cut out for it.

The opening scene initially left me disappointed, until I got what the creators were going for. We open with two teens - played by Pretty Little Liars' Lucy Hale and 90210's Shenae Grimes - who pretty much embody everything the original Scream characters weren't. One is dumb enough to keep talking to a Facebook stalker, and another one when faced with a threatening phone call from the killer, first hangs up, and then later passes the phone to her friend. (Grimes by the way, makes ZERO effort to distinguish this character from her 90210 role, right down to the same acting ticks.) Moments later, these girls are dumb enough to actually open the front door when it might as well be flashing "KILLER ON THE OTHER SIDE."

So it's no shock when these two are swiftly dispatched, and just as I'm thinking "Wow, that was oddly tensionless for a Scream opening," the title card for Stab 5 comes up and I realize the joke is on me. It puts a clever spin on what we just saw. After all, in a world where Stab 5 is supposed to be of questionable quality, Shenae Grimes WOULD be its Drew Barrymore. Consider that a point for the casting people. (This is probably the best place to note that Scream 4 continues the series tradition of strong casting, not just for the genre, but for a feature in general.)

Enter Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell as the viewers of the aforementioned Stab sequel, cue the usual meta speech about how horror films are trapped in their old habits and aren't surprising anymore. (The meta perhaps is carried out a beat longer than necessary, but again, I'm betting that's intentional) Then, surprise the hell out of the audience by having Bell stab Paquin and ask, "Are you surprised?" As I'm thinking, "Are they really tipping their hand on one of the killers this early?"cue the title card for Stab 6.

Inspired. Rather than go for the scares, Williamson and Craven take more of a chance and go for the in-jokes, making it clear that whenever someone criticizes the Stab films, we should read that as "every bad horror film of the last ten years." Just as I'm thinking, "Wait... how can Stab 5 be happening inside Stab 6 and still be a coherent franchise" the film literally verbalizes my thoughts through the character played by Britt Robertson, who's watching Stab 6 with a character played by Aimee Teegarden.

That instilled me with a lot of faith that the film was in the hands of people with a mindset like mine, and who were going to ask the questions that a smart viewer would ask. Scream was the godfather of staying one step ahead of the audience and then using that lead to confuse the hell out of them. After Robertson and Teegarden do some due diligence on exposition, they're dispatched rather quickly. As a scary scene, it's easily the least impressive of the four films, likely because the creators realized that it would be impossible building up any sort of tension immediately after the two false openings. Overall, I think the opening works.

From there we move on to a scene that introduces Sidney's young cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), and her friends Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Olivia (Marielle Jaffe.) Given that Olivia looks a good five years older than the girls and seems to have stepped right out of a modeling catalog, you'd do well to wager that she's going to be the "early kill who ends up in a state of undress." The girls chatter about Jill's creepy ex-boyfriend bothering them all, and any fan of this series knows that means he's being set-up to be either the killer or a red herring that'll be called into service throughout the film. Not bad for a guy who hasn't even showed up yet. Then we go to school and meet even more new teens, in a way that doesn't precisely mirror the original Scream even as it evokes the spirit of those scenes. It doesn't feel like Scream so much as Scream: The Next Generation.

And that is probably the slickest bit of misdirection here. By going straight into the new cast, complete with proto-Sidney in the form of Jill, we're made to subliminally see this film as a passing of the torch. The opening seems to be saying, "Here's the new cast - enjoy the cameos by your old friends, but you'll be seeing a lot of these young faces in the inevitable sequel."

After all, that's how these franchises work. Slasher films are largely a teen-driven affair, and when the actors outgrow their parts, they're replaced by new ingenues. Actually, that's true in other genres. One day you're playing Danny in Grease, the next you're playing the DJ at the dance. Basically, by bringing in so much fresh blood, we seem to be primed for the old-timers to drop one-by-one.

And yet, once again, Williamson and Craven find a way to use our expectations against us. If you saw the film this weekend, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

Scream's Sidney Prescott: Horror's greatest heroine

I'm anticipating this week's release of Scream 4 with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. I've said before that the original Scream is not only my favorite horror movie, it's one of my all-time favorite movies, period. In fact, it's pretty much the movie that made me a horror fan. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and you have to remember that that was a period where a proliferation of inferior sequels really tarnished the genre. The endless Friday the 13ths might have made a decent amount of money, but they and their kind really contributed to the perception that horror films were mindless, bloody and exploitative affairs. There wasn't much respect for that genre in general.

So as I was becoming "movie aware" right in the middle of this trend, Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers held no appeal for me. Slice and dice affairs weren't my kind of movie, and it's not as if the latter chapters in those franchises and their imitators offered much counterarguement to the notion that those films were trash. I remember the hype over Freddy's death, even though I had zero interest in the film, though I do recall being intrigued when I heard the following sequel took place in "the real world" and actually commented on the horror genre. I still wasn't intrigued enough to go see it though.

And then came Scream - which I initially dismissed as more trash. (Yes, even at sixteen I was a movie snob.) I don't think I even saw it until a few months after its release and I was instantly a fan because it was such a smart film. It was a horror movie for people who were smarter than the genre. If you haven't read it yet, check out my post on what you can learn from the original Scream. Scream 2 continued that tradition, and even though I was largely disappointed by Scream 3, it was still better than many of the imitators. So it's a given that I'm going to be there for the opening of Scream 4.

However, my trepidation comes from the concern that this time they might actually kill Sidney (Neve Cambpell.) I've spoken about this fear before, so I don't want to repeat myself too much. Instead, I want to talk about the impact of Sidney Prescott.

Back in college, I ran what was basically a half-hour teen drama that was intended to air on our school's fledgling cable network. (The network itself ended up crashing and burning, but that's beside the point.) I quickly decided that one of my central characters had to be an assertive female character. As I developed the character, like most writers, I found myself using a shorthand to describe her, citing other influences.

Remember, this is 2000, the height of the WB and after many, many assertive, strong, and/or ass-kicking heroines had invaded pop culture. So did I compare my lead to Buffy Summers? Joey Potter? Jen Lindley? Felicity? Angela Chase? Those were the leading teen heroines of that day, but they weren't my point of reference.

No. Without hesitation I picked Sidney Prescott, who was not only horror's greatest heroine, but possibly one of the strongest modern teen females ever created. She's perhaps the best-realized version of the girl-next-door turned heroine. When she takes on the killer, she doesn't have the advantage of super powers, cool weapons or military training (ala Buffy, Ripley, or Sydney Bristow.) She's also got her shit together a lot better than some of the WB female leads of the day, who tended towards mopeyness, martyrdom, and wallowing in their own baggage.

Yes, like most heroines, she's got some issues from a dead parent, but unlike say Lana Lang or Joey Potter, those issues don't DEFINE her. The wound is there, but it's not stopping her from interacting normally with her friends and it doesn't feel like she uses every conversation as an excuse to pick at that scab. She has friends, she's well-adjusted and she's generally likable. You get the sense you could carry on a conversation with young Sidney, and not once get the urge to smack her, or feel like she's making it all about herself.

I'm aware she's a descendant of Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy and Halloween's Laurie, but I feel she is a successor that improves on the original. They're both icons in their own right, but Sidney is a better-realized character in my opinion.

(So yeah, I'll cop to the fact that when I was in high school, I totally would have gone for the Sidney Prescott type. It was my bad luck we really didn't have any in my class. However, I honestly think that every female lead I've written owes a lot to the impression Sidney Prescott made on my teenage brain.)

Better still, when the time comes, she actually uses her head. She's blindsided by the reveal of the killer, but the plot doesn't turn her into an idiot to pull this off. She makes questionable choices, but not stupid ones and it never feels like the script makes her brain-dead for the sake of advancing the plot. She's smart, she's likable, and she's emotionally mature, which is sadly kind of rare in teen characters, male and female.

But the real reason I think Sidney is horror's strongest heroine is who she becomes in the sequel. After all she's been through, she's still strong enough to not let it get her down. Her mother's been murdered, her friends have been killed and she herself narrowly escaped that same fate. That'd be enough trauma to turn anyone into a basket case, but no, she goes off to college, she has a social life, and she's almost jaded about the prank phone calls she gets.

Sidney is no victim. And she's got her shit together. It's part of her past, and ONLY when it's clear that someone is actively stalking her does she really let it get to her and mess with her mind.

This is partially why I'm less of a fan of Scream 3. Not only is Sidney's participation greatly reduced, but the character herself is shown to be living in seclusion, shutting herself off from society and people in general. I get that some of that was done to accommodate the fact that Neve Campbell only could work some 20 days on the film, but it's frustrating to see that in between parts 2 and 3, the killer essentially beat Sidney and drove her into hiding. Even though the "real" Sidney seems to reassert herself by the end of the film, I had a hard time recognizing the Sidney we rediscover early on as the same girl from the first two films.

In Scream 4, I hope to see more of the character who was the emotional core of the first two films. I'm sure the younger characters will dominate in terms of screentime, but even if Sidney's role is as limited as, say, Leonard Nimoy's in J.J. Abram's Star Trek, as long as the character is true to herself, I'll be happy.

And yes, it would be a shame if the film featured Sidney's death, but if the character has to die, I hope it's handled in a way that honors the character, and is a worthy death in some way. Kevin Williamson, Wes Craven and Neve Campbell have created one of the genres best characters, and it would be unfortunate to see that tarnished by an undignified exit. However, I have faith that these players wouldn't have teamed up again after so long if they didn't feel as strongly about honoring the character as I do.