#Gale DOESN'T write about Sam being a killer because she knows straight up their family life is so fucked and she's so concerned with Tara

[krikeymate]

Double whammy of the Sam with a 10 year age difference having a conniption cause Tara is trying to go around sleeping with random guys

Sam was NOT prepared for handling a teenager, let alone a teenager with PTSD. She's barely feels like an adult herself, and only two years after finally getting her mother out of their lives, her little sister is nearly killed, all because of her.

Tara's 14 (&3/4) when Amber and Ritchie try to kill her in this AU, so let's not try and make that too 😬... hmm, got it.

In the aftermath, she does not cope well.

Tara's always had moments where she's chafed against Sam's authority, where she's been distant, especially since she became her legal guardian, but nothing like this. Sometimes it feels like Amber had managed to kill Tara after all, and she's left trying to care for a ghost. Sam wishes she could kill her all over again... and again, and again, for the rest of eternity, for the anguish she's caused her girl.

The attack at the hospital and again at Amber's only makes her injuries worse. In the end, it takes her leg 4 months to heal, and she was confined to the bed full-time for a month, with another month of being confined mostly to her bed. Needless to say, she doesn't cope well. Tara's not a baby anymore, and she can't stand to be coddled, can't stand the reminder that she isn't like the other girls in her class. She can't stand the fact she can't even dress and undress herself in this state. Can't stand to think of Amber.

And the pain, it's constant, it's everywhere, in her body, in her heart, in her head. The only time she's somewhat happy these days is under the influence of the painkillers that leave her floating between awake and asleep, where everything is fine and good. Sam can't bear to see her sister in this state, drugged up and absent. It's the only time she sees her sister smile anymore, and it hurts. But it's the only thing that keeps her going, and Tara's constantly in pain, so she keeps refilling the prescription. Later, she'll wish she was stronger, she'll wish she had listened to the part of her that said something was off. But Sam's never listening to herself, to anyone, over her sister.

Tara takes painkillers long after she needs them, and eventually, they stop providing the void she's always searching for. So she finds other options. Tara's newly 17 and lying beneath some guy, drugged out of her mind, in the basement of someone's house. They'd been making out for what felt like hours, when she felt his hand slip down her trousers, and then her sister had stormed into the room, throwing fists. What happens after that is as foggy as what came before that.

They move to New York.

Apparently, Sam is best friends with Gale fucking Weathers these days, because Sam gets a job with her, and that job apparently comes with an apartment. Tara finishes her school career online, in the corner of a studio or in a dressing room or the back of a news van, wherever Sam or Gale go, Tara is stuck being dragged around by them. She knows why. She's not stupid. She kind of hates Sam for it. She hates herself more for thinking such a thing, for being so weak.

She still has her vices, despite it all Sam never took her privacy from her. So Tara still has seedy chats and pictures and videos to distract herself with when she's feeling empty. It feels good to be loved, adored, for a little while. She can't bear to expose the emptiness inside of her to Sam, can't bring herself to talk about what happened to the therapists, to talk about Amber. Or the things she said, the things she did.

She's nearly 18 when they're attacked again. Ethan, Sam's clumsy assistant with the sweet smile and who always had a kind word for Tara, and their neighbour, Quinn, who liked variety in her men. Some of those men had little brothers she would introduce to Tara. They're Ritchie's family, and they want revenge.

Tara begins sleeping around as a coping mechanism after that. She won't go back to the drinking, and the drugs, she doesn't want to do that to Sam again. Her sister already has so much going on, she doesn't want to add to that. It doesn't even occur to her how much this would hurt her as well.

[rappaccini]

scream 6 thought dump:

so... mixed to negative feelings on it.

spoilers below.

good slasher, with great chases and kills, but not a good scream movie, because it doesn't have the balls to kill off any of their now-bloated list of legacies (sidney, gale, kirby, tara, sam, mindy, chad... come on. take out sam and one of the twins at the Minimum.) and it has nothing to say about the state of horror.

the requel sequel speech was flat as hell and reachy. off the top of my head: 'requels that recast the usually white straight male legacies with women, poc and queer chars', and then incite rage from bigoted corners of the fandom; true crime fetishization of real murderers by hybristophiles who keep harassing the actual victims; elevated horror trying to force campy fun lowbrow franchises to ~level up and be about Social Issues~. any of these could have worked. instead we got ~subvert expectations~

which the movie doesn't even do. surprise surprise, there are multiple killers who are people we already know in disguise working together, violence getting amped up with every installments is the standard, and all the main characters live. ~i'M dIfFeReNt~' these ghostfaces keep saying but they aren't.

i like that there are finally three killers, but they just regurgitate scream 2's motive of 'getting revenge for family member who was a killer in the prev movie.'

you wanna subvert expectations?

-kill the designated final girl, sam, right away. i'm glad they actually tried to give her character better material, and that they're acknowledging her negative reception with the meta 'internet hates me' moments.... but kill her off. please.

-have the characters immediately anticipate there being several killers.

-have the killer survive the film, and be arrested at the end.

-take the good ideas from the opening: revealing a killer's identity immediately, and there being competing ghostfaces, and go with it: we know one killer's identity from the jump and the suspense lies in waiting for the others to catch on,

-and having two unrelated killers try to make competing 'movies' with different motivations and profiles.

anyway. we got. that.

also: it's dumb as hell that sam didn't recognize her own boyfriend's family, or that gale, who has regressed to her scream 2 characterization and wrote a book about the requel killings, doesn't recognize the family of the killer she profiled. all the more reason to Not Do That.

also: kill kirby OR mindy. we only need one movie nerd and too many people are surviving.

and i know i've said this already i think it's very sexy of scream 4 to predict both influencer culture, the final-girl-as-killer trend, and that the scream franchise would eventually swap out sidney with a younger woman who's edgier than her. big sigh.

and that the writer-directors absolutely are the fanservice-obsessed hacks that they're trying to satirize. they can't write scream movies bc they can't critique the tendency of requels to suck off the originals while failing to do anything truly new... because they're too busy sucking off the original.

at this point sidney's exit being that she's married to kincaid with 2-3 daughters isn't even reassuring. who wants to bet money that in 5-10 years, when those daughters are teenagers, scream 16-or-whateverthefuck will have sidney being murdered in front of her girls to make them the new trio. which will retroactively make sidney's whole story about how her mom was raped and killed when she was sixteen, she was hunted by people who would never let her forget it, and she literally never escaped it and the trauma repeated itself on her own children.

because i'm me, of course i'll be throwing a revision bulletpoint essay down here. being that i am Nobody On The Internet, of course this isn't gonna be great, but hey, you're reading this.

first, i'm gonna chalk 2-4 up as a done deal. in a perfect world hallie mcdaniel would be the third killer in scream 2 as originally planned, and that dumb 'gays can't die' rule wouldn't be around in scream 4, which ideally would've come out around now instead of in 2011 so jill's influencer monologue would make more sense and kirby would be the final girl of this new trio with sidney as a mentor figure, but we'll go with what we have.

and because so many of the problems started with scream 5.... well,

5:

first of all: spoofing requels is the right move, ergo two killers, obsession with ~the original trio/town/characters~, and absolutely dead-on with the motive being toxic fans trying to create real source material for their movies to draw from.

i love the opening girl lives subversion. if anything tara should've been the final girl of these movies, because 1) the whole conceit of sam being the convenient secret daughter of billy loomis who happens to have magical deepfake deaged hallucinations of him urging her to be a serial killer is so fucking dumb, and derivative of scream 3's secret family twist, 2) i Hate that at this point the movies are more about billy loomis than sidney prescott, and 3) jenna ortega acts circles around melissa barrera, who does nothing to elevate the bad role she already has.

plus the killers' plan to frame sam/all the original red herrings about her being the killer.... nah. we already HAD a final-girl-is-the-killer twist in scream 4. sam is not jill roberts.

anyway sam is just the older sister of tara in this version. no secret parentage. maybe she has a troubled history, or mental illness, but she isn't ~billy's secret daughter~. maybe she's tara's guardian, maybe she's still estranged.

the requel rules are solid. but they need one addition: "there are going to be two killers." because Come On. that's the biggest takeaway of the killer profile of the original.

it seems like in an earlier draft the characters all being related to the first kills was a bigger factor, what with liv being a mackenzie and vince being a macher. personally i think that needed to stay. the new crew have no chemistry as a friend group. if they're acquaintances who aren't that close them hurling accusations of murder at each other actually makes sense.

as for how they all get together: let dewey do it. he's the only og still in woodsboro, he was a cop, he should be able to put it together. give him a bit of development from dope cop to the guy who figures it out.

as such: let's make the kills related to the original.

tara's still targeted, because she lives in casey beckers' boyfriends' family's house, and her big sister is the Designated Final Girl.

let's have liv, the mckenzie/casey stand-in, get stalked, but survive, while creepy ex vince, stu's nephew, get killed. and before vince dies, build him up as the black sheep sam originally was: the blood relative of one of the original two killers, who everyone walks on eggshells around... only for him to die unceremoniously. and to cast suspicion on liv. (this would probably be what gets dewey to gather the requel gang to explain the rules and alert gale and sidney.)

wes and judy, to trigger the For Wes Party and because the og hates anyone who isn't an Original Survivor. this would be the principal analog.

dewey. we need to clear up room for the new cast, his arc's already at a firm close, and him going out protecting tara isn't a bad way to go. especially if the killer's logic is trying to finish tara off for completion's sake, and they're trying not to touch dewey (because the Originals Are Sacred), but are forced to kill him.

i like the chad death fakeout. let's keep it. he's the new dopey but sweet guy. we'll retroactively recontextualize his attack as like, the killers expecting to kill liv as a tatum-analog, but chad walking in instead.

and kill liv at some point after the killers are revealed, but not the headshot. her being a red herring is the only good thing that was done with her character.

do something new by building sam up as the obvious final girl, and then kill her unceremoniously at the start of the third act. that gunshot to the head liv gets? give it to sam. there was never a plan for sam to be the Real Final Girl; she's just a placeholder to lure sidney back to force her to relive this again. requels always bait the audience with more diverse casts only to treat them as disposable in favor of the (white straight) original characters. the second sidney and gale came back, sam outlived her usefulness.

tara's the final girl, and her being unexpected is what makes her interesting. she's not sidney, she's not a slasher fan, she has nothing to do with the originals, (she's not white,) she spends most of the movie in a wheelchair.

richie and amber as the killers is good. i like that they're a gross couple, that richie ingratiates himself as sam's boyfriend, and that amber lives in stu's house and that's how she has access to it/became obsessed with the woodsboro murders (she's the stu connection). keep all of it.

and probably add some meaningful lines about how their plan kept going awry because as it turns out, expecting people to be the carbon copies of the characters you're forcing them to be for the sake of your requel accuracy isn't gonna work in reality. tara isn't going out like casey and neither was liv, who also wasn't tatum. mindy and chad aren't randy. sam isn't sidney. and richie and amber aren't billy and stu, as much as they want to be.

so anyway: tara, mindy and chad should've been the final trio.

also sid and gale should have burned stu’s house down.

6:

the big city location is a great idea.

so's the alternate ghostface/early reveal opening scene, with laura being murdered by jason. as said before, i think competing killers/at least one having their identity known to us right away, could have been great and we should've done it.

but let jason live. it'd be more interesting to learn one killer's identity right away, and watch him ingratiate himself with tara, mindy and chad at uni.

mixed feelings about sidney's absence. on the one hand her taking her family into hiding works, on the other i can't see her sitting out an obvious threat to them. or stomach that sidney's absence is because they wouldn't pay neve what she's worth. maybe i'll think of something later and edit it in here. for now, let's imagine she's getting her family somewhere safe and then showing up for the climax.

since sam is dead, let's just totally ignore the sam-was-framed stuff, and reposition the harassment as mindy and chad, and tara in particular, getting hate for not being the ideal victims or the survivors anyone wanted (read: not being white/straight, like the originals, and not being related at all to the originals in tara's case). take the glimpses of ghostface worship and build that out too.

give kirby more to do. and kill either her or mindy. we don't need two film nerds

(... or two meeks-martins for that matter. if mindy lives, chad should die, vice versa).

since kirby's an fbi agent, and the new characters are meant to be on one about avoiding threats, let's keep them actively hunting for ghostface... but you know, have them expect to be dealing with several killers.

keep the tense chase scenes. the ladder, subway and bodega sequences were great.

don't make gale regress as a character. if anything, given that 4 was about sidney confronting the idea that being older makes her expendable in the face of a younger woman being positioned as her replacement, and 5 was about dewey technically becoming a competent protector, 6 should've been about gale.

specifically, since gale used to be a muckraker, make the killer's motive tied in to the true crime/serial killer fetishization craze a la true crime podcasters and that dahmer netflix series.

if gale hadn't written the woodsboro murders, the stab movies would've either not been made at all, or been very different. things to think about that the franchise hasn't really touched on.

but mindy's big monologue about this movie's satire shouldn't be about that. it should be about bigoted internet outrage culture, where 'fans' of a certain demographic get viciously hateful over a reboot casting diversely.

which brings us back to the competing killers:

killer 1, jason, is one of those dudes. he's angry that the new survivors are queer/poc and wants to get rid of them to Make Room For Sidney To Return. he was literally introduced as a student stalking and killing a female film professor. feels like you coulda done something with that.

and killers 2 and 3: quinn? i guess, and another girl. we've never had two female killers before. let's do it. they're a great fit for that true crime/serial killer fetishist/hybristophile theme. they think billy, stu, richie, mickey and roman were all ~misunderstood~ and should be avenged.

furthermore i think it would be hilarious if the girl ghostfaces kill the guy immediately because they're grossed out by his motive or don't find him hot enough to excuse it, given how hybristophiles love to create excuses for often-white male mass murderers at the expense of their often-female/poc/queer victims. or them insisting billy and stu were together and that’s why they snapped, as they intentionally target mindy. take a jab at fake righteous female fandom.

and the characters are caught off guard because they don't expect more than two killers, let alone that they aren't all working together. they were so busy figuring one motive out that they didn't consider the other, or that half the time the murders didn't fit the rules they deduced.

anyway. give gale the big hero moment. something to wrap her arc up in a bow, from ambitious vicious girlboss muckraker reporter who can't wait to profit off the deaths of a bunch of teens to someone who intimately cares about the victims of these crimes and understands and takes responsibility for how her irresponsible reporting made this situation worse. fwiw i do think sidney needs to be present for this culmination, being the only person to see this transformation from start to close.