It’s easy to root for the nice guy. One of the most reliable tropes across storytelling is good versus evil. It could be angels versus demons, warriors of purity against corrupted gods, sheriffs versus bandits, or superheroes versus supervillains, but wherever you look, we see the same story being retold. In slasher movies,that force of good is usually a final girl- a nice, sweet character who is hardened by the situation she finds herself in, who overcomes an unstoppable killer with a convoluted and shallow motive, making it easier than ever to draw the line between good and evil. In Scream 6 though, our final girl is a total bitch, and it gives her the strength to carry the franchise.
Mild spoilers for Scream 6 and major spoilers for Scream (2022) follow
Scream 6 is the first movie without Sidney Prescott after a deal could not be struck with Neve Campbell, although the last movie (which I’m calling Scream 5 to avoid confusion) saw the handover from Sydney to Sam Carpenter, as Melissa Barrera became the face of the franchise. Here, Sam has full control of the movie, and the script allows her to shine. In most cases, as with Sidney, the final girl in these sorts of movies is sweet, pleasant, and either popular or that dorkily relatable sort of unpopular we see in movies that only makes the audience like them more. With Sam, that’s not the case.
Related:Don’t Blame Wokeness When The Marvels FailsSam is not a nice person who can be cold, harsh, and violent when she needs to be. She’s a cold, harsh, and violent person who can occasionally be nice. In Scream 5, she is haunted by visions of her late father Billy Loomis (one of the original Ghostfaces) and overprotective of her sister to the point of hindrance. She shuts everyone out and often comes across as mean and aggressive. The irony is the one person who seems able to get through to her is her boyfriend Richie Kirsch, who turns out to be the killer.
As Scream 6 takes great pains to remind us, Sam’s revenge against Richie is an extension of her character. She doesn’t get the drop on him and stab him once through the heart, before rolling away and gasping for breath, holding back tears. Instead, she stabs him over 20 times and slits his throat in an act of violent retribution we normally see only enacted by our villain.
Likewise, in Scream 6, one of Sam’s earliest scenes show her tasering a man in the crotch after he tries to take her sister upstairs while she’s drunk at a party. It’s justified so we never dislike Sam, but Chad (the movie’s gentle giant) already had the situation under control. Sidney (nor Laurie Strode, not Sally Hardesty, nor Nancy Thompson) would have been more likely to resolve the situation comedically with the threat of violence and a quip, not a serious act of bodily harm the way Sam does.
Sam is not beloved in her world either, with a swirling conspiracy theory that she was the real killer in Scream 5. This makes her angrier and colder, and while she does seem sweeter with her group of friends, she’s still very guarded. They’re not really her friends at all, they’re her sisters’ friends, and said sister resents her constant presence in her life. As an audience, we’re never given reason to hate Sam - she has our sympathy, even if she does not have the world’s - but we’re constantly reminded that Sam is a very different final girl.
Most final girls will flee, winning their victory either with a weapon of circumstance or, in the case of Sally Hardesty, simply by the act of fleeing. But Sam arms herself with an array of violent weaponry and does not hesitate to use it in the most brutal of ways. In one scene, Sam in her grey, blood-soaked vest, wanders through the shadows with her weapon raised. To me, it recalled images of Tomb Raider, but it’s also the sort of stoicism in the face of violence we associate more with the killers. Take away their motivations and the mask, and there’s little to distinguish Sam’s kills from Ghostface’s.
This is in complete contrast to her sister Tara, who would be the ideal final girl. Tara is nice, sweet, popular, and embodies the usual ‘nice person who can be violent’ tropes. In fact, one of her kills in the movie is a single blow, delivered cleanly, with a clever quip, before rolling away, breathless and overwhelmed. All the ingredients are there for Tara to be the star, and on a meta level, she’s also a more famous actor in Jenna Ortega. But the film is smart to give it over to Sam, allowing Scream to feel fresh while staying loyal to the genre it understands perfectly.
We’ve seen other movies play with the slasher tropes recently too. A hallmark of the final girl is innocence and purity, but in X, the final girl is a porn star.Pearl, the prequel to X, even makes the killer the protagonist. Freaky merges the slasher with the body swap comedy, meaning the sweet and naive final girl is the killer, and the disgusting lowlife is the scared and pure survivor.Scream has always been a meta series that deconstructs tropeswithout the disdainful irony we see fromother rejections of conventions. Essentially, Scream loves being a slasher, but it wants to keep you on your toes. Sam is the ideal lead for that.
A Scream ‘requel’ always felt like a risk, but the series is now two for two on delivering clever, meta horror movies that challenge viewer’s expectations while still putting enjoyment front and centre. Sam Carpenter is the series’ leading light, and a new type of final girl. We’ve rooted for the nice girl long enough. As someone whose all-time favourite Scream character is Jill Roberts, it feels good to be able to root for the bitch.
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