.jpg)
The Scream Franchise: A Complete Guide to Every Kill, Twist, and Unmasking
- Sakshi D
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 30
Six films, a dozen ghostfaces, and one very tired final girl
Horror in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was a mess. Iconic slasher franchises had devolved into self-parody. Freddy Krueger was telling bad jokes. Nobody was scared anymore. Then Wes Craven, the man who built the genre, burned it all down and rebuilt it.
Scream arrived in 1996 and changed everything. It assumed its characters watched scary movies, killed its biggest star in the first ten minutes, and made the audience feel smarter than the killer, then proved they weren’t.
Six films and three decades later, Ghostface is still out there. And Sidney Prescott still can’t catch a break.
The Scream Franchise (1996): The One That Started It All
Drew Barrymore was the biggest name on the poster, but Craven killed her in the cold open. That set the tone for everything.
Sidney Prescott is still processing her mother, Maureen’s, murder from the year before. Cotton Weary is in prison for it. Sidney has doubts. Ghostface starts stalking her friend group, horror nerd Randy lays out the three rules of surviving a slasher, and Sidney’s boyfriend, Billy Loomis, has terrible timing throughout.
At Stu Macher’s house party, the kills stack up fast. Tatum dies in a garage door. Dewey gets stabbed. Gail crashes her news van.
Then the reveal: Billy and Stu are the killers. Billy murdered Maureen because she was sleeping with his dad. Stu is there for the vibes.
Sidney survives by putting on the Ghostface costume herself, dropping a TV on Stu, and shooting Billy in the head after his dramatic curtain call. Cotton is still in prison, and of course, Gail breaks the story.
Scream 2 (1997): Bigger, Bloodier, Still Meta
Hollywood turned Gail’s book into a movie called Stab. Someone uses the premiere as a murder scene. The copycat killer follows Sidney to Windsor College, where Randy, Dewey, and Gail all show up, along with Cotton Weary, who wants to parlay his exoneration into a Diane Sawyer interview.
Randy gets pulled into a news van in broad daylight and stabbed to death before finishing the third rule of sequels. This haunts me personally.
The killers are Mickey, who wants a celebrity trial he can blame on violent movies, and Debbie Salt, who is actually Billy’s mother, Nancy Loomis, there for old-fashioned revenge.
Nancy kills Mickey because his plan was stupid, which is fair, then:
Cotton shoots Nancy
Sidney finishes her off
Cotton gets his fame
Sidney lets him have it
You might like No Good Deed Netflix Series Review
Scream 3 (2000): Everything Leads Back to Maureen
Cotton has a talk show now, and Ghostface kills him for refusing to give up Sidney’s location. Sidney has changed her name and is working as a crisis hotline operator.
The action moves to Hollywood, where Stab 3 is in production, and the killer is murdering the cast in script order. Three different versions of the script are circulating, so nobody knows who’s next. Very Hollywood-esque, IMO.
Randy’s pre-recorded rules video arrives via his sister: the killer is superhuman, anyone can die, and the past always comes back. The killer is Roman Bridger, Stab 3’s director and Sidney’s secret half-brother. He was born after Maureen was assaulted in Hollywood, tracked her down as an adult, got rejected, and responded by showing Billy footage of his dad’s affair to trigger the original murders. Roman caused everything.
Sidney stabs him three times. Dewey shoots him in the head. They get engaged. Sidney leaves her front door open for the first time.
Scream 4 (2011): Fame Is the New Motive
11 years later, a new Ghostface arrives on the massacre’s anniversary.
Sidney is in town for a book tour, where Dewey is the sheriff. Gail is trying to write fiction, unsuccessfully.
The new targets include Sidney’s cousin Jill, horror fan Kirby Reed, and film nerds Robbie and Charlie. The theory: Ghostface is staging a real-life remake where the kills are bigger, and the rules are reversed.
The killers are Charlie and Jill. Jill wants the survivor fame Sidney has and plans to frame her ex-boyfriend, betray Charlie, and emerge as the sole victim. She stabs Sidney, beats herself up, gets taken to the hospital as a hero, then goes back to finish the job when she finds out Sidney survived.
Sidney defibrillates Jill back to death. Kirby survives, which matters later.
Scream (2022): Welcome to the Requel
First film without Wes Craven, who passed in 2015. Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett handle the handoff well. Tara Carpenter gets the opening phone call and, for the first time, survives it.
Tara’s sister Sam returns with a secret: Billy Loomis is her biological father. She sees visions of him, takes antipsychotics, and genuinely fears her own bloodline. Mindy Meeks-Martin, Randy’s niece, names what they’re in: a requel.
The new Ghostface is a Stab super-fan who hated the franchise’s direction and wants to manufacture better source material.
Dewey is divorced, off the force, and not doing well. He dies saving Tara. His death pulls Sidney and Gail back to Woodsboro. The killers are Richie and Amber, toxic fans who met online. Amber’s house is Stu Macher’s old house. Sam kills Richie by leaning into her father’s legacy. The twins survive.
The Movie Junkie Streaming Guide Web App
We have launched a Web app for all you movie junkies that helps you find the latest releases across Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, and HBO Max, and theatrical releases as well! It is The Movie Junkie Streaming Guide, and it will also have a weekly newsletter that will inform you of what you can watch for the week!
Make sure to check it out, let us know what you think, and ask for any features if you think it is necessary. Let us know what's good, what's just okay, and what could be better! We would love to hear from you, movie junkies!
Scream Movie Franchise Soundtrack ( Spotify )
Scream VI (2023): New York, Bigger Knives, No Sidney
The Core Four relocate to New York City. Sam is being harassed online over conspiracy theories that she was the real killer. Neve Campbell didn’t return over a pay dispute, so the film only acknowledges Sidney is in hiding and moves on.
Ghostface with a shotgun in a bodega is extraordinary cinema. This one earns its confidence.
The killer family is Detective Bailey, his daughter Quinn (who faked her death), and his son Ethan, a planted friend. All three are Richie’s family, seeking revenge on Sam. They’ve built a shrine to every previous massacre in an abandoned theater.
Sam dons Billy’s original costume to kill Bailey. Kirby kills Ethan with the same TV that took out Stu in 1996. The Core Four survive intact.
Scream 7 (2026): Neve’s Back, But the Magic Isn’t
Sidney is back, and Ghostface is now targeting her teenage daughter Tatum, played by Isabelle May. It’s a mother-daughter story wrapped in nostalgia. The film really wants you to feel something about that.
Ghostface’s identity is obvious within seconds of their first appearance, and the motivation lands with a thud.
The AI deepfake plot, where Ghostface uses fake footage of dead characters to torment Sidney, is the most Scream-shaped idea in the script. The film does nothing with it. Chad and Mindy return and make the same mistakes for the third time.
Neve delivers. But Scream 7 is the first entry that feels genuinely unnecessary.
The Bottom Line
What makes Scream work, across six films and nearly three decades, is the same thing that made it work in 1996.
It trusts its audience to be smart. It kills people you care about. It earns its reveals. And it keeps asking the same question every time Ghostface picks up the phone.
Sidney Prescott survived five of those films. She earned that open front door at the end of Scream 3, earned her quiet life at the start of Scream 5, and now she’s being pulled back in for a seventh time. At some point, the woman deserves a vacation.
But Ghostface is not done. And honestly, neither are we.
Which Scream film is your favorite, and do you think the franchise can survive without its original final girl? Drop it in the comments.